A list of my published materials in chronologically descending order. Do let me know if there is anything you are unable to access. I have put a link to publications that have accompanying blog posts on this site.
2026
Adébísí, Folúkẹ́ I, ‘Disrupting International Law’s Colonial Afterlives of Human Property: Educating for a World Beyond Racial Capitalism and Unending Apartheids’, in Mohsen al Attar, and Claire Smith (eds), Emancipating International Law: Confronting the Violence of Racialized Boundaries (Oxford, 2026)
This chapter borrows Bhandar’s phraseology and illustrates the manifestation of what is called ‘vaccine apartheid’, to explain how the same logics of coloniality and racial demarcations have replicated themselves through legal understandings of what is property and ownership, as well as law’s inability to protect all life over market imperatives. The chapter argues that exiting this colonial-necropolitical landscape requires a fundamental reconceptualization of international law’s normative standards, meanings, and role.
2025
“Seeking the University That Is Ours: Understanding, Unpacking and Unsettling Black Students’ Racialised (Un)Belonging in UK Law Schools.” The Law Teacher 59 (2): 200–216
This article unpacks the nature of racialised (un)belonging experienced by law students – why for students of colour, the law school has often felt like a space to which they cannot fully belong. First, it examines the nature of “race” and “racism.” It then goes to on to analyse the role that the content of the law school curriculum plays in producing unbelonging. The core of law school activity is what happens in the classroom, and this should be (but often is not) a key avenue for law schools to address racialised unbelonging. Finally, the article engages with decolonisation as a remedy to racialised unbelonging, by examining its meanings, methods, challenges, and possibilities.
2024
“Black/African science fiction and imaginative resistance: ExplorationJs towards a racially just jurisprudence of the future.” [Chapter]
In Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction, pp. 62-83. Routledge, 2024. Edited By Alex Green, Mitchell Travis, Kieran Tranter
This chapter argues that the relationship between law, time, temporality, race and racism is vital to understanding the continuous reproduction of racial injustice and the making permanent of colonial logics. This entanglement, exemplified in the evolution and adaptation of those colonial logics beyond the time of both racialised enslavement and exploitative colonisation, limits the futures that law can posit within and with its knowledge structure. However, I argue that this limitation of legal knowledge – especially in teaching, but also in research – can be addressed by recourse to science fiction.
Decolonisation and the Law School: Dreaming Beyond Aesthetic Changes to the Curriculum. Taylor & Francis, 2024. [Edited Collection: Editor and Author of the Introduction].
The is essentially a reprint of the special issue published by the Law Teacher in 2020 (See below). However, the introduction incorporates new discussions in the field.
“Race, Decolonisation and Legal Research.” [Chapter]
The chapter considers some key issues that legal scholars should reflect on when their research engages with the relationship between law, race, and exploitative colonial logics. It explores the concept of “decolonising research” by reflecting on the ways that law schools have responded to the absences of race within research as the contemporary result of harmful histories. It also outlines some key questions legal scholars should be asking themselves if they want to produce legal research that makes an intellectually sound and rigorous account of the impact of racialisation and empire on their scholarship.
2023
With Suhraiya Jivraj, and Ntina Tzouvala, eds. Decolonisation, Anti-Racism, and Legal Pedagogy: Strategies, Successes, and Challenges. Taylor & Francis, 2023. [Edited Collection: Co-editor, Co-author of Introduction and Co-author of a chapter]
With a specific focus on post- and decolonial thought and anti-racist methods in pedagogy, this edited collection provides an accessible illustration of pedagogical innovation in teaching and learning law. Chapters cover civil and common law legal systems, incorporate cases from non-state Indigenous legal systems, and critically examine key topics such as decolonisation and anti-racism in criminology, colonialism and the British Empire, and court process and Indigenous justice. The book demonstrates how teaching can be modified and adapted to address long-standing injustice in the curriculum.
The Sea Casts Its Net of Justice Wide: A Speculative Judgment for What Has Been Left to the Waters of Despair [Chapter]
In The Anthropocene Judgments Project: Futureproofing the Common Law. pp. 59-71 Routledge.
This chapter is a fictional judgment that uses (among others) the frameworks of Black/African Science Fiction, Indigenous Knowledge, Earth Laws, and anticolonial logics, to imagine the sea and its inhabitants addressing a petition against humanity for what it has thrown into the waters. It relies on ideas from the law and literature movement, and takes Gregson v Gilbert (1783), as its entry point. By imagining the ocean, as well as its inhabitants, as sentient petitioners, this judgment explores a wide range of questions that trouble the capacity of Euro-modern law (fashioned to protect and regulate the accumulation of capital) as a succour for the perils of the Anthropocene age.
Educating for the End of a Necropolitical World: What Happens Beyond Decolonisation in Legal Education? [Chapter]
In Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education, pp. 9-23. Routledge.
This chapter argues that coloniality of power is reproduced by and in Euro-modern legal education and this contributes to the increasing emergence of a necropolitical world. Such a necropolitical world is concerned not with the preservation of life or the earth itself, but the governance of death, as ‘necropolitics’ describes a structure and body of legal knowledge dedicated to the sovereign’s power over ‘who may live and who must die.’ This also describes the logics of a decadent discipline which is unable to die and unable to bring life. Therefore, legal education requires a radical rethink of its aims and concepts.
Decolonisation and Legal Knowledge – Reflections on Power and Possibility [Book]
In it I argue that the histories of racialised enslavement and extractive colonisation have had a profound effect on the fundamentals of the legal knowledge that we teach, research and practise. In response, the decolonisation movement, gives us an option for imagining together, new ways of thinking, being and doing in the world, to avert global injustice, deprivation and climate disaster.
Accompanying blog post 5
2022
Black/African Science Fiction and the Quest for Racial Justice through Legal Knowledge: How Can We Unsettle Euro-modern Time and Temporality in Our Teaching? [Journal Article]
Law, Technology and Humans 4 (2):24-37.
This paper argues that the relationship between law, time, temporality, race and racism is vital to understanding the continuous reproduction of racial injustice and the making permanent of colonial logics. A specific area of science fiction, collectively termed here Black/African Science Fiction, has made inroads into unsettling Euro-modern law’s chronopolitics. Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as an example, this paper argues that Black/African Science Fiction can help us to reframe legal knowledge to disrupt the inevitability of our current version of the future and the question of inevitability itself.
Reinventing possibility: A reflection on law, race and decolonial discourse in legal education. [Chapter]
In What Is Legal Education For?: Re-Assessing the Purposes of Early Twenty-First Century Learning and Law Schools, pp. 85-110. Routledge, 2022.
This chapter argues that law schools have a responsibility to educate students on racialisation and coloniality as both continue to influence knowledge construction as well as laws, policy making and enforcement (including legal practitioners’ interactions with people of colour).
2021
Law, Race and Development [Encyclopaedia entry]
Adebisi, Foluke. “Law, Race and Development.” In De Feyter, Koen, Gamze E. Türkelli, and Stéphanie de Moerloose, eds. Encyclopedia of Law and Development. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021. pp. 177-180.
In this entry, I explore how a critical examination of the nexus between the three [i.e. law, race, and development] uncovers how they co-constitute each other, sometimes in negative ways. It is important, however, to begin any examination with an understanding that ‘race’ is not a legitimate scientific categorisation of humanity – neutral or objective. Development policy should take into account the history of race when determining the future of development. Accompanying blog post
Racism As Legal Pandemic: Thoughts on Critical Legal Pedagogies [Book chapter]
In Adebisi, F. I. & Jivraj, S., 29 Jul 2021, in Cowan, Dave, and Ann Mumford, eds. Pandemic Legalities: Legal Responses to COVID-19–Justice and Social Responsibility. Policy Press, 2021.
In this chapter, we extend this reflection to the profession of the authors of this book: legal education. As a starting point, it is clear that justice is not available for everyone: from police brutality and deaths in custody against Black lives and those of indigenous and other people of colour across the globe including in (former) colonial centres like the UK; to the sheer negligent disregard which led to the burning of Grenfell Tower; to standing by as people fleeing persecution drown in the waters that surround us.
Revisiting (inclusive) education in the post-colony [Journal article]
Abdulrahman, Hadiza Kere, Foluke Ifejola Adebisi, Zibah Nwako, and Elizabeth Walton. “Revisiting (inclusive) education in the postcolony.” Journal of the British Academy 9 (2021): 47-75.
This article uses a dialogic approach to explore the complex state of education in the postcolony. It revisits the subject of educational inclusion (and exclusion) and interrogates different epistemological and systemic framings of what constitutes education and knowledge, and the effects that these have on the postcolonial educational landscape.
Should We Rethink the Purposes of the Law School? A Case for Decolonial Thought in Legal Pedagogy [Journal article]
Series 2 Vol. 2 Amicus Curiae (2020): 428.
2020
Decolonising the law school: presences, absences, silences… and hope [Editorial]
The Law Teacher, October 2020, Taylor & Francis
On the 13th of September 2019, I convened at the Law School, University of Bristol, a conference titled, ‘Decolonisation and the Law School.’ The purpose of the conference was to bring together some of the vast array of work legal academics across the UK were doing with reference to decolonial thought, in particular how they were bringing this work into their teaching and their research. This editorial gives some context to the special issue. Accompanying blog post
2016
Decolonising education in Africa: Implementing the right to education by re-appropriating culture and indigeneity [Journal article]
Adebisi, F., 9 Dec 2016, In: Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly. 67, 4, p. 433-451.
Using theories of deconstructive postcolonialism, this article examines Africa’s education narrative and suggests a critical Freirian approach for decolonising education in Africa. This article contends that undecolonised education results in epistemic violence/injustice and is thus pedagogically and ethically unsound – violating the right to education. Accompanying blog post
Levitt, Jeremy I. (ed.), Black Women and International Law [Book Review]
Ipinyomi, F., 1 Feb 2016, In: African Journal of International and Comparative Law
This review explores the overall themes that are examined in the book – the invisibility, objectification, exclusion and exploitation of black women. Of special note are the stories of Baartman and Truganini, poignant examples of black women who were failed by justice. Law. 24, 1, p. 168 – 172
The Impact of African Philosophy on the Realisation of International Community and the Observance of International Law [Journal article]
Ipinyomi, F., 1 Feb 2016, In: International Community Law Review. 18, 1, p. 3 – 33
In this article I argue that the international community is defined as a unitary actor that is separate from post-colonial Africa. The effect of this is to relegate the African experience to a footnote in research. International law then goes ahead to prescribe solutions for African problems which ignores African historicity, philosophy and values. This results in an international community that is not sufficiently communal and a disregard for international law. Accompanying blog post
2015
A Right to a Project of (African) Life: Boko Haram, ESC Classification of the Right to Education, and the Unjustifiability of Generationalising Human Rights [Journal article]
Ipinyomi, F. I., Dec 2015, In: Journal of Academic Perspectives. 2015, 4, p. 1-21
This paper questions the generational hierarchy of human rights, and the contextual classification of RtE as an ESC right. The violators of RtE who are non-state, as well as the content and benefits of the right, make this classification questionable. The international human rights law (IHRL) indicators of RtE therefore become redundant. This paper argues for an approach that focuses on vulnerable groups and de-emphasises generationalisation of human rights and unproven preconceptions of international relations. Accompanying blog post
Ipinyomi, F. I., 3 Mar 2015, In: NIALS Journal of Law and Gender.
2013
Losing the Utility of the Responsibility to Prevent: The confines of international law and focus on genocide prevention [Journal article]
Ipinyomi, F. I., Dec 2013, In: International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory. 6, 4, p. 191- 203
This article aims to examine the responsibility to prevent by dissecting the component crimes of R2P and their prevention, examining prevention through the overarching lens of disciplines in international law and the various practicalities that impede prevention.
2012
Is Côte d’Ivoire a Test Case for R2P? Democratization as Fulfilment of the International Community’s Responsibility to Prevent [Journal article]
Ipinyomi, F. I., Oct 2012, In: Journal of African Law. p. 151-174 23
This article examines the post-election crisis in Côte d’Ivoire [also known as Ivory Coast] that occurred between 2010 and 2011. In it, I argue that the international community should be more focussed on promoting democratic principles rather than the form or structure of democracy. Any other course of action could result in violent conflict and human rights violations. Unfortunately, the Responsibility to Protect [R2P] has been used as an argument for military intervention rather than prevention of violence. I argue here that the spirit of R2P speaks more about peace than violence. The international community should therefore be more prepared for peace than war.