Dr. Lionel Zevounou is a Beninese and French legal scholar. He currently serves as Associate Professor of public Law at University of Paris Nanterre (CTAD, UMR 7074), where his areas of research are legal theory, law and social sciences, and economic law. In 2021-2022, Dr. Zevounou was a Visiting Scholar at the Humanities Institute at Penn State University in the US, and in 2018, he was appointed to the prestigious Institut Universitaire de France for a five-year term. Dr. Zevounou’s current research examines the relationship between race and law, particularly the tensions generated by the universalist claim of French law and colonial domination through the category of assimilation. He has published on a wide range of subjects, including race and the law in France, reparations for slavery, and Africa’s place in the world.
Dr. Zevounou is a co-founder of CORA, the Collective for the Renewal Of Africa (CORA), a Pan-African intellectual collective whose mission is to create spaces for intellectuals to engage in constructive debate in an uninhibited atmosphere, to develop and contribute powerful and transformative ideas about Africa’s future, and to frame the terms of Africans’ engagement within the global system.