Oumar Ba

Assistant Professor

318 White Hall
oumar.ba@cornell.edu

Departments and programs

Government
Africana Studies and Research Center

Affiliated Colleges

College of Arts and Sciences

Academic interests

International Relations

Overview

Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. His primary areas of research focus on law, violence, race, humanity, and world order(s) in global politics. He is the author of States of Justice: The Politics of the International Criminal Court (Cambridge, 2020). His writings have appeared in Human Rights Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, PS: Political Science & Politics, Journal of Narrative Politics, African Studies Review , Africa Today, Foreign Affairs, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, among others. His opinions have been featured in a number of media outlets including Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, and BBC.

Research Focus

Oumar Ba is currently working on two major projects. The first one, titled Crimes, Against Humanity: Governing Global Justice is a genealogy of the international criminal justice system within the liberal order, highlighting its racialized hierarchy of humanity and explaining its current crisis. It also proposes a decentering of The Hague, through an exploration of worldmaking projects and visions for and alternatives to the current international order, from Global South perspectives.

The second project is titled (Re)Centering Decolonization as Ontology and Sifting through the Archives of Liberation. It seeks to (re)center the ontological grounding of decolonization not only as political processes, but as praxis grounded in theories of humanism and the universal. To do so, it sifts through the archives of liberation, as articulated by Global South voices at the forefront of the decolonization struggle at the UN General Assembly and other international fora. Ultimately, it contends that decolonization, as theorized and articulated by these voices, is a continued generative site of theory and praxis built around a humanistic ethos of the universal.