Sonya Cotton (ERC project PROPERTY[IN]JUSTICE)
Research area
Legal geography/anthropology, TWAIL, decolonisation, legal personhood
(opens in a new window)sonya.cotton@ucdconnect.ie
Supervisor
Dr Amy Strecker
Thesis title
Who Stands on Land? Demarcating Collective Legal Personhood in Post-Apartheid Landscapes and the Role of International Law
Abstract
While new legal avenues in international law allow dispossessed groups lacking formal title to affirm collective land rights against states/corporations, for groups seeking to avail of those legal avenues, it is necessary to be legible as a "community", a concept that has not been sufficiently interrogated in a transnational legal context. Informed by the ways in which apartheid was not a once-off historical event, but rather a phenomenon made possibly through transnational technologies of colonial governance. My research asks: (1) What is the normative meaning of “community” in post apartheid South African and Namibian land claims with respect to legal standing? (2) How do groups in the margins of post-apartheid racial categorisation draw on their status as "community" under international law to affirm collective land rights? Conversely, how are these groups (mis)recognised through national and international law? (3). What is the impact of the legal meanings of community on the locus standi of claimants and, more broadly, spatial justice?
Biography
I am a South African socio-legal scholar in the final year of my PhD. I have a Master of Laws from Peking University specializing in Chinese law and society, and a Master of Philosophy in Comparative Law in Africa from the University of Cape Town. Prior to that I majored in linguistics and Xhosa at UCT. My approach to legal subject matter is strongly shaped by my interdisciplinary background: I am interested in the interplay of language, power, and social/spatial justice, with a strong Global South emphasis. My doctoral research is shaped by legal geography and legal anthropology, and is informed by Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). Previously, I specialised in comparative family law, drawing on legal pluralism and feminist approaches to the statutory regulation of polygamous marriage in sub-Saharan countries. I have tutored undergraduate Property I and II at UCD, and Feminism and Gender Justice in UCD's Philosophy department. I am a research fellow at the Centre for Legal Integration in Africa at the University of the Western Cape and was a Yenching Academy Fellow at Peking University (2017-2019).
Research funding/awards
European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No. 85351
Publications
Sonya Cotton: ‘Legislating “Community” in Southern Africa’s Plural Properties’ (2024, forthcoming) in Legal Transfer and Legal Geography in the British Empire, Max Planck
Cotton, S., 2023. 16. Are women in polygamous customary marriages entitled to constitutional protection in the Southern African development community?. Research Handbook on Family Justice Systems, p.250.
Anthony C. Diala and Sonya R. Cotton, 'Chained Communities: A Critique of South Africa's Approach to Land Restitution', African Studies Quarterly (Volume 20, Issue 3), 2021.
Cotton, Sonya., 2020. Do Equality and Non-discrimination Apply to Polygamous African Customary Marriages? A Constitutional and Statutory Analysis of 14 African Commonwealth States. Global Journal of Comparative Law, 9(1), pp.87-116.
Cotton, Sonya. and Diala, Anthony, 2018. Silences in Marriage Laws in Commonwealth Africa: Women's Position in Polygynous Customary Marriages. (2018) Speculum Juris vol 32 (1) pp. 18-32, Available: (opens in a new window)https://ssrn.com/abstract=3376340
Conferences
"Displacing communities to fit the law: transnational sources of apartheid and landscape injustice in South Africa." Nordic Geographers Meeting [Interrelations between landscape, law and justice], 25 May 2024
"Who Stands on Land? Legislating “Community” after Apartheid", presented at Land Accountability Research Center, University of Cape Town, 14 August 2023
"Jamming Shut the Floodgates to Public Interest Litigation: Locus Standi in Ireland and Namibia", UCC Law and the Environment Conference, 20 April 2023
"The law does not recognise you. Defining communities in (post)colonial Namibia and South Africa." Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference, Derry, 4-6 April 2023
"Who Stands on Land? Legislating Community in Anglophone Southern Africa." Project panel, "Land, Property and Spatial [In]justice: Reclaiming Landscapes in the Former British Empire", Law and Society Global Meeting, Rage, Reckoning and Remedy, Lisbon. 13-16 July 2022
"Anxious Pluralisms and Communal Land in Anglophone Southern Africa." Project panel, "Land, Law and Spatial Justice in the Former British Empire", Legal Histories of Empire conference, Maynooth University (Legal Transfer in the Common Law World, stream). 29 June 2022
“Prefiguring “community” in international law and land justice in South Africa”, Hart Workshop, Responding to the Crises: Law, Alternative Economies and Activism, Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, London. 10 June 2022
“Communities of (Dis)possession and Spatial Justice in South Africa,” Contested Legalities: Translocal Encounters with Transnational Law, University of Melbourne, 9 July 2021.
"Land Rights and Post-colonial African Legality in Southern Africa" Critical Exploration of Human Rights: When Human Rights become Part of the Problem. UCD Centre for Human Rights Conference, 7-8 May 2021, University College Dublin, Ireland, 23rd Irish European Law Forum.
“Pluralising Property: Land, Legal Pluralism and Foreign Investments in Southern Africa”, Osgood Graduate conference on Law’s Topologies: The Map, Territory and Spaces in Between. 18 February 2021