The Introduction revisits the judicial saga between the vulture fund FG Hemisphere and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world’s cobalt reserve, before Britain’s Privy Council to illustrate the blurry divisions between state/non-state entities, offshore/onshore capitalism. Tracking the patterns of symbolic valuation that justify the relationship between the African South and the global economy requires breaking away from the functionalist understanding of law and global value chains. The Introduction sets out the book’s research strategy, which is further explained in Chapter 1. Embracing the global turn in sociology, this involves tracking interconnected dynamics of legal intermediation across Britain, France and the US, in former British, French and Belgian colonies, in tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, as well as in the institutionalisation of the international legal order. Approaching these interconnected dynamics as imperial encounters provides us with a history of the present relationship between law, politics and global finance.

Chapter 7 tracks the transformation of the position of Paris induced by the neoliberal turn. The marketplace of intermediaries between resource-rich African states and French businesses has long been derided as an outgrowth of the Françafrique, the interpersonal shadow networks linking France to its African pré carré. The neoliberal turn fostered the prominence of corporate lawyers as key intermediaries between the state and the market. It was also deployed within the system of the Françafrique. Due to the historical distancing of the Paris bar from business, French corporate law pioneers contributed to the expansion of a French corporate bar under the double thrust of the European Common Market and the model of the Wall Street corporate law firm. It is also as intermediaries of US multinational corporate law firms that they entered the former French pré carré in Africa qua a legal market.

Chapter 8 examines how social hierarchies are reproduced through the operations of justice. It argues that justice institutions, whether national or supranational, are systematically characterised by restricted professional markets of repeat players (Galanter 1974) who act as gatekeepers of the relationship with justice users (individuals, corporations or states). The globalisation and financialisation of global value chains is reinforcing rather than weakening the post-Cold War competition between legal ordering claims. The contrasted development of justice institutions (from the US Supreme Court; asylum justice; interstate adjudication; investment arbitration to international criminal justice) demonstrates that it is fostering the global diffusion of the Wall Street model of the corporate law firm as an engine of legal globalisation and for the reproduction of legal and social hierarchies. This positions justice institutions as practical and symbolic boundary-making sites between capitalism’s so-called cores and its peripheries.

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book by exploring the case of Kizito Mihigo, a well-known popular singer who was imprisoned, was released, and later died while in police custody. It discusses the idiom of the heart – or, more particularly, the need to transform the heart – as key to understanding post-genocide social life and urban young people’s attempts to navigate a difficult political terrain. Instead of reproducing theoretical binaries – resistance–domination, sound–silence, past–present – this chapter proposes looking to popular culture and Pentecostalism in order to understand the different ways young people in Kigali attempt to assert agency and make ‘noise’ despite a wider context of silence.

Chapter 5 examines the ongoing rush for Burundi’s rare earths twenty-five years after the Arusha agreement that put an end to the violent conflict that tore the country apart from 1993. It argues that Burundi’s transition into an origination site leans on the legacy of colonial, post-independence and post-1993 rule of law reforms which together have fostered what Mamdani (1996) calls ‘decentralized despotism’. The conflicting position of lawyers as either representatives of authoritarian power or champions of the rule of law is embedded in a structural bifurcation of the Burundian legal field that enables corporate predation, like that of beer giants. According to their political and social resources, lawyers are positioned alternately as gatekeepers of the rent of exported commodities, or vulnerable to another type of extraversion, aid dependency. This bifurcation makes Burundi a Petri dish of the hyper violence generated by the hyperlegality of late capitalism.

This chapter focuses on the new sound economy that Pentecostalism brought to Rwanda after the genocide. It considers a wide range of Pentecostal sound practices – from noise-making to praise and worship to Pentecostal radio – and shows how sound was understood to be key to inner and outer transformation. Pentecostals drew a distinction between ‘godly’ and ‘secular’ media, which allowed some young singers to become ‘gospel stars’. This chapter equally focuses on the materiality of Pentecostal sounds – the work that sound does outside of its discursive properties – and places this within the wider sonic context of post-genocide Rwanda. The RPF state has increasingly cracked down on noise – associated both with the new churches and nightclubs – and in 2018 closed thousands of chruches across the country. Perhaps ironically, despite their differences, the new Pentecostal churches and the RPF state share a conviction of sound’s transformative power.

The Conclusion revisits the takeaway messages of the book’s research strategy and empirical inquiry. Lawyering Imperial Encounters tells the story of the relentless hangover of the past in the present. Law remains the vernacular of Africa’s uneven and unequal relationship with the world economy precisely because it is imprinted by the past Scrambles into the continent. Foremost, law’s position as the cutting edge of Africa’s relationship with capitalism reflects legal imperialism as a core variable in the deployment of power. This is illustrated by the conversion of Hong Kong as a gateway for the expansion of Chinese business interests abroad, which builds, itself, on the globalisation of the Wall Street model of the corporate law firm.

Chapter 1 lays out the book’s research strategy. Deploying a post-colonial critique of the terms of the relationship between the African South and the global economy requires questioning law’s double bind – as both enabler and bulwark against domination – and confronting ourselves to the imperial entanglement of scholarship (Steinmetz 2013). Building on Tilly’s trilogy of coercion-extraction-protection (1985), the chapter identifies two sets of variables deployed throughout the book to track the articulation between law, politics and capitalist expansion over time: the ‘double-edged protection’ produced by legal imperialism and the ‘middle power’ used by the British hegemon and competing imperial métropoles to justify colonialism and lessen social disruption and inter-imperial rivalries. Lastly, the chapter explains the book’s methodology. Zooming in and out to track imperial encounters at the scale of localities, institutions and global structures exposes pre-existing conflicts and contradictions that help understand ongoing conflicts and contradictions in late capitalism.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

Chapter 2 argues that imperial powers (Britain, France and Belgium) deployed a similar strategy of legal imperialism during the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa. Indirect rule operationalised the contradiction that colonial power was weak in its effective reach, yet strong in the systemic upheavals it engendered. It also fostered legal and capitalist unevenness, what Benton and Ford (2016) call ‘lumpiness’. The chapter focuses on three crisis situations that were ostensibly solved through juridical means: the 1920s Gold Coast conflicts before the Privy Council; the 1895 Stokes-Lothaire incident before the High Council of the Congo Free State; and pre-independence military trials in French and British colonies. Together, these judicial crises help account for structural commonalities in the articulation of post-independence African states with the world economy: the deployment of merchant law with and without state sovereignty and middling as a durable though variable sovereign resource of the post-colonial state.