Oduu Haaraya

ESAT Special Program ”Oromo and Amhara Should work together” Dr Awol Kassim

Below article is unrelated to the interview, but intended to introduce to you a rising young Oromo scholar. 

Source:  LSE Human Rights 

Dr. Awol Allo is LSE Fellow in Human Rights at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology. Prior to joining LSE in 2013, Dr. Allo was the Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith Scholar at the University of Glasgow. He holds degrees from Addis Ababa University, University of Notre Dame, and the University of Glasgow.

Dr. Allo’s research interests are in the areas of the sociology of law, critical social theory, political theory, human rights, post-colonial studies, and the African Union. Dr. Allo is interested in understanding and explaining how law constitutes and regulates the social world by observing how its discourses, practices, and institutions operate in the real world and generate effects. His scholarship examines empirical data – court files, trial transcripts, and historical archives – to describe and explain the behaviour of legal actors.

His forthcoming monograph, Law and Resistance: Toward a Performative Epistemology of the Political Trial, is a genealogical enquiry into law’s conditions of possibility for progressive change and transformation. Drawing on the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, the monograph explores the tension between the normative and the performative dimensions of law and argues that the normative in law is merely a metaphysical placeholder for the performative. Questioning the kinds of logic, the forms of rationality and modes of reasoning with which law constitutes and regulates the social world, the project brings sociological inquiry into the orbit of law and legality.

Dr. Allo is the editor of The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial, published by Ashgate in 2015. The book is both a celebration and a reflection: a celebration of the life and struggle of the man who led South Africa’s long walk to freedom, Nelson Mandela, and a reflection on the spatial dimension of resistance and struggle in the courtroom. Through an engagement with Mandela’s compelling deployment of law both as a sword and a shield, leading social theorists from Africa, Europe and the United States join forces to address the multifaceted functions of trials.

Selected Publications:

Books

  • Allo A. (Forthcoming 2017) Law and Resistance: Toward a Performative Epistemology of the Political Trial, The Routledge Series in Social Justice
  • Allo A. (2015) The Courtroom as Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial (eds.) Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

Articles and Book Chapters

  • Allo A. (2016) Marwan Barghouti in Tel Aviv: Occupation, Terrorism, and Resistance in the Courtroom, Social & Legal Studies
  • Allo A. (2016) The Courtroom as a Site of Epistemic Resistance: Mandela at Rivonia,Law, Culture, and the Humanities
  • Allo A. & Tesfaye B. (2015) Spectacles of Illegality: Mapping Ethiopia’s Show Trials, African Identities Journal.
  • Allo A. (2015)  ‘Black Man in a White Man’s Court’: Mandela’s Performative Genealogies, in Allo A. (eds.) The Courtroom as Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 189-212.
  • Allo A. (2015) The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance, in Allo A. (eds.) The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance: Reflections on the Legacy of the Rivonia Trial, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 1-20.
  • Allo A. (2012) Law and the Stranger, (eds.) ‘Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, And Martha Umphrey, Review Essay, 15 (2) New Criminal Law Review, 333-345.
  • Allo A. (2010) The Show in the Show Trials: Reconceptualising the Politicization of Truth and Justice in the Courtroom, 15 Barry Law Review, 41-72.
  • Allo A. (2010) Ethiopia’s Military Intervention in Somalia: Assessing the Legality of Self-Defense in Response to the Threat of Terrorism, 39 Den. J. Int. L. & Pol. 139-167.
  • Allo A. (2009) Mayhem in Darfur: The Accountability, Peace and Immunity Debate, 3(1) Mizan Law Review, 70-104.
  • Allo A. (2009) Derogations or Limitations: Rethinking the African Human Rights System of derogation in the Light of the European System’, 2(2) Journal of Ethiopian Legal Education.
  • Allo A. (2009) Counter-intervention, Invitation, Both or Neither: An Appraisal of the Ethiopian Military Intervention in Somalia, 3(2) Mizan Law Review, 201-239.

Book Reviews

  • Allo A. (2010) Book Review, ‘Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust’, 4(1) Mizan Law Review.

Selected Media Writings Include:

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