(Book Review) Africa: Mapping New Boundaries in International Law by Jeremy I. Levitt

This is a review of Jeremy Levitt’s edited collection of chapters in Africa: Mapping the Boundaries of International Law, which is an impressive work to the dearth of scholarship on Africa’s contribution to the normative substance and theory of international law. The book explicitly seeks to counter the racist mythology that Africans were tabula rasa in international law. In his own introduction to the book, Levitt makes it clear that “Africa is a legal marketplace, not a lawless basket case.” The eight contributors to the book are renowned scholars who make the case that Africa is not stuck in pre-history – that the continent has been an active participant in making and humanizing international law in diverse areas such as human rights, women’s rights, international humanitarian law, democracy theory, and international criminal law, among others.