Renée Ramona Robinson
PhD Candidate in International Law at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. With law degrees from Sciences Po, Queen Mary, and Harvard Law School, Renée is a public international lawyer engaged in the interdisciplinary fields of creative industries. Renée is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris teaching International Law, Fashion Law, and Feminist Legal Theory.
I. Introduction
Behind the scenes of global power, an enduring legal chasm shapes who is seen and who is left to suffer in silence. This Essay argues that the most enduring structure of global governance today is the deeply entrenched schism between public and private international law. This legal architecture—often treated as technical or natural—has quietly enabled the reproduction of social violence on a transnational scale. It does so by insulating private economic actors from public accountability and fragmenting legal responsibility across borders and disciplines. As a result, entire communities are rendered unimagined within law: legally invisible yet economically indispensable. Their premature and preventable deaths become normalized—what this paper frames as a form of international social murder.
Africa stands at the center of this legal paradox. Far from being marginal to international law, it is a primary site where the failures of global legal governance manifest most clearly. In the garment manufacturing sector, workers in African cities labor under precarious conditions as part of supply chains governed almost entirely by transnational private law—through contracts, corporate governance, and intellectual property law—while formal public international legal regimes remain silent or ineffective. That is, these issues do not fall outside the scope of public international law but demonstrate the inefficiency of it. And, while the International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions and human rights treaties set useful standards, in practice they fail to bind or protect workers in transnational supply chains. The workers fall through the cracks of jurisdictional silos, treated as externalities of the global economic legal order rather than as subjects of rights and protection. This public/private schism thus normalizes workers’ premature and preventable deaths, conceptualized in this Essay as a form of international social murder.
To uncover and address this systemic violence, I look to three critical lenses: (1) feminist legal theory, (2) property theory, and (3) Afrofuturism. Drawing on feminist legal theory’s emphasis on care and interdependence, property theory’s challenge to exclusion and enclosure, and Afrofuturism’s visionary jurisprudence of survival and radical possibility, the Essay proposes a model of multipolar hybridity (Zumbansen 2013; Sassen 1996). This model rejects the siloed architecture of current international law and instead envisions legal orders rooted in juridical solidarity, reparative justice, and alternative property and contract formations. By recentering Africa as a zone of legal innovation, the Essay offers a dual-transformative approach to international law: one that names the violence of the present and simultaneously constructs plural futures beyond it.
II. The Public/Private Divide in International Law and Its Lethal Consequences
The bifurcation of international law into “public” and “private” domains is one of its most enduring yet least questioned features. Traditionally, public international law encompasses the laws of state behavior such as treaties, international organizations, and human rights norms while private international law concerns itself with cross-border commercial relations like contracts, arbitration, and corporate law. This structural divide is often treated as a given. In reality, it functions as a form of juridical technology that enables and legitimates transnational exploitation by shielding private actors from collective legal scrutiny.
The problem is not merely fragmentation but impunity. While corporations increasingly operate across borders, their obligations remain governed by contract law and internal governance mechanisms that are often outside the reach of international human rights law and state labor protections. Under this regime, responsibility is diffused, deterritorialized, and displaced. States are expected to regulate corporations they cannot meaningfully control, while international law looks away, invoking sovereignty when convenient and private ordering when profitable.
This global governance model does more than obscure accountability. It actively facilitates international social murder. Borrowing from Friedrich Engels’ concept, this term has been reconceptualized in law to refer to the premature and preventable deaths produced not by individual malice but by systemic conditions that render certain lives expendable. Under the current international legal architecture, some populations are largely excluded from legal protections, while playing an important role in upholding economic systems. The erasure of these persons is rooted not only in the law’s silences but also in its active structuring.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the African garment sector. African cities such as Addis Ababa, Accra, and Nairobi have become sites of fast-fashion manufacturing and large dumps for Global North waste. Workers in these sectors labor under exploitative conditions: low wages, long hours, exposure to hazardous chemicals, and minimal health protections. Their labor sustains major global brands and supports the world’s economies, yet the legal frameworks that govern their workplaces are overwhelmingly private. Contracts between multinational corporations and suppliers define the terms of production. Corporate codes of conduct, intellectual property protections, and international arbitration systems are the primary regulatory tools instead of public labor law, international human rights, or local democratic processes.
The result is a jurisdictional black hole. If a worker is injured or dies on the job, there is often no effective remedy. This is because responsibility is endlessly deferred: corporations point to suppliers, suppliers point to local law, and states lack the capacity or will to regulate powerful foreign investors. Recent cases bear out this pattern. After the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, victims struggled for years to secure compensation from global brands, which forced them to rely on ad hoc donor funds rather than binding legal remedies. Similarly, instances such as Ghana’s Kantamanto market’s disastrous fire lead to sudden factory closures that typically leave thousands of workers unpaid, with no effective recourse in either local courts or international institutions. The transnational nature of the supply chain means that accountability is endlessly deferred or passed along a legal chain that leads nowhere. Public international institutions, such as the ILO or the UN, may issue guidelines or reports, but they lack binding enforcement mechanisms. Meanwhile, domestic legal systems often lack the resources or the political autonomy to challenge powerful multinational actors.
Narratives of marginality often obscure Africa’s centrality to this system. Yet it is precisely because African labor is legally unprotected yet foundational to the global economy that the failures of international law are most starkly revealed. The private/public divide functions to exclude the most vulnerable from legal recognition while securing economic extraction. Legal invisibility is not incidental. It is the price of profit.
This Section has shown how the structural public/private divide within international law does not merely produce legal incoherence; it produces both real and social death. The invisibility of African garment workers is not just an oversight, but a direct consequence of the existing legal architecture. Any meaningful reform of international law must confront this system of structured invisibility and impunity head-on.
III. Feminist, Property, and Afrofuturist Interventions
A. Feminist Legal Theory: Care, Relationality, and Juridical Visibility
Feminist legal theory offers an indispensable intervention into the enduring public/private divide in international law by centering care, interdependence, and the social reproduction of life—elements often excluded or obscured by formal legal structures. The divide between public and private law does not merely segment legal fields; it constitutes a mode of global governance that privileges market rationality and sovereign abstraction over embodied experiences, community survival, and structural vulnerability. Feminist theory confronts this fragmentation by making visible the legal invisibility of social reproduction, and by challenging the binary between economic production and social life.
While feminist critique has long been applied to domestic law, its extension to international law is crucial because the harms at stake are not confined within one jurisdiction. Supply chains that span continents expose how gendered labor is erased not just domestically but globally. These instruments of trade agreements, investment treaties, and intellectual property regimes hardwire gendered hierarchies and proprietary exclusions into the global legal order. Domestic law that mandates equity in pay or recognizes communal land rights can easily be undermined by international investment protections, restrictive trade conditionalities, or transnational corporate contracts that relocate production to jurisdictions with weaker safeguards. Moreover, feminist theory exposes how international law privileges sovereign actors and markets while obscuring the reproductive labor that sustains them. International law defines the limits of what states can do to protect workers. Ignoring this transnational dimension risks reproducing the very asymmetries that feminist and property critiques seek to dismantle.
The current international legal order relies on a narrow conception of legal subjectivity. Within this framework, legal recognition is tethered to participation in either state-centric sovereignty or market-based exchange. Individuals and communities who labor outside these paradigms in reproductive, care-based, or particularly informal economies are treated as legally peripheral, if even acknowledged at all. In the African garment industry, for example, this invisibility is most acute for the predominantly female workforce engaged in precarious labor. These women are bound by informal contracts, governed by private international law instruments, and excluded from effective labor protections. From sewing garments, to transporting large bales of tattered clothing, to caring for children and elders, their roles are essential for both economic production and social cohesion, yet the legal frameworks that regulate global value chains ignore these forms of labor. In short, they are economically essential but juridically unimagined.
Feminist legal theory also critiques the ideological neutrality of legal formalism that underpins the system. The ostensibly neutral tools of international law such as contracts, arbitration clauses, and investment protections are gendered in their operation. These instruments prioritize economic efficiency over lived experience, thus disembedding legal decisions from their social consequences. For instance, when a garment factory closes due to a breach in a transnational supply contract, international arbitration may resolve the matter strictly in terms of commercial loss. The livelihoods and care networks disrupted by the closure are not part of the calculus. Feminist critique demands that these social consequences be juridically legible. A feminist approach would reconfigure the metrics of harm and accountability. Instead of abstract standards of due diligence or risk, it would foreground the relational effects of legal regimes and ask who bears the cost, who benefits, and who is excluded from legal redress. It would shift the legal gaze from discrete events, such as a breach of contract or a factory fire, to structural conditions, like the normalized precarity of women’s labor in supply chains. This shift in focus is essential for naming and addressing the social murder that international law enables.
Moreover, feminist theory calls for a reconceptualization of legal responsibility beyond the actor-centric model. Traditional international law assigns responsibility to states or corporate entities, often through rigid doctrines of causation and intent. Feminist jurisprudence, by contrast, embraces a theory of distributed responsibility that acknowledges the networked nature of harm and the interdependence of actors. In the context of garment factories in Africa, this means recognizing the roles of not only local employers and governments, but also transnational corporations, financiers, IP holders, and international institutions in sustaining systems of exploitation.
Feminist legal theory also disrupts the temporal assumptions of international law. Legal remedies typically respond to harm retroactively, after a violation has occurred. A feminist lens encourages anticipatory governance, promoting legal structures designed not merely to punish harm but to prevent it through attentiveness to social precarity, care needs, and collective well-being. This is particularly crucial in contexts where harm is systemic and slow-moving—conditions of labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and health neglect that may not constitute legal emergencies but that cumulatively result in premature death.
Importantly, feminist legal theory does not only diagnose exclusion; it also offers tools for reconstruction. Its emphasis on care and relationality can be operationalized in legal design. Participatory mechanisms such as community-based contract negotiation, social impact assessments embedded into trade agreements, and gender-sensitive labor standards can bring juridical visibility to those previously marginalized. Feminist approaches also support pluralism in legal epistemologies, opening space for integrating customary practices, informal norms, and local knowledge systems that recognize interdependence as a basis for justice. The African context is especially generative for feminist legal innovation. Feminist movements across the continent have long linked economic justice with bodily autonomy, environmental care, and collective memory. From campaigns for land rights to resistance against exploitative labor practices, African feminists are already crafting alternative legal imaginaries. These are not only responses to global capital, but also assertions of value systems that prioritize life over profit, relationship over abstraction.
In short, feminist legal theory enables a structural critique of international law’s architecture while also providing a transformative framework for juridical renewal. The division of legal domains, the abstraction of legal responsibility, and the erasure of feminized labor all contribute to the systemic legal erasure of communities whose deaths are economically rationalized and juridically ignored. A feminist reimagining would dismantle these silos and foreground the social, embodied, and affective dimensions of legal harm. It compels international law to imagine the unimagined, to see the invisible, and to value what it has long rendered worthless. In doing so, it lays the foundation for a multipolar, solidaristic, and care-based legal future—one where law is not a shield for violence but a site for collective survival.
B. Property Theory: Enclosure, Dispossession, and the Legal Architecture of Exclusion
Building on feminist legal theory’s destabilization of the public/private divide through the lens of care and interdependence, property theory reveals the deep structural underpinnings of that divide: the global legal architecture of ownership, exclusion, and dispossession. International law not only reflects but also constructs regimes of property that determine who controls resources, labor, and knowledge. These regimes are far from neutral; they are embedded in histories of colonial expropriation, capitalist accumulation, and legal abstraction. Modern international law remains deeply entangled with classical liberal notions of property: individualized, possessive, and exclusionary. This model of property privileges fixed, bordered entitlements enforceable through private law—contracts, trademarks, patents—while disregarding collective forms of stewardship, customary land tenure, or labor-based entitlements. Such a framework not only marginalizes non-Western legal traditions but actively erases them through instruments of global governance.
In the African context, particularly in the garment sector, property regimes serve as both tools and outcomes of a system that renders communities juridically invisible while extracting their value. One salient example of this dynamic is the role intellectual property (IP) plays in the African garment sector. International IP regimes, administered through treaties like the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (popularly known as TRIPS), enforce a proprietary logic that privileges design rights, branding, and trademarks, all of which constitute legal assets. While African garment workers provide the labor, knowledge, and often cultural inspiration for the products, they often remain outside the chain of legal ownership. Their contributions are rendered economically essential yet juridically irrelevant. This separation between labor and property rights constitutes a form of legal enclosure: the appropriation of value without reciprocal recognition.
This enclosure is not incidental; it is systemic. Global value chains, while framed in economic terms, are legally constructed through proprietary regimes. Transnational contracts assign rights to foreign investors and firms. Investment treaties protect those rights with state-enforceable guarantees. Arbitration mechanisms prevent national courts from contesting them. Meanwhile, customary landholders displaced for export processing zones and informal workers producing garments for foreign brands, have no enforceable claims within these legal infrastructures. Their legal marginalization is not a failure of governance but a function of it.
Property theory brings to light how international law creates zones where property exists and is exchanged at high velocity, but also where the people embedded in those transactions have no ownership, no veto, and no rights. This is evident in how contracts between multinational brands and local factory owners include strict performance and delivery terms, while local workers are subject only to often-unenforced national labor laws or informal employment arrangements. Even the factory owners, who often operate with thin margins and limited leverage, serve as intermediaries rather than rights holders in a vertically integrated regime of control. Furthermore, property regimes structure the flow of capital and value in ways that reinforce global hierarchies. Consider the valuation of intangible assets: trademarks and brand reputation constitute a significant portion of global apparel corporations’ market capitalization. These intangible assets are protected through international legal systems, yet they are often sustained by material practices such as aesthetic labor, design reinterpretation, or cultural referencing performed by African workers without legal recognition or just compensation. Here, law operates as an extractor of value: protecting upstream ownership while externalizing downstream production risk.
Through the lens of property theory, it becomes clear that the marginalization and disposability of certain communities are not byproducts of negligence, but rather systemic outcomes of legally codified design. The legal invisibility of African garment workers is a necessary condition for the property regimes that govern global value chains’ (GVCs) ability to function profitably. For the value chain to maintain its asymmetric structure, these workers must remain unimagined; unseen by legal doctrine, excluded from ownership, and denied voice in contract negotiation. This is a juridical form of social stratification, one that replicates colonial patterns of dispossession under the guise of technical legality.
Importantly though, property theory also offers tools for reimagining legal relations. It urges thinking beyond possessive individualism and explores models of collective stewardship, non-possessive ownership, and distributed control. African legal traditions are particularly rich in such alternatives. Systems of communal land tenure, for instance, often operate on principles of usufruct, intergenerational responsibility, and ecological sustainability—logics that defy Western conceptions of alienable, commodified property. Crucially, this reimagining must extend beyond private governance and be reflected in public international law. The prevailing public law regime of treaties, trade law, and investment arbitration still presumes the sanctity of capital mobility and private property, while offering little to no normative grounding for collective or labor-based claims. Public international law must evolve to codify principles of equitable ownership, sustainability, and transnational social responsibility. This could take form through binding obligations on states to recognize cooperative economic models, treaty-based protections for collective labor rights across borders, or even new frameworks for economic self-determination rooted in cultural sovereignty. These proposals are not utopian. They align with existing innovations, such as co-operative enterprises, community benefit agreements, or plural corporate governance charters. What is needed is an international legal architecture that does not merely tolerate these models but affirms and scales them. Recasting public international law to support communal and labor-centered ownership would disrupt the privatizing, extractive logics that underlie both economic governance and structural social violence, thereby opening space for a transnational legal order that acknowledges interdependence, memory, and reparative justice.
Moreover, revisiting property through this lens allows us to expose the false dichotomy between public and private law. The rights of foreign investors to enforce contract and IP protections are upheld ostensibly through public international law mechanisms like investor-state dispute settlement, which blurs the lines between what is considered “private” enterprise and “public” enforcement. Simultaneously, claims by communities for land restitution or labor justice are relegated to domestic legal spheres and dismissed as non-justiciable in international law. This inversion of visibility and voice is not a matter of jurisdictional design but of ideological commitment: a commitment to safeguarding the sanctity of private property and contract as the organizing principles of the global economy, even when doing so displaces collective rights and obscures the coercive role of law in reproducing inequality.
Finally, property theory opens space for radical innovation. It invites us to imagine transnational regimes that center use, community, and justice over exclusion, profit, and control. It challenges the assumption that private ownership is apolitical, that market transactions are neutral, or that legal abstraction ensures fairness. In an African context, this could mean elevating legal traditions that prioritize communal access, interdependence, and reciprocal responsibility, such as by developing new forms of transnational legal instruments that transcend the public/private divide.
In conclusion, property theory enables a structural understanding of how international law sustains social murder and unimagined communities. It reveals that the problem is not simply the absence of law, but the presence of a legal architecture designed to dispossess. Reimagining this architecture requires more than reform—it demands a shift in legal ontology: from ownership to stewardship, from extraction to reciprocity, from invisibility to recognition. This reorientation lays essential groundwork for the next analytic move: engaging Afrofuturist thought as a speculative legal method that refuses the inevitability of global legal hierarchies and insists on imagining otherwise.
C. Afrofuturism and Legal Imagination: Reworlding Law from the Margins
If feminist legal theory and property theory expose the structural violence embedded in international legal frameworks, Afrofuturism offers a path beyond critique: a speculative method for radically reimagining law itself. Rooted in Black diasporic history, political economy, and cultural production, Afrofuturism interrogates law’s role in perpetuating historical and ongoing racial and economic subjugation. It does so not by rejecting legality outright, but by refusing to acquiesce to the inevitability of the present legal order. In doing so, Afrofuturism situates law as dialectical, constitutive, and legitimating—a cultural and material practice that can be contested, transformed, and re-invented.
From the vantage point of African garment workers whose labor is systemically exploited and juridically unrecognized, Afrofuturism challenges us to imagine legal systems not yet born. These workers exist within juridical regimes designed to render them legally invisible while economically indispensable. Their legal non-recognition is not accidental, but the result of a global legal infrastructure that encodes social murder and sustains unimagined communities through its entrenched hierarchies of ownership and formalist detachment. Reimagined through feminist legal theory and critical property frameworks, the international legal order can begin to center care, interdependence, and relational entitlement over commodification and exclusion. In this context, Afrofuturism is a jurisprudence of refusal and reworlding.
Afrofuturism’s speculative nature allows us to ask: what if law did not legitimize inequality, but instead actively dismantled it? What if law were designed not to enclose property or protect capital flows, but instead to nurture dignity, relationality, and planetary survival? These questions are not utopian, but necessary, especially in a world where the persistence of legal formalism shields transnational harm behind technical neutrality. The Afrofuturist imagination opens conceptual space for a legal order that does not presume exclusion, abstraction, or hierarchy but builds from collective memory, embodied experience, and emancipatory possibility. Applied to the African garment sector, Afrofuturism enables a shift in legal sensibility: from legal invisibility to presence, and from marginality to innovation. Imagine a legal framework where international labor governance is based on a conceptualization of garment workers not just as laborers but as cultural producers and historical actors. This framework is not just particular to the garment industry but could also apply to every private economic system that is predicated on the same premises of profit maximization. Contracts would not be unilateral instruments of corporate protection, but relational covenants rooted in consent, shared benefit, and mutual recognition. Factory zones would not be legal vacuums designed to attract foreign capital, but hybrid jurisdictions co-governed by local communities, workers, and transnational allies. Dispute resolution mechanisms would not be corporate-friendly arbitration panels, but participatory forums that center care, context, and historical redress.
Such visions are anchored in Afrofuturist thought, which understands time and law not as linear progressions but as cyclical, contested, and nonlinear. The past is never gone—it reverberates in present-day legal exclusions which are the scaffolding of current international law. Afrofuturism demands that we not merely reckon with these legacies but build legal systems that acknowledge and repair them. Reparation in this framework is not only financial; it is ontological and epistemic. It involves re-centering marginalized knowledges, worldviews, and legal traditions that have been systemically erased. This speculative jurisprudence also critiques the legitimating function of law—the way legal systems naturalize inequality by embedding it in formal rules and neutral language. Afrofuturism rejects the idea that these are the only possible configurations of law. Instead, it affirms that law is malleable, imagined, and open to reinvention.
Since Afrofuturism is fundamentally aesthetic and cultural, drawing from literature, music, visual art, and oral histories to reclaim the imaginative terrain of legality, this Essay suggests a small turn to the inclusion of these practices within international law. International law is often confined to sterile, formalistic jurisprudence and rarely engages with the arts, but perhaps it should. How is it that general norms of international law seldom escape their rigid texts to influence or dialogue with the rich, expressive world of the arts? In this sense, Afrofuturism decolonizes the legal imagination itself. Where law often operates through abstraction and elite language, Afrofuturism roots legal possibility in story, rhythm, and image. It asks: Whose stories count in law? Whose harms are legible? Whose futures are worth protecting? It challenges the bureaucratic detachment of legal institutions and calls for a legal practice that is emotionally intelligent, historically grounded, and creatively generative.
This imaginative legal work is not a fantasy—it already exists in fragments across African communities. The use of customary law to resolve disputes through consensus, the reintegration of displaced communities through land-sharing models, and the emergence of youth movements demanding global reparations and climate justice—these are all Afrofuturist legal acts. They operate within, around, and beyond the existing legal order, asserting that another legal world is not only necessary but already in motion. Applied to international law, this Afrofuturist praxis requires a paradigmatic shift. Legal doctrines must be read not as neutral rules but as political choices with cultural consequences. Legal institutions must account for their role in sustaining global stratification. Law schools must teach not only blackletter rules, but also critical jurisprudence, radical history, and speculative futures. Judges, advocates, and scholars must engage with communities not as passive beneficiaries of law, but as co-creators of legal meaning. This is what a jurisprudence of reworlding demands: that we build law from the margins, not that we merely include the margins in law.
Afrofuturism also calls us to confront the metaphysics of legality. What counts as law, and who gets to decide? Often, legality is equated with state-sanctioned authority or codified text. But Afrofuturist legal theory insists that law can also emerge from lived practices, collective memory, and liberatory struggle. In the African garment sector, this might mean recognizing community-developed codes of labor ethics, worker-led governance models, or cultural protocols for intellectual property. Crucially, Afrofuturism resists the foreclosure of legal possibility by re-centering the body, the land, and the future. It affirms that legal systems must not only respond to crisis but prefigure transformation. In this sense, it aligns with feminist and property critiques of the international legal order but also adds a visionary horizon: one that sees beyond critique to creation, beyond fragmentation to hybridity, beyond silencing to symphony. Where feminist theory introduces relationality, and property theory introduces stewardship, Afrofuturism introduces hope—a rigorous, grounded hope that insists another legal world is both necessary and possible.
In conclusion, Afrofuturism is not merely an aesthetic genre or cultural movement; it is a radical legal method. It interrogates how law is constructed, legitimized, and naturalized. It reveals how international law produces unimagined communities and enables social murder—not by accident, but through the very design of its doctrines and divisions. And it insists that we can do otherwise. By drawing on African traditions, diasporic knowledge, and speculative creativity, Afrofuturism helps us envision international legal futures that are multipolar, hybrid, and emancipatory. These futures do not merely include Africa; they emerge from Africa—as both critique and creation, as memory and possibility, as justice and imagination.
IV. Toward a Multipolar Hybrid Legal Model
Reimagining the international legal order thus requires more than critique; it demands reconstruction. The feminist, property, and Afrofuturist interventions explored thus far each point toward an international law that does not merely correct its excesses but transforms its foundations. At the heart of this transformation lies a vision of multipolar hybridity: a legal model that rejects the universalizing tendencies of the current regime in favor of layered, relational, and coexisting systems. This model would not replace one hegemonic paradigm with another; rather, it would recognize a plurality of legal logics rooted in care, stewardship, and imaginative world-building that together challenge the public/private divide as the central architecture of global governance. A multipolar hybrid legal model can be concretized through the African garment industry, a sector that epitomizes the failures of both public and private international law. Rather than relying on voluntary corporate codes or distant institutions, this model envisions hybrid labor tribunals that integrate international labor standards, domestic law, African customary principles, and Afrofuturist ethics of reciprocity and repair.
The first step toward this hybrid legal order is reconceptualizing legal responsibility. Current regimes allocate responsibility through fragmented jurisdictions and sovereign silos, enabling states and corporations to disavow harm while benefiting from it. A hybrid model requires a solidaristic legal framework—one that accounts for the global interdependence of peoples, economies, and ecologies. This means developing doctrines of shared accountability that span borders and legal categories, particularly in cases of transnational labor exploitation, ecological harm, and economic dispossession. These bodies would operate transnationally, with jurisdiction across supply chains so that when harm occurs in one country, but the brand sits elsewhere, the tribunal could adjudicate the full chain of responsibility. Composed of state, worker, community, and regional representatives, the tribunal would grant direct standing to workers and collectives, closing the accountability gap that currently defines the jurisdictional black hole.
Second, the model embraces legal pluralism not as an exception but as a norm. Hybrid legality is already a lived reality in many African contexts, where customary law, religious codes, colonial statutes, and transnational norms coexist and interact. Rather than suppressing this complexity, a reimagined international legal order would formalize it as a strength. This approach affirms that different legal traditions have equal epistemic authority and deserve institutional space. Crucially, this hybridity is not about legal shopping but about deliberate co-governance that respects the autonomy and knowledge of all systems involved. Such hybridity also demands institutional innovation. Courts, treaty bodies, and arbitral panels must integrate community voices and non-state actors not as subjects of law but as authors of it. This means embedding participatory design into the legal process, where laws and standards are co-developed with those they affect.
In the African garment industry, for example, a hybrid institution could adjudicate labor disputes by blending international labor standards, local cultural norms, and Afrofuturist ethical visions ensuring justice that is both context-sensitive and forward-looking. Trade agreements could embed binding wage and safety floors, enforceable through hybrid tribunals that combine international standards with community representation. Contracts between brands and suppliers could require worker consent clauses and community benefit agreements, drawing from both customary African legal traditions and international labor law. Intellectual property frameworks could be retooled to recognize the collective cultural contributions of African workers and designers, ensuring they share in the value they create. In practice, this would mean that when a worker is injured or a factory closes, remedies would be available not only through local courts but also through hybrid transnational mechanisms where workers and communities are recognized as legal subjects. Therefore, unlike the ILO or UN systems, which depend on state ratification and lack binding enforcement, this hybrid model embeds participation and compliance mechanisms at every level.
Third, the hybrid legal model insists on reparative justice as both principle and practice. It recognizes that the harms international law currently perpetuates—such as social murder, unimagined communities, and systemic erasure—are not incidental but structural. Addressing these requires more than redistribution; it calls for reparation of memory, land, labor, and law itself. African legal traditions offer blueprints that do not merely fill gaps in the global legal order, they offer models for its reconstitution. Remedies could include compensation, injunctive relief, and structural reform, with transparency and recusal rules preventing capture by powerful actors. In sum, a multipolar hybrid legal model challenges the international legal system’s foundational divisions. It supplants the public/private split with a layered architecture of care, interdependence, and shared responsibility. It replaces exclusionary universals with pluralistic engagement. It reorients legal authority from the abstract sovereign to the grounded collective. And it centers legal innovation in Africa—not as a site of deficit or labor extraction, but as a site of futurity. This is not only a theoretical possibility but a political imperative. To avert deeper planetary injustice, international law must open itself to becoming something else: multipolar, hybrid, and genuinely just.
V. Conclusion
This Essay has argued that the enduring public/private divide within international law functions as a foundational structure of global governance that renders invisible vast populations, enabling both the creation of unimagined communities and the perpetuation of social murder. The example of African garment workers—whose labor is essential yet legally marginalized—demonstrates how international legal silos facilitate systemic harm by shielding capital flows and private power from accountability.
Challenging this conventional paradigm requires more than reform. It demands reimagining international law’s very architecture. Feminist legal theory exposes the care and relationality erased by state-corporate binaries. Property theory reveals how enclosure and dispossession underpin global economic orders. Afrofuturism offers a powerful imaginative horizon, insisting that law is not static but dialectical, constitutive, and ripe for transformation through the creative reclamation of marginalized histories and futures. Together, these interventions point toward a multipolar hybrid legal order rooted in juridical solidarity, pluralism, and reparative justice. Indeed, through the African garment sector, the integration of these principles into a form of multipolar hybridity becomes a laboratory for reworlding international law itself. Such a model rejects universalism and the rigid public/private split in favor of overlapping, coexisting legal frameworks that recognize interdependence and shared responsibility. Ultimately, this is a call for a radical reorientation of international law—one that confronts its role in producing harm and invisibility and opens space for solidarity, justice, and collective creativity. In a rapidly evolving global landscape marked by inequality and ecological crisis, embracing such a hybrid and multipolar legal future is not only desirable but imperative.
Acknowledgements: I express my sincere gratitude to the editors of the Yale Journal of International Law for their thoughtful comments and rigorous editorial assistance.