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Oriented to ongoing student and university momentums for decolonial futures, the purpose of this paper is to interrogate the role and status of mainstream international development curricula and pedagogies by critiquing two absences in the sub-discipline’s teaching formulae: appropriations and assassinations.

The author draws from a decade of research on oil extraction in Central Africa, including ethnographic work with two communities in Cameroon along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline; four years of research (interview-based and unofficial or grey materials) on the 1983 August Revolution in Burkina Faso and assassination of Thomas Sankara; and five years of experience teaching international development in North America, Western Europe and North and Eastern Africa.

Through a critical synthesis of political and rhetorical practices that are often considered in isolation (i.e. political assassinations and corporate appropriation of Indigenous knowledges), the author makes the case for what the author calls pedagogical disobedience: an anticipatory decolonial development curricula and praxis that is attentive to the simultaneity of violence and misappropriation within colonial operations of power (i.e. “coloniality of power” or “coloniality”).

This paper contributes to debates within international development about the future of the discipline given its neo-colonial and colonial constitutions and functions with a grounded attention to how this opens up possibilities for teaching praxis and scholarship in action.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ongoing “new extraction” on the African continent. Contrary to mainstream scholarship and policies that see in law an external variable to remedy the “resource curse,” this paper channels attention toward the role of law as an institution of extraction in the longue durée. Unpacking the close association of law with the conversion of economic surpluses and power into enduring social relationships can help trace the mechanisms by which the uneven and unequal connection between Africa and the world is being negotiated, justified and challenged over time.

To this end, this paper deploys an approach anchored in political sociology of law and focuses on the roles played specifically by lawyers to trace the “interconnectedness” between European colonialism on the continent and the consolidation of the contemporary international economic and legal political order. It illustrates this approach with the case study of the “Africa” Bar in Paris as a key site in which extractive deals between multinational corporations and Francophone African states are negotiated.

This micro focus helps to explain the dual position of the “Africa” Bar in Paris, as offshore yet connected as it is shaped by both imperial legacies and ongoing waves of globalization into the African continent.

This approach traces a more nuanced explanation of Africa’s unequal and uneven relationship with the global economy as one shaped by the path of imperial legacies and successive and interconnected waves of globalization across Africa.

IT is now just forty‐eight years since, on the first page of The Library World, James Duff Brown wrote: “for quite a number of years Librarians and Library Authorities have been urging the establishment of a magazine which will reflect accurately and systematically the various phases of modern library work and progress. A demand has also arisen for a magazine of a more independent nature than anything hitherto issued, or, at least, one which is not hampered in any way by official connexion with a Society or other public body.” As then, we open the first page of the Forty‐Ninth Volume we are glad to assert that through the two generations of our existence the policy, enunciated in our first Editorial has been sustained. It cannot be greatly improved upon for our future, although library policy may and will change rapidly if all present prognostications have any substance in them. We intend, so far as we can, to promote progress, to endeavour to allow expression to younger writers, to support all the good efforts of the Library Association and any other body which energizes libraries, but never to be subservient to them or fear to ask questions.