A trialogue on lessons for Legal Research and Writing from a reading of Edwin Bikundo’s ‘The Faustian Pact in International Law’
The conversation begins. Addressing the students and us.
This semester I am teaching Advanced Legal Research and Writing to third year undergraduate students at Kabarak Law School. This course is a buffer between first year Legal Research and Writing and Dissertation Writing in fourth year. One of its aims is to remind them of their ‘foolish ideals’ about the law in first year and encourage them to keep building their ‘wiser ideas’ about the law as they proceed to fourth year.
So why not enter the discussion with Dr Edwin Bikundo’s text ‘Faust and International Law’.[i] Fascinating book for legal research. While it centres on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, a scholar who despite reading far and wide, was restless and dissatisfied with his mastery over his knowledge about the world. Faust made a deal with Mephistopheles (a devil), hence, the saying making a deal with the devil. In return for the devil’s lifelong service, Faust agrees that if he ever becomes completely content with worldly pleasures and ceases his pursuit of knowledge, he will forfeit his soul to eternal damnation.
My desire is to have students who have Faustian curiosity at least for their chosen research topics. Declare that it is never enough; I want to know more.
Contending with the lacklustre approach (‘the law is clear, implementation is weak) to studying law, behold, Bikundo tells us a mystery. Law is openly ambiguous and perfectly ambivalent at the same time. He develops this thought from Giorgio Agamben, who was influenced by Odo Casel and his two major interlocutors, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz.
Admittedly, this is not the typical text for my classes, which are always based on a decolonial research framework, especially for the African context. But it is Edwin Bikundo. Not convinced? Well, I had the pleasure of being part of the Faust Book Festival from 22 February 2025 to 12 April 2025, convened by Hosted in Africa, where Bikundo dissected the ten chapters of his book.[ii] In one of the episodes with The Hut (a decolonial epistemic community), a pertinent question arose as to whether the book was written for an African audience as its framework does not mention or rely on any African thinker.
Bikundo’s slightly paraphrased response.
The audience is you. In relation to the law in Kenya and as a Kenyan, I see myself as being a third generation lawyer. The first generation lawyers took over from the colonialists. They were part of the Africanisation of the law and our justice systems. All they had to do was to be African and understand passed down law without necessarily questioning them. Second generation lawyers were those who were trained after Independence. They had to go beyond (master) the law to suit their circumstances. The fact of their Africanness was neither here nor there. The third generation lawyers are what I would call the critical constructivists. They question radically, the whole experience of the ordinary person’s relation to the law. You and I are in that generation. We are constantly questioning the utility of this law. My work is directed to the third generation lawyer, who has gone beyond understanding the law and gone beyond mastering the law. Granted, this may be an exaggeration as these three generations merge into each other. My invitation is for us to expand the limits of our imagination with the tools available to us. Essentially, to open up the space to new ideas [iii]
Another impression on decolonial thought (dis)connections from interrogation of the text.
Bikundo’s ‘The Faustian Pact in International Law’ invites a different way of reading international law. Rather than focusing only on doctrine or case law, the book asks readers to pay attention to how international law tells its own story, the language it uses, the metaphors it relies on, and the kinds of power those choices produce. Although the work clearly speaks to Third World and critical approaches to international law, Bikundo does not explicitly frame his project as part of the scholarship on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). This matters. It shows that critical engagement with international law does not always require adopting a recognised label, and that critique can take shape through form and style as much as through argument.
The central idea is the Faustian pact itself: international law as Faust, positioned as a way of reconciling lofty goals, such as peace and justice, with methods that are often violent and exclusionary. Mephistopheles represents the force of inequality, coercion, and colonial legacies that international law ‘shakes hands with’ in order to produce order and stability. While this framing draws heavily on familiar TWAIL concerns, it risks placing the non-European world primarily at the site where this violence is enacted, in service of Europe’s legal and political consolidation. In doing so, the allegory may understate the historical participation of non-European actors in the formation of legal norms, a point long emphasised by scholars such as T.O. Elias in his work on precolonial African legal systems.
These tensions do not undermine the value of Faustian Pacts. On the contrary, they are what make the book worth reading. Bikundo’s work encourages readers, particularly students of international law, to think carefully about how critique is done, not just what is being criticised. It reminds us that international law’s power lies not only in rules and institutions, but also in the stories it tells about itself, and in the language through which those stories are sustained.
Returning to the classroom.
Our class discussions only focused on the Introduction and Chapter 1 of the book. All good readers know the first two chapters of academic texts are the whole book, the framework, the motherboard. From the Introduction, I was humbled by the motivation for the book. He shares that just two lines from Goethe’s Faust ‘sparked, spurred and sustained the project on.’ As researchers, we challenged ourselves to find that one line, art form (we loved the book cover and its explanation on page 2), persona, muse if you wish, that fans the flames our motivation to study our given topic.
We also see how Bikundo had to justify his contribution to the field of law alongside literature and philosophy. That Agamben was profoundly inspired by Faust. That Agamben’s Faustian bent influenced his take on International Law. When we say cutting-edge interdisciplinary research, is this the quest? I think so. It is a serious task if you so dare. Decolonial research frameworks always insist in collapsing disciplinarity, hence, Bikundo’s conceptualising shows us how other disciplines inform the limitations of the law and also what it means to think beyond the law.
As we journeyed along this interdisciplinary conceputalisation of law in Chapter 1, we could not help but obsess with Bikundo’s take on language of the law. This is an imprint of the author’s renowned scholarly obession with Agamben, the language philosopher among others.
Describing the stylistic energy and intellectual boldness.
Reading Edwin Bikundo feels like stepping into a Legal Writing class where comfort is forbidden. Bikundo jumps in with his points from the start. His introduction begins with a question. He allows the reader to think before he feeds them his concept. He withholds just enough to make one lean forward. In this kind of pause, between not-knowing and wanting-to-know, one is quietly pulled into his intellectual gravity. He builds engagement that persuades a reader from the beginning.
Bikundo makes his points fast and poetic. He does not beat around the bush. His approach is ‘beautified’ with literature, poetry, and metaphoric thinking all integrated into legal analysis. What he models, above all, is that legal research can be written in a lively manner.
Internationally claimed concepts, e.g., homo sacer and sovereignty, become tools for understanding our own political and social wounds/ills. Like Ngũgĩ wa Thing’o’s mediation in ‘Return to the Roots’ (Writers in Politics, 1981) kind of concept. A global idea(s) dragged home and made to speak our own language. He gives the reader the freedom to drop the theories and clothe them in local breath. Now you see everything as a Faustian pact, a surrender of relativism at the altar of universalism. Ordinary shifts to ideological Africanness. Normal spaces need decolonization. You are sold, and automatically so.
What stands out most is his display that normal or bland writing simply won’t do. One is encouraged to engage with ideas rigorously, yet creatively, letting the law speak in a unique voice, away from the strict, rigid statutes and cases. He also teaches that legal writing should not be polite. He ‘attacks’ but subtly so. ‘Normal is boring’, he shows it. He calls social ills through the lenses of other scholars. Safe. Yet in the end, he still manages to command the pages, braiding diverse themes into one disciplined, coherent narrative without ever seeming diffuse. A poetic script wrapped in critique, unmasked slowly but with careful incision.
Chiming in with narrative critique on International Law texts.
One of the book’s most distinctive features is how it is written. Bikundo does not simply analyse international law; he experiments with how it can be written about. He uses allegory, references drawn from literature and popular culture, with reggae even, and a deliberately stylised prose that departs from the familiar tone of academic international law. This includes moments where he moves across languages. At times, this makes the text demanding, and occasionally opaque. Yet this difficulty appears intentional. Rather than smoothing out complexity, the writing resists the discipline’s preference for detached, neutral language and draws attention to the narrative choices that structure international legal thought.
The conversation ends. The discussions and recorded episodes of the Faust Book Festival are available on Dr Bikundo’s dedicated space on the HiA network. Join in to extend the trialogue.
[i] Edwin Bikundo, The Faustian Pact in international law: Literature, jurisprudence & Giorgio Agamben’s critical theory, Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
[ii] In class, we also listened to Session 4, Faustian Book Club: Chapter 1, 15 March 2025.
[iii] Session 1, Preliminary discussion: Edwin Bikundo visits The Hut, 22 February 2025.
Co-Authors
