“…whatever you put your heart and mind into, give it your absolute best not for accolades, not for certainty of success, but so that when you look back, you can do so without the heaviest of all burdens: the words “I wish I had done more.” – Razan Ali
Razan Ali is a Sudanese lawyer and human rights researcher whose career sits at the intersection of international law, corporate accountability, and the pursuit of justice in conflict-affected societies. She holds two LLMs: the first in International and European Business Law from Trinity College Dublin and the second in Human Rights and Democratisation from the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is currently enrolled in the Doctor of Laws (LLD) programme at the University of Pretoria, where her doctoral research examines corporate complicity in atrocity crimes within the gold extractive sector during the ongoing conflict in Sudan – a body of work that places her at the frontier of one of the most urgent and underexplored areas of international legal accountability.
Razan’s professional experience spans human rights and humanitarian work in conflict-prone environments, including with leading international organisations such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). Her work has brought her into direct engagement with the human cost of institutional failure and the legal frameworks, or absence thereof, that govern conduct in the world’s most fragile contexts. Her areas of expertise include international human rights law, business and human rights, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and peace and conflict studies.
1. The Driving Force for Choosing the Legal Profession
Razan stated that the easy answer would be her parents, and continued saying “while it is true that I grew up surrounded by law, the reality is more nuanced than simple inheritance. Both my parents are in the legal profession, yet they practise in entirely different fields. Watching them navigate their respective disciplines from an early age did not just spark my interest; it revealed something fundamental about law that many only discover years into their careers: that law is not a single pursuit but an ecosystem. It accommodates the constitutional scholar and the commercial practitioner, the human rights advocate and the tax law adviser, often under the same roof. That realisation, formed at our dinner table, gave me an appreciation for the law’s breadth before I even thought of joining law school.
But what truly ignited my passion and what continues to sustain it is Sudan. I come from a country that has known military coups, revolution, economic collapse, and the systematic dismantling of institutions that should have protected its people. I have watched injustice operate not in the shadows but openly and without consequence. And I made a conscious decision that I did not want merely to witness that; I wanted to be equipped to challenge it. The law, for me, is not an academic exercise. It is the most structured and legitimate tool available to those who want to build something better from the ruins of what was broken. That is what makes this profession not just fulfilling but necessary, driven by the desire to build a better Sudan for future generations”
2. Qualities of an Exceptional Lawyer and How Young Professionals Can Cultivate Such Attributes.
Integrity
Not integrity as a platitude, as something written in a firm’s values statement or recited during an oath, but integrity as a daily practice. Razan is careful to acknowledge that the law itself does not always operate in black-and-white. Much of what lawyers navigate exists in the grey: competing interests, moral ambiguity, complex client causes, and imperfect systems. It is precisely in that grey space, she argues, where integrity is most tested and most revealing. Anyone can do the right thing when the answer is obvious. The exceptional lawyer is the one who does the right thing when no one is watching, when the stakes are personal, and when compromise would be the easier path. For young professionals seeking to cultivate this quality, her counsel is rooted in a deeper philosophical conviction: guard what you pursue.
Razan believes that the greatest threat to a lawyer’s integrity in the modern age is not a single catastrophic moral failure but the slow, quiet erosion that comes from chasing material reward above all else. The legal profession offers access to wealth, influence, and status, and those are not inherently corrupting. But when they become the goal rather than the byproduct, something essential is lost. The lawyer who measures success only by what fills their pockets will, over time, find that their judgment bends in the direction of their appetite.
Her alternative is simple but demanding: pursue the richness of the soul. Invest in your principles, your reputation, your relationships, and your sense of purpose. These are the assets that compound quietly over a career and cannot be taken from you by a market correction, a lost case, or a change in fortune.
3. Significant Ongoing Project or Initiatives and Possible Impacts.
Razan is candid about where her attention and energy are currently directed: she is in the midst of a PhD, and for her, that is not a footnote to her ambitions — it is the groundbreaking project itself.
Her research is focused on Sudan. At a time when the country remains in the grip of profound political and institutional crisis, she has chosen to dedicate years of rigorous academic inquiry to examining its legal and systemic realities. This is not a detached scholarly exercise. It is, for her, a form of purposeful intervention, building the intellectual foundation that serious reform requires.
What drives her eagerness to complete this journey is not the credential at the end of it, but the findings. She speaks with quiet urgency about what her research is uncovering, the ground-level realities of a legal and governance landscape that the world has largely observed from a distance, without fully understanding. She believes her work will shed light on issues that are not only academically significant but practically urgent: the kind of findings that can inform policy, shape legal reform, and contribute to the long conversation about what a functioning, just Sudan could look like.
4. Role Models and Impactful Books
Two legal minds have profoundly shaped Razan’s journey. Nelson Mandela stands foremost among them not merely as a political icon, but as a lawyer who understood that the courtroom could be transformed into a platform for conscience. His famous statement during the Rivonia Trial, in which he declared his readiness to die for the ideal of a free and democratic society, encapsulates what Razan believes, law at its highest calling, demands: the courage to speak truth to power, regardless of the consequences. His journey taught Razan that a lawyer’s greatest brief is sometimes not a case, but a cause.
Razan second influence is less conventional but perhaps more personal. Hiwot Teffera’s Memoir, “Tower in the Sky”, is not a legal text, but it is one of the most legally and politically instructive books she has encountered. It chronicles the author’s experience as a young revolutionary during Ethiopia’s Red Terror of 1974–1978, navigating ideology, betrayal, love, and state-sanctioned violence. When Razan first read it, it mirrored something she lived arriving at the University of Khartoum and being immediately confronted by the collision of law, politics, social class, and ideology. Like Teffera, she had to ask herself, “What do I stand for when the structures around me demand conformity?” That question has never left her, and she believes it makes her a more honest and grounded lawyer. Together, Mandela and Teffera have taught her that law does not exist in a vacuum. It is always embedded in power, history, and human suffering, and the lawyer who forgets that risks becoming an instrument of the very injustice they swore to oppose
5. Advice or Guiding Principles for Young Legal Professionals and Advocates Trying to Find their Place and Purpose in the Legal Terrain.
When asked for advice to young legal professionals just finding their footing, Razan does not reach for polished wisdom or rehearsed inspiration. Instead, she offers something more valuable: honesty.
She tells them that at every significant transition in her life, the completion of a degree, the crossing from one chapter into the next, she has been visited by the same unwelcome companions: self-doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. She does not present this as a weakness she has overcome. She presents it as a feature of being human. That restlessness, she explains, is simply how a thoughtful mind processes the departure from the familiar, the grief of leaving behind what it has known, and the fear of what it has not yet become.
What has always steadied her, she says, is not the absence of that fear, but a deep and unshakeable conviction that runs beneath it: wherever she is heading, she will give it everything she has. She will not slack. She will not let opportunities pass through inattention or half-hearted effort. She refuses to be the author of her own regret.
She is particularly clear on this last point. She does not demand of herself that things always work out — she understands that outcomes are not always within her control. What she demands is that if something does not go as hoped, the reason is never her own inadequate effort. Let it fail for circumstances, for timing, for forces beyond reach, but never for lack of trying.
Her advice to young lawyers and advocates, then, is distilled into a single principle: whatever you put your heart and mind into, give it your absolute best not for accolades, not for certainty of success, but so that when you look back, you can do so without the heaviest of all burdens: the words “I wish I had done more.”
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Editorial Team
Silver Obioha
Clinton Nyamongo
Kazeem Afolabi
Dikeledi Matlhagare
Tolulope Olasunkanmi
Sulaimon Badmus
Aya Hamdy
Princess Maake
Vera Enubianozor
Brandon Otieno
Oluwabusayo Awodele
Kyenpiya Wonang
Gift Nwoke
Jessica Odoh
Tracy Karumba
Mary-Jones Ossi
Halimah Oladunni
Mary Linus
Peter Momoh
Jessica Omoruyi
