Professor Ambreena Manji

Publication

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Research

I currently have two strands to my research:

Land Law Reform

I have published widely on the politics of land law reform in East Africa. Topics have included the notable absence of gender as a consideration in Tanzanian land law debates, the subsequent attempt to secure women's land rights through schemes for statutory spousal co-ownership in Tanzania and Uganda, the global promotion of individual titling and registration of previously customary land by the World Bank, and the failure of land law reform in Kenya.

My most recent book, The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya (James Currey/Boydell & Brewer 2020), explores why new land laws introduced in 2012 have not addressed long-standing grievances about grossly unequal land distribution. It suggests that agitation for constitutional reform and calls for changes in land relations went hand in hand. Civil society and human rights groups presented injustices connected with land as questions of human rights, equity and justice. Yet land law reform efforts have been more concerned with the redistribution of bureaucratic power than land corruption. I argue that land law reform has failed to confront the material consequences of unequal access to land.

The Political Economy of Reproductive Labour

My current project is a study of the political economy of care. I am writing a book which seeks to reread key texts in African social history for care. I study a range of key texts and show how they can be read as ‘supportive texts’ (Marks 2000: 106) for studying the history of reproductive labour. Works of African social history have often recorded the provision of reproductive labour and the experiences of women when this form of labour comes under strain. My objective is to show that although in the first instance authors of these texts have not explicitly labelled reproductive labour as such, they have provided us with rich accounts of this work. I suggest that these accounts provide us with an opportunity for rereading. My method in this book can be summed up as going back to texts to look for care. What forms of care have been provided by women and recorded by social historians? Often these accounts of reproductive labour are incidental to the main text – a text concerned with women’s work will contain rich accounts of care work but will not have this as its central concern. Or an account of women’s relationships with each other can be reread as an account of social reproduction being negotiated, redefined or contested. My method in the book is founded on Shula Marks' (2000) observation that ‘as new questions break the surface’ it might be possible to ‘suggest new ways of hearing and seeing old stories.’

Teaching

I have taught Global Problems and Legal Theory; Discrimination and the Law; and Law and Literature.

Biography

I have held academic posts at the Universities of Warwick and Keele. I have been a visiting fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town and at Dar es Salaam Law School; a Global Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School; and Dame Lillian Penson Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

My research is focused on Law and Society in Africa. It is strongly interdisciplinary and collaborative. I have published on the history of African legal education, on law in African literature and on women and the law. I have co-published with colleagues in history, political science, and development studies. I have written widely on land law reform. My most recent book is The Struggle for Land and Justice in Modern Kenya (James Currey/Boydell 2020).

I served as President of the African Studies Association UK 2018-2020. I was a member of the ASAUK Fage & Oliver Book Prize panel in 2016 and in 2018 I chaired the judging panel for the Audrey Richards Prize. I have represented the ASAUK in the Arts and Humanities Alliance. I am a member of the Council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and of its Research Committee.

I am a co-editor of African Affairs, the top-ranked journal in African Studies. I have been a member of the Editorial Board of Social and Legal Studies for two decades. I sit on the International Advisory Boards of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights and Feminist Legal Studies. I was a member of the working group on Climate Sustainable Academia of the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA).

I sit on the Council of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) and on the British Academy's International Engagement Committee and its Higher Education Policy Development Group. I am a British Academy representative on the UK Academies Human Rights Committee (2023-2027). In REF 2021 I was a member of the Area Studies sub-panel. I was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2020 and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2024. I am a Visiting Professor at the Sutherland School of Law, Unversity College Dublin 2021-2026. I am a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory 2022-2027.

I co-founded Cardiff Law School’s path-breaking Global Justice Pro Bono programme in 2015, working on legal cases in Tanzania and Kenya and providing our students with the opportunity of fully funded law placements in Nairobi and Delhi.

I have advised a number of international organisations on land issues, including the FAO, UNDP, DfID, the Rift Valley Institute, and the Centre for African Cities. In 2016, I was nominated by the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development to act as expert adviser to the Habitat III conference being held in Quito, Ecuador.

Between 2010 and 2014, I was seconded to Nairobi as the director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, a British Academy research institute. In that capacity, I was responsible for the strategic development of the BIEA. Under my leadership, the Institute became known as a centre of excellence for work on legal and constitutional change in Eastern Africa. As the first lawyer to direct the Institute I was responsible for an important broadening of its subject reach beyond its traditional associations with archaeology and history. This achievement was recognised in a quinquennial evaluation carried out by the British Academy in 2012 which noted the transformative interdisciplinary and collaborative relationships that I had fostered with colleagues across Eastern Africa. These included strategic links with key non-academic stakeholders including with law reform bodies and with the judiciary across the region. During my tenure, I inaugurated and secured funding for the Institute’s first East African fellowship to support early career scholars from the region. I created new opportunities for the Institute to collaborate with leading constitutional lawyers, including the Kenyan Chief Justice and members of the high court; the Chairs of Constitutional  Review Commissions in Kenya and Tanzania; and judicial training institutes across the region. This ensured that research carried out at the BIEA had an impact beyond the academy and that the Institute played a key role in important political and constitutional debates in the region.

I have been part of the following collaborative projects:

- With John Harrington (Cardiff Law School), I have reseached the history of African Legal Education. This project received support from the Nuffield Foundation and from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.

- With Sibongile Ndashe (Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa) and Sharifah Sekalala (Warwick Law School) I launched the African Feminist Judgments project. This project received support from Cardiff's Centre of Law and Society.

- With Catherine Boone (LSE Government and International Development), Jacqueline Klopp (Columbia Earth Institute) and Karuti Kanyinga (University of Nairobi Institute of Development Studies) I have studied Decentralized Land Management in Kenya. This project was supported by a grant from the LSE Inequalities Institute.

Honours and awards

Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (2020-)

Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2024-)

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (2024-)

Committees and reviewing

President, African Studies Association UK (2018-2020)

Editor, African Affairs: Journal of the Royal African Society (2020-)

Member, Area Studies Panel, REF 2021

Trustee, British Institute in Eastern Africa (2019-)

Member, Council of the Royal African Society (2018-)

Member, Judging Panel, Fage & Oliver Book Prize in African Studies (2016)

Member, Research Committee, British Institute in Eastern Africa (2014-)

Member, Working Group on Climate Sustainable Academia, European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA)

Editorial Board, Feminist Legal Studies (2014-2018)

Editorial Board, Social and Legal Studies: An International Journal (2001-)

Supervisions