Dr. Chilenye Nwapi

Biography

Dr. Chilenye Nwapi is a Research Associate at CIRL. Prior to his appointment, he was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow also here at CIRL. He holds a Ph.D in law from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Laws from the University of Calgary, and a Bachelor of Laws from Imo State University (Nigeria). 

Dr. Nwapi's research seeks to understand how energy and natural resource development can contribute to public welfare improvements in developing countries where regulatory and accountability mechanisms are weak. The questions he asks include: What role can home-countries of multinational extractive corporations play to enhance the positive impact of the activities of their corporations in developing countries? And what can governments of host-developing countries do, either alone or in cooperation with one another, to maximize the gains of foreign direct investment in a responsible and business-friendly manner? Local, regional, and inter-regional initiatives are of particular interest to him. His research aims to generate knowledge for law reform as well as knowledge about public policy options for governments and inter-governmental bodies and to contribute to the production of knowledge about how best to grapple with the problem globally. His scholarship, which has appeared in several scholarly journals around the world, has considered such issues as extractive sector transparency, corruption, business and human rights, local content policies and environmental/social impact assessments, among several other issues. He has also presented his research on these issues at international conferences in numerous countries across the globe.

In past years, Dr. Nwapi served as a Visiting Professional at the International Criminal Court at The Hague and as a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. Most recently, he was an Erasmus Mundus Visiting Scholar at the Global and European Studies Institute, University of Leipzig, Germany, where he participated in teaching a course titled, “Respacing Africa: New Regionalisms”.

Outside his professional life, Dr. Nwapi finds immense interest in seeking answers to the unsolved problems of human existence, such as: Why was I born? Why am I here? Why is this happening to me? Moments when he comes close to finding answers to these questions are to him the only real high points in his life - everything else is pushed far into the shade.