Chloé Maurel The choice of a South African lawyer with a long-standing commitment to international law On 9 October 2026, in Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist, for her commitment to peace and international law. Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes praised a career devoted to holding states and their leaders to account for their actions and to restoring hope to victims of violence and conflict. The committee highlights in particular her contribution to consolidating an international legal order capable of prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. ...

In 1960, with the recovery of independence, Africa inherited an entirely new form of political organisation: the nation-state, defined by fixed, demarcated borders. These borders corresponded to the lines that former colonial powers had drawn to delimit the geographic extent of their presence. Far from reflecting the human realities of the continent, they obeyed an exclusively political logic, shaped by rivalries between neighbouring powers. At the time of independence, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) recommended the absolute respect of the principle of the intangibility of borders inherited from colonisation. At the time, this was simply prudent. The partition was admittedly far from satisfactory — ethnic groups were divided, culturally and historically antagonistic communities were forced to coexist, and some borders were incoherent to the point of absurdity, such as the Caprivi Strip or the enclave of Cabinda — but everyone could imagine the near-impossible negotiation required to achieve any version of border perfection. Today, this principle appears to have reached its limits. After all, as the man of letters reminds us, “human history is the history of shifting borders.” ...