Short Abstract

The panel uses courts as a prism to explore how legal and political fields are co-constituted in Africa. Examining legal mobilisation and judicial responses to rising authoritarianism and socio-environmental crises, it analyses legitimacy-seeking strategies across rights and governance issues

Long Abstract

African national and supranational courts have become key arenas for contesting politics, rights, and governance. From challenges to transnational repression and electoral manipulation to litigation over climate-related harms, judges are asked to confront powerful executives, unsettle legislative bargains, and shape budgetary allocations and macroeconomic policy. How and why do African courts choose between audacious rulings and strategic restraint in such politically charged cases? Likewise, how do political actors strategise in the legal arena?

Convened by the African Courts, Politics and Rights (ACPR) early-career network, this panel brings research on African judicial politics and legal strategy into dialogue with scholarship on authoritarian practices and climate justice. It examines when and how political actors mobilise the legal system to advance their aims. It also considers how concerns about backlash, legitimacy, and compliance structure judicial behaviour across court levels—domestic courts, regional tribunals, and international bodies—and issue areas, including civil, political and environmental rights. Papers analyse judicial strategies in light of actual and anticipated authoritarian backlash, as well as rights-based legal mobilisation.

Empirically, contributions focus on cases involving repression of political opposition and civil society, socio-economic and environmental claims, and emerging climate-related rights litigation. Conceptually, the panel treats African courts as sites of innovation in which judges, litigants, and executives negotiate the boundaries of rights protection amid autocratisation and ecological crises.

We invite contributions on related themes, including authoritarian practices; environmental and climate justice; migration and displacement; electoral politics; and broader struggles over rights and governance before African courts.

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