Koen De Feyter’s academic legacy: Seven takeaways

On 20 September 2024, Professor Koen De Feyter passed away. He was a brilliant scholar and a committed and talented teacher. He inspired many generations of students. Koen and I first met in the late 1990s and were close colleagues for about two decades. This post is a personal take on Koen’s academic legacy for the fields of human rights as well as law and development. Elsewhere, I identified some of the recurrent topics in his written work: a human rights approach to development, including the right to development; the rights of indigenous peoples; shared responsibilities of state and non-state actors for development; human rights and the market; the perspective on human rights by ordinary, subaltern people; and literature, music and film.[1] Here, I want to foreground seven deeply held views that drove Koen’s academic life and work: justice, self-reflexivity, interdisciplinary collaboration, epistemic justice, critical of the law, mentorship and institution-building.

1. Justice

Koen’s meticulous doctrinal work always served a higher purpose of justice for the most vulnerable or marginalized, the subaltern. In Human rights: social justice in the age of the market, Koen is crystal clear from page one about whose interests he seeks to serve: ‘This book is not about how human rights can serve the interests of a company or of a racist party. It investigates whether human rights can assist people abandoned by globalization in achieving human dignity.’[2] Koen was driven by his quest for justice, in particular for indigenous peoples, local communities and the Palestinian people. Never as a matter of charity, always as an imperative of rights, justice and structural change.

2. Self-reflexivity

Koen had a high level of self-reflexivity. In the introduction to his monograph on World Development Law: sharing responsibility for development, Koen is soberingly honest about his own role in the independent commission of inquiry into the Kibeho massacre by the Rwandan army, which took place in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide: ‘I was an obscure academic, and definitely a low profile choice.’[3] He mentions how he has experimented with teaching some of the book’s draft chapters and admits candidly: ‘Perhaps students suffered’, but apologetically explains: ‘I definitely learned.’[4] He also recalls that an African student asked him ‘whether the denial of the right to development at home would constitute a ground for asylum in Europe. “Of course not”, I smiled, but I have not stopped wondering since why the answer should be so obviously negative.’[5]

3. Multidisciplinary collaboration

Koen was a staunch proponent of interdisciplinary research collaboration. In ‘an afterthought’ to a review essay, he argued that human rights lawyers need to engage with development actors from different disciplinary backgrounds and in particular within human rights law.[6]

It was Koen’s work on localising human rights that made him argue quite adamantly that multidisciplinary research wat not only nice to have, but need to have in law and development research. In order to empirically ground localizing human rights claims, Koen set up partnerships with institutions and scholars in the Global South (Bolivia, China, the DRC, India, Lesotho, Palestine).[7] The research findings are all the result of ‘slow science’, as Koen used to put it. Science that takes time because of practical and conceptual challenges, but also science that is not rushed and has the time to mature.

The need for collaboration extends in Koen’s view beyond academia. In Human Rights: Social Justice in the Age of the Market, there is a passionate call not only for interdisciplinarity but also for pooling resources and cross-fertilisation between the human rights movement and the alternative globalization movement.[8]

4. Epistemic justice

In that same monograph, andas a precursor to his localizing human rights research agenda, Koen submitted that the ‘experience of people alienated by the globalization process should inform the direction of the human rights project, rather than the extent to which dominant actors are willing to accommodate aspects of human rights that serve their interests.’[9] Localizing human rights is about ‘taking the human rights needs as formulated by local people (in response to the impact of economic globalization on their lives) as the starting point both for the further interpretation and elaboration of human rights norms, and for the development of human rights action, at all levels ranging from the domestic to the global’.[10]

Those views culminated into a plea for epistemic justice in the introduction to the Encyclopedia of Law and Development. Epistemic justice requires ‘a truly equal bi-directional flow of knowledge between scholars located in the Global South and the Global North’.[11]

Koen walked the talk. In an attempt to ensure accessibility and attention for the needs of ordinary people, he published the book Human rights: social justice in the age of the market in the Global Issues in a Changing World series. The series offers accessible think pieces on leading global issues, paying particular attention to the needs and interests of ordinary people.[12]

5. Critical of the law

In the introduction to the Encyclopedia of Law and Development, a collaborative flagship publication of the Law and Development Research Network (LDRn), Koen, together with the co-editors, reflected on the future of law and development research. They located the future of law and development scholarship amongst others in being ‘critical of the law, i.e. reflect on to what extent the law under review supports power dynamics that maintain established privileges, and is able to achieve its stated objectives’[13] as well as being self-critical.[14]

An illustration of this critical approach to human rights law can be found in the introduction to The Local Relevance of Human Rights. Koen and the co-editor contended there that

‘it is […] unclear whether the global regime that was so painstakingly developed over the last few decades is of much practical use at the local level to people confronted with the abuse of power and/or inhumane living conditions. […] It is at the local level that abuses occur, and where a first line of defence needs to be developed, first and foremost by those who are under threat.’[15]

The objective of the book was therefore to assess the local relevance of human rights, i.e. whether the global human rights regime managed to provide protection against abuse or inhumanity.[16] This echoes the litmus test for success of the Geneva human rights system that Koen had proposed earlier, in Human Rights: Social Justice in the Age of the Market. What makes or breaks that human rights system is ‘whether [it] fulfils the role of a global forum capable of translating the experience of those who suffer grave abuse at the local level into effective but sufficiently flexible global norms and action.’[17]

6. Mentorship

Koen loved to mentor students and colleagues. He did not lose himself in micro-management, but gladly trusted in the capacities of others. Koen wanted to wrap up his two decades of scholarly work on localising human rights in a monograph. In the book proposal for that book, he expresses the hope that the publication will provide useful guidance and mentorship to early career colleagues: ‘My hope is thus that book will speak to colleagues who have thread a similar path, but also and more importantly to early career practitioners and academics setting out in this field.’[18]

7. Institution-building

There is a longstanding debate in the social sciences about the importance of either institutions or agency. For Koen, it was both about structures and people(s). Koen had a genuine interest and belief in people. Each place he visited or spent some time left its mark, often and most prominently because of the people he met there. At the same time, he was an institution-builder: in the realm of law and development, it started in 2005 with the establishment of a Law and Development Research Group at the University of Antwerp. It enfolded into a Flemish Law and Development Interuniversity Research Network (law&dev) and eventually in the Law and Development Research Network (LDRn).

I hope and wish that those seven takeaways softly but decisively steer the being and knowing of every scholar in the field of law and development, human rights and beyond.

[1] Wouter Vandenhole, ‘Mapping Koen De Feyter’s Academic Legacy: Geographies of Shared Responsibility for Sustainable Development for Subaltern People(s)’ [2025] 11 Journal of National Law University Delhi 1.

[2] Koen De Feyter, Human Rights: Social Justice in the Age of the Market (Zed Books 2005) 1 <https://hdl.handle.net/10067/681530151162165141>.

[3] Koen De Feyter, World Development Law. Sharing Responsibility for Development (Intersentia 2001) xvi.

[4] ibid xvii.

[5] ibid.

[6] Koen De Feyter, ‘Human Rights and Development Revisited’ [2008] Human rights & International Legal Discourse 117, 122–123.

[7] Law and Development Research Group, ‘Localising human rights working paper series’, <https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/law-and-development/publications/localising-human-rights/#:~:text=The%20Localizing%20Human%20Rights%20Working,law%2C%20political%20and%20social%20sciences> accessed 10 September 2025.

[8] De Feyter, Human Rights: Social Justice in the Age of the Market (n 2) 6.

[9] ibid 3.

[10] Koen De Feyter, ‘Localising Human Rights’ in Wolfgang Benedek, Koen De Feyter and Fabrizio Marrella (eds), Economic Globalisation and Human Rights (Cambridge University Press 2007) 68.

[11] Koen De Feyter, Gamze Erdem Türkelli and Stéphanie De Moerloose, ‘Future of Law and Development Research: An Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Law and Development’ in Koen De Feyter, Gamze Erdem Türkelli and Stéphanie De Moerloose (eds), Encyclopedia of law and development (Edward Elgar 2021) 2 <https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1748360151162165141>.

[12] Fernwood Publishing, ‘Global Issues Series’ <https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/books/series/global-issues-series> accessed 10 September 2025.

[13] De Feyter, Erdem Türkelli and De Moerloose (n 11) 2.

[14] ibid 3.

[15] Koen De Feyter and S Parmentier, ‘Introduction’ in Koen De Feyter (ed), The local relevance of human rights  (Cambridge University Press 2011) 1 <https://hdl.handle.net/10067/933310151162165141>.

[16] ibid 2.

[17] De Feyter, Human Rights: Social Justice in the Age of the Market (n 2) 5.

[18] ibid.

Additional outputs on Koen De Feyter’s academic legacy by Wouter Vandenhole: