Ambreena Manji

Professor Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at Cardiff University's School of Law and Politics. Since 2023, she has served as Cardiff University's International Dean for Africa. Previously, she was Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa from 2010 to 2014. She co-founded the Law and Global Justice Centre at Cardiff and established the innovative Global Justice Pro Bono programme in 2015, which provides students with fully funded law placements in Nairobi and Delhi.

Professor Manji's research focuses on African Law and Society, with particular emphasis on land law and development, women's rights, legal education, and constitutional law in Africa. Her work is strongly interdisciplinary, bridging law with history, literature, and political science. She has conducted extensive research on land law reform in East Africa, examining issues such as gender dimensions of land rights, conservation policies, and historical land injustices. Her scholarship demonstrates how legal frameworks interact with social and political realities in postcolonial African contexts.

Her extensive publication record reveals consistent themes across multiple disciplines, connecting land rights with constitutional development, gender justice, and legal education. Her research shows an evolving focus from specific country studies (particularly Kenya and Tanzania) toward broader theoretical frameworks for understanding law in African contexts, while maintaining strong empirical grounding in specific legal cases and reforms.

• Finalist for US African Studies Association Best Book prize 2021
• Runner-up for African Studies Association of Africa's Pius Adesanmi Memorial Prize for Excellence in African Writing (2023)

Professor Manji actively supervises doctoral students including Ruth Akinwale, Barbara Hughes-Moore, Lizzie Willmington, Mulugeta Getu Sisay, and Layla Latif. She has examined PhDs at numerous universities worldwide. Through the Law and Global Justice Centre, she has secured funding from the British Academy for the Socio-Legal Journals Global South Initiative, which supports early-career legal scholars in the Global South.

She leads the African Feminist Judgments project with Sibongile Ndashe and Sharifah Sekalala. This initiative reimagines judicial decisions through feminist perspectives, highlighting how gender considerations can transform legal reasoning in African contexts. The project has created important spaces for dialogue between scholars, practitioners, and activists across Africa.