rakande@osgoode.yorku.ca

Rabiat Akande works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, Islamic law, International law, and (post)colonial African law and society. Her current research explores struggles over religion-state relations in comparative contexts and illuminates law’s centrality to one of modernity’s most contested issues—the relationship between religion, and the state, and society—while also interrogating law’s complex relationship with power, political theology, identity, and socio-political change. These issues are at the forefront of her book project, Constitutional Entanglements: Empire, Law and Religion in Colonial Northern Nigeria (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which traces the emergence of “secularism” as a constitutional idea of ordering religion-state relations in early to mid-twentieth century British Colonial Northern Nigeria, and grapples with the postcolonial legacy of that inheritance. Dr Akande’s work has been supported by grants and prizes including Cravath International research fellowship, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs fellowship, Harvard Academy grants, the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World Research Grant, as part of a Law and Society Association International Research Collaborative, among others.