This book concludes by reiterating the importance of avoiding grand narratives in research on sustainable development in international law. While each chapter revolves around its unique theme, my adoption of TWAIL helped unite these separate parts to tell a single story on Africa’s intersection with sustainable development’s legal evolution, conceptualisation, and implementation. Even so, this book is more than just writing about sustainable development or Africa as it deeply explores how international law should evolve, going forward. Finally, I end this book by drawing on TWAIL’s hopeful agenda by foreshadowing my future research interests in re-reading the law and politics of ecological crises as everyday occurrences and not as episodic events in international law.

In this chapter, I will look at how the twin projects of cultural and political decolonization in the overlapping fields of literature and law played out over the past hundred years in order to consider how the problem of “formal” decolonization – the filling of foreign colonial administrative structures and cultural educational systems with “native” content – can detour and defer a more radical decolonization of form itself, rooting out the intrinsic eurocentrism at the bottom of both international law and comparative literature. Calls to decolonize (whether territory or a curriculum), especially in the current name of “the decolonial,” often appeal to the language of human rights, but human rights are intentionally counterrevolutionary, designed to forestall the possibility of radical disruption by expanding the compass of the universal to include, over time, people and peoples historically excluded from its coverage.

This chapter explores Hughes’s historic visit to Shanghai in 1933 and his encounter with the reverberating Shanghai jazz scene in the interwar era. It situates Hughes’s account of his trip in I Wonder as I Wander (1956) during the Bandung period, examining Hughes’s subsequent response to Afro-Asian engagements with the language of jazz. Against the overarching premise of Afro-Asian solidarity, music in Hughes’s work becomes an alternative site of politics, simultaneously conveying Bandung-era optimism and the limits of Afro-Asian solidarity underpinned by the nation-state and its racial categories. Music in Hughes’s world as practice metaphorically sensitizes the many nuances of interracial dynamics, that is, Sino-Japanese tension, in ways that necessitate reconfiguration of the global color line.

Chapter 9, finally, examines China’s interrelated international and domestic public law developments from the time of the signing of the United Nations Charter, where its unified delegation represented the Guomindang, Communists, and key third parties, through the Cold War era and its own drastic implications for diverging Chinese views on global legal order.

This chapter has attempted to explore three ideas. First, that there was in fact considerable work and effort invested in regulating and prohibiting landmines since the end of the Second World War, and the 1997 treaty in large part rested on that earlier work. Indeed, the success of the Landmines Convention cannot be properly understood without this historical context. Second, the longer history in turn reveals an important story of the developing world actively engaged in pursuing limits on indiscriminate weapons, and actively engaged in the pursuit of disarmament. While this changed across time as the developing world itself fractured and shifted, it remains an important part of the story of disarmament efforts in the Cold War, much of which has yet to be explored. Finally, the story exposes the fallacy that ‘humanitarian disarmament’ is a creature of the post–Cold War era in the sense that especially from the South (but generally as well), there was deep and abiding concern about the humanitarian impacts of indiscriminate weapons.

This chapter locates Ghana’s quest for nuclear power within the context of French bomb tests in the Sahara that sent radioactive materials across West Africa. In 1959, French scientists announced plans to detonate a series of bombs in their colony of Algeria, where resistance fighters sought to remove the French occupation. The French bomb tests further exacerbated tensions between the European nation and African leaders like Nkrumah, who supported the Algerian independence struggle. The prospect of French nuclear weapons extended the terror of Western atomic bomb activity from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the South Pacific test fields to the African continent. Once fallout from the French detonations reached Ghanaian towns, the outrage from Nkrumah’s government and his international supports was tremendous. The French bombs helped to mobilize interest in fallout monitoring at the University of Ghana and led to Ghana’s bid to join the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Ghana’s efforts to eliminate bomb testing across Africa through the United Nations.