Kwamou Eva Feukeu

Main Fields of Research

Legal pluralism (comparative law), land law, business law, decolonial legal theory, futures studies, participatory action research methodologies, philosophy of time, customary law, informality, political economy of Africa

Vita

Kwamou Eva Feukeu is the head of the Africa Centre of Expertise at the Institute. As a researcher in private law, a decolonial practitioner, and an anticipation specialist, her scholarship documents African contexts in order to challenge or nuance global sociolegal frameworks, with a particular focus on land law and the informal economy. Since 2022, she also co-runs the Decolonial Comparative Law project at the Institute. 

Alongside her academic work, Kwamou is involved in the Currency Lab, an art-research collective through which she explores currencies as social decisions. This engagement informs her broader methodological approach of using participatory methods to examine how legal and economic futures are imagined, negotiated, and contested.

Previously, Kwamou worked for over six years at the United Nations, investigating the relationship between futures and power. During this time, she organized her own practice as a head futurist, training several international organizations (OECD, World Organisation for Animal Health, UN Executive Office of the Secretary-General, UNICEF, GIZ, etc.) and families to engage with a specific critique of development. She has also worked on mining law in Niger, on women's rights in Tanzania, on international business law in Uganda, and on diaspora policy at the African Union headquarters (Ethiopia).

Trained in business law (MA) and African Studies (BA) at Sciences Po, she earned a professional diploma in OHADA law from Sorbonne-Panthéon-Assas before finishing her PhD under Prof. Dr. Ralf Michaels’s supervision at Hamburg University. Kwamou has been a guest lecturer at the Universities of Witwatersrand, Yaoundé 1, Makeni, Zurich, Trento, and Regensburg, and a visiting fellow at Cambridge University. In addition to facilitating workshops since 2014, she has spoken before a variety of constituencies, including Stanford University and the World Bank.