Socio-Legal Enquiry on a Global Scale: Legal Intermediation, the Geography of Extraction, and the (Re)Negotiation of Africa’s Relationship with the World Economy

This paper asks: what does socio-legal enquiry tell us about one of the most pressing problems of our time— climate change? Can (and should) socio-legal enquiry provide a meaningful critique of the so-called green transition? Law's ubiquity in the ongoing phase of capitalism—from the predominance of private contracts in the regulation of relations between states and transnational corporations to the formidable growth of transnational dispute settlement mechanisms since the turn of the 1990s raises a challenge for socio-legal enquiry. Where do we put the cursor of law's empowering potential as opposed to its enabling role in reproducing patterns of inequality and domination? This challenge is complicated by the fact that the green transition is seemingly pitting the United States and Europe against two so-called peripheries—China as the powerhouse of the lithium-ion batteries used for electric cars and other devices of the transition away from carbon, and Africa, specifically the Democratic Republic of Congo, as the main reservoir of the critical minerals needed for "green" energy. Deploying a socio-legal enquiry on the relationship between law and the green transition from Africa is a way to unpack the entanglement between law, politics, and finance in the contemporary phase of capitalism. Building on the "global turn" in social sciences, this shifts the focus to law's entanglement as a repertoire of material and symbolic power and towards the interconnectedness of its deployment across scholarly and geographic scales. Considering the selective social, financial, material, and cultural globalisation fostered by global value chains helps account for the reproduction of the subaltern position of the African continent in the world economy. More broadly, this research agenda underscores how socio-legal enquiry can respond to the challenge of allowing for the possibility of studying the imperial factor over an extended period, including by tracking how imperial legacies and financialisation are shaping China's prominence in the current phase of capitalism.