Global Law Futures Seminar Series: The importance of futures studies for legal scholars

Edinburgh Law School’s ‘Global Law Futures’ seminar series explores questions relating to global law, broadly construed, from transdisciplinary and diverse methodological perspectives. Law in a plural global context requires a radical re-imagining of the practice, study, and theory of legal orthodoxies. This seminar series questions and attempts to push the boundaries of thinking about law. The series will touch on issues such as the space-time of legal imaginaries, the place of law in times of anthropocentric ecological crisis, the relationalities and materialities of law, what it means to decolonise legal thinking in a global context, the meaning of ‘global legal order(s)’, the relationship between law and algorithmic governance, the exploration of decentralised and deformalised legal practices, and many more besides.  

Beginning in January 2024, the seminar series is convened by Amalia Amaya Navarro, Gail Lythgoe, and Veronica Ruiz Abou-Nigm, collaborating with Nehal Bhuta, Deval Desai, Simone Lamont-Black. The series is supported by the Edinburgh Centre for International Global Law and the Edinburgh Centre for Legal Theory.

About the Seminar 

The imperative for social and legal innovative to be future-proof or to reflect long-term thinking is a characteristic of the 21st century. Looking back, such an imperative is not novel, and is situated in political (military) and economic agendas of the post-WW2 world order. Beyond glossy titles, there is something both to question and to analyse in why the future is expected to matter. Futures studies is an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the analysis of why and how humans think about the future. As part of this session, we will focus on the methodological and thematic implications of focusing on the future in our legal practice, namely matters of ethics and interdisciplinarity. 

About the Speaker

Kwamou Eva Feukeu co-runs the Decolonial Comparative Law project initiated by Professor Dr Ralf Michaels and Professor Dr Lena Salaymeh at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg). She previously worked for four years as the Africa coordinator for Futures Literacy at UNESCO. She has also organized her own practice as a head futurist for UN Global Pulse Finland, the OECD, the International Development Research Centre, and the French Development Agency. She is an experienced facilitator and lab designer involved in labs run since 2014, mainly in Africa and Europe, for governments, NGOs and CEOs but also in family settings. Feukeu is also a member of the editorial board of two scientific journals, Futures and Prospective et stratégie. She has spoken for a variety of constituencies including Stanford University, the World Bank, the UN Office for Africa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the African Technology Policy Centre.

A legal scholar by training, she has focused her recent work on the role that norms play in the production and evolution of anticipatory systems, using lessons learned from decolonial studies and pluralist legal contexts as evidence of complexity. She is also keen to work on African representations and uses of the future. She is currently a PhD candidate in Complexity Studies and Law at the University of Hamburg. She holds a master’s degree in business litigation and arbitration and a bachelor’s in African Studies from Sciences Po Paris.

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