Oche Onazi

Human rights from community : a rights-based approach to development

Global justice and human rights is perhaps the hottest topic in political science today. This series of monographs and edited collections publishes groundbreaking work on key topics in this increasingly popular field, such as democracy, gender, legal justice, poverty, human rights, environmental justice and just war theory. It will be essential reading for theorists working in politics, international relations, law, philosophy and beyond.

The moral quality of work in international economic institutions: resisting complacency

This paper offers a theory thanks to which, we argue, we can more appropriately evaluate and potentially improve the moral quality of work. There are three components to such a theory. The first two components, which we argue need to be integrated, are normative resources that appeal to two different behavioural capacities: first, the articulation of rules, appealing to the capacity of agents to deliberate about what they ought to do; second, the introduction of forms of institutional design, appealing to the capacity of agents to acquire habits and dispositions in certain social environments. The third and most important component is that of the infinity of suffering and vulnerability. This component has both a negative and a positive aspect. On the negative side, the component is designed to assist us in recognising the inevitable limitations of either normative resource or indeed any one integrated totality of normative resources (i.e., both rules and forms of institutional design). Those limitations consist in the narrowing of the domain of objects of value towards which workers are guided or oriented by either or both normative resources. On the positive side, the component encourages us to construct alternative normative resources on the basis of alternative forms of representation of suffering and vulnerability. In that respect, the specific policy proposal of this paper is that of the establishment of Community Forums, which are designed to offer a framework thanks to which some of the particularities of suffering and vulnerability within a specific community can be recognised and communicated in a multiplicity of ways, thereafter forming a resource for the development of policy with respect to the challenges facing that specific community. The second part of the paper applies this theory to consider the value and limitations of second-generation reforms in international economic institutions. The third part of the paper further considers the values and limitations of reforms for access to public goods and services in Nigeria.

Legal Empowerment of the Poor: Does Political Participation Matter?

This chapter elaborates on a specific limitation of the recent emphasis on formalisation in a particular aspect of the practice of international development. Through a case study of the recent legal empowerment of the poor initiative, the chapter demonstrates that the value of political participation and its potential effect on poverty alleviation is illustrative of the type of values that are misplaced as a result of the pursuit of formalisation. After outlining the specific elements of this argument, the chapter shows that there is a stronger appreciation of political participation among the poor in the informal sphere in Africa and other parts of the third world. Apart from firmly grasping the significance of political participation, the expansiveness of diverse forms of activity in the informal sphere provides a significant medium to concretise this value, particularly in ways that can compete with mainstream initiatives aspiring to do the same. The chapter concludes by sketching out key features and the potential of the informal political participation of the poor, including the advantage this model holds over the human right to political participation.

African Legal Theory and Contemporary Problems: Critical Essays

The book is a collection of essays, which aim to situate African legal theory in the context of the myriad of contemporary global challenges; from the prevalence of war to the misery of poverty and disease to the crises of the environment. Apart from being problems that have an indelible African mark on them, a common theme that runs throughout the essays in this book is that African legal theory has been excluded, under-explored or under-theorised in the search for solutions to such contemporary problems. The essays make a modest attempt to reverse this trend. The contributors investigate and introduce readers to the key issues, questions, concepts, impulses and problems that underpin the idea of African legal theory. They outline the potential offered by African legal theory and open up its key concepts and impulses for critical scrutiny. This is done in order to develop a better understanding of the extent to which African legal theory can contribute to discourses seeking to address some of the challenges that confront African and non-African societies alike

Before rights and responsibilities: an African ethos of citizenship.

The concept of citizenship lies at the heart of many problems in contemporary Africa. The dichotomy between indigenes and settlers, the focus of this chapter, is one such difficulty. It has provoked some of the most violent conflicts in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and very recently, Cote d’Ivoire. The chapter demonstrates how African jurisprudence – particularly with its emphasis on human ontology – can contribute to a concept of citizenship capable of responding to this and other problems. The chapter uses the indigene and settler dichotomy as a methodological device to question what citizenship means today, and also, whether it yields to a proper understanding of the kind of moral values fundamental to societal co-existence. Going much further than this, the chapter argues that situating citizenship in an African jurisprudential context can encourage the most fundamental moral values central to what it means to live an ethical life as a citizen. The implication is that, when African jurisprudence is applied to citizenship, it does not place citizens at a threshold above aliens, foreigner’s, legal or illegal immigrants. African jurisprudence specifically shows that our moral obligations to each other precede, as the title of the chapter suggests, citizenship rights and responsibilities.