A Reflection on African Trade and Investment Wars in Context

Authors

Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, Dalhousie University Schulich School of LawFollow
Gertrude Amarh, UPSA Law School

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

Keywords

African Trade, Trade Wars, Investment Wars, International Economic Law, Economic and Social Conflicts, African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement, AfCFTA

Abstract

African trade and investment wars and their implication for the development of international economic law (IEL) in Africa are under-appreciated[1]. Except for a handful of literature in the last two decades, most of the scholarly work on economic integration in Africa has not focused on intra-African trade and investment wars. Yet, some of these trade wars have endured for many years. By trade wars, we mean the fracture of economic (trade and investment) relations between cooperating African States. We do not understand trade wars in the strict sense that trade economist or classic trade law do. These approaches understand trade wars as triggered when States decide to relate on the basis power-based tariff bargain as opposed to a rules-based regime. One narrative is that trade wars may be triggered as a consequence of governments’ unilateral behaviour that ignores the ‘impacts of their actions on political and economic agents in the opposite country.’

Comments

https://perma.cc/HJ5R-5EDR

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Olabisi D Akinkugbe & Gertrude Amarh, "A Reflection on African Trade and Investment Wars in Context" (2 February 2022), online (blog): Afronomicslaw < www.afronomicslaw.org > [perma.cc/HJ5R-5EDR].