Q&A with Oreva Olakpe
In May, Bloomsbury Publishing released South-South Migrations and the Law from Below: Case Studies on China and Nigeria (external link) , a new book written by CERC Migration Research Fellow Oreva Olakpe. CERC Connections sat down to learn about her motivations for writing the book and some of the biggest insights she took away from the experience.
You’ve published a book early in your career. Congratulations! How did it come about?
The book is based on the work I did during my PhD, which I started on in 2014. It became my PhD thesis. When I joined the CERC Migration team in 2021, Anna Triandafyllidou read it and thought I should really do something with it. She pushed me to turn it into a book; my colleagues Amaka Vanni and Rafeeat Aliyu also encouraged me to publish.
Your book provides a critique of the effectiveness of international law in dealing with migration issues but through a perspective from “below.” What motivated you to take on this topic?
One of the main reasons for writing comes from my childhood and is related to one of the case studies in the book. In 2002, the International Court of Justice in the Hague made the decision regarding to which country Bakassi, a small peninsula in West Africa, would be annexed. The area is the home of a small ethnic community where their ancestors had been living for hundreds of years, sustained by fishing. When African states gained independence after World War II, the International Court of Justice had the role of resolving contested land and new borders, and in this case, ownership was disputed between the bordering countries of Nigeria and Cameroon. The peninsula was awarded to Cameroon because of agreements delimiting borders between colonial powers; yet the people on the peninsula did not identify as Cameroonian. Many people became displaced as a result of the decision.
Did you feel the decision of the International Court was unfair?
At an early age, I would watch the news and talk a lot with my parents about it, about whether the decision of the court was fair; was it right that a decision was made based on colonial agreements and by a faraway court that did not value the local dynamics? Over the years, we saw the impact of that decision. After the peninsula became Cameroonian territory, the inhabitants were required to either naturalize as Cameroonian or obtain residence permits, and faced fines or punishment if they did not. Then, when I studied international law for my master’s degree, we discussed the case, covering everything about the court, the procedure, the provisional measures, counter claims and the decision. We never talked about the people and the impact of this decision on them. Many of them were forced to move out of the peninsula and faced a lot of struggles having lost their ancestral lands, which were the means to their livelihoods. They also faced limitations in Nigeria due to lack of identification documents and have lived for many years in camps. All those things were created by that court decision. We did not delve deeply into the long-term impact of this decision. We weren’t reflecting on the long-term impact of law in the displacement of the people or the paths to justice that the people have taken since the decision. I felt really strongly about the importance of asking this question because I grew up reading and talking about it.
The second case study of the book is based on your research in China. It’s a completely different setting, yet it contributes to the same theme. Why did you explore migrants in China, and what were the main insights this study provided?
I did a lot of travelling in China and met a lot of interesting people, including African students, business people, and asylum seekers. I was particularly interested in asylum seekers and business people without status, which in China is a very unique experience because of how the government addresses immigration and migration issues. I felt that there was a lot that we, as migration and legal scholars, can learn from about how they were handling the challenges they were facing in their everyday lives. There is a lot to understand in terms of how migrants can contribute to building access to justice or how they can organize themselves, create the kinds of structures necessary to address safety or crime, for example, because as someone without papers, you cannot go to the police. The legal field is very cut and dry – it’s either you have documents or you don’t, and if you don’t, formal protections do not apply to you. I was very interested in learning more about the ways in which these communities were creating strong, not just informal legal structures, but different types of structures to get by in a country like China.
My doctoral supervisor Gina Heathcote gave me the freedom to study all these things in one thesis. She gave me the freedom to really explore and also the framework to do that.
In your book, you argue that we can learn about the inadequacies of our institutions, like international law, by understanding how informal communities on the outside respond. Can you explain?
One community in China that I came to know had its own systems of leadership and had to create its own form of enforcement. They had individuals who tended to be the older businessmen in the community and who had spent many years in China. . . . [They] were like judges that settled disputes. And those judges understood the Chinese system. They had their own set of rules. People on the outside of these communities focus just on their lack of status and don’t recognize that within their community, they are managing to fill gaps that formal law cannot fill – this is a problem all over the world. We don’t see undocumented migrants beyond their lack of status and it limits our knowledge greatly. Every human being, no matter whether they have papers or not, deserves to live with dignity.
Are you advocating for some kind of local justice shaped out of the needs of the community?
Yes. Take the two case studies of the book as examples. If the historical and cultural realities of the community annexed to Cameroon were upheld, there may have been a different outcome. Those factors are just as important as some colonial agreement made between some random people. From their account, no one from the Court or government ever came to speak with them; they said, “We just heard one day that these lands are no longer ours, that we were to either become Cameroonian or get out.” The international court’s decision created a lot of injustice, including state-backed violence and gender-based violence, which has made the Bakassi people look for local solutions and their own paths to justice. These solutions from below are crucial because they are righting the wrongs created by our current international system.
In the case of the community in China, they were trying to organize and say, “Okay, when we have certain issues, when someone commits a crime in the community, this is what we’re going to do; when a member of the community has cancer, this is what we will do; and when someone is arrested or is being deported, we will take these specific steps to support them and their families.” Those are initiatives that should be supported and not punished.
Once you understand the kind of contributions these communities make to address the inadequacies of institutions and norms, the ways in which they strive to live with dignity, you realize more needs to be done to support them. And when we do that, we create a more equal world; we create a world where there is less injustice, where people can live with dignity in their day-to-day lives.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
