Bahri: Trade Agreements and Women: Transcending Barriers

Amrita Bahri (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México) has published Trade Agreements and Women: Transcending Barriers (Oxford Univ. Press 2025). Here's the abstract:

With more and more countries including provisions on women's concerns in their trade agreements, Trade Agreements and Women: Transcending Barriers explores how women's empowerment and trade liberalization interact, overlap, and converge.

Tapping into examples from across the globe, and taking into consideration the diverse political, economic, social, and legal contexts of different countries, Amrita Bari poses and answers some key questions: What role can trade agreements play with regard to women's empowerment, and what limitations do they have? Have previous efforts to include women through trade agreements been genuinely responsive to the needs of women, or have they been merely symbolic? What, ultimately, makes a trade agreement responsive to the needs of women, and how can countries achieve this in their own trade agreements?

In answering these questions, Bahri carves out a roadmap, with concrete recommendations, for the future of women-related trade provisions, and offers much-needed guidance for legal scholars, trade negotiators, and policymakers involved in preparing, revising, and inclusively negotiating trade regulations.

Grosescu & Richardson-Little: Socialism and International Law: The Cold War and Its Legacies

Raluca Grosescu (National Univ. of Political Science and Public Administration) & Ned Richardson-Little (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History) have published Socialism and International Law: The Cold War and Its Legacies (Oxford Univ. Press 2024). The table of contents is here. Here's the abstract:

The contributions of socialist thinkers and states to the development of international law often go unrecognized. Socialism and International Law: The Cold War and Its Legacies explores how socialist individuals and governments from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia made vital contributions to international law as it is practiced today, and also brought ideas and initiatives that constituted important disruptive moments in its history.

The socialist world of the 20th century was an ambiguous and fragile construct: there were clear divisions between the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc, which kept one foot in Western Eurocentric traditions, and the positions of the radical Third World, primarily post-colonial Afro-Asian states, which mounted a more fundamental challenge to the international order. Far from a monolith, the socialist world was an intricate and dynamic space, which still had many shared common understandings of global affairs and the meaning of the law within them.

By examining how different state socialist ideologies, legal principles, and realpolitik affected contemporary international law frameworks, this book contests existing linear and Western-dominated histories. It considers these state socialist engagements in conversation with liberal and Western approaches and underlines the divisions that existed between versions of socialism from different regions and across the North-South divide. The legacies of socialist international law are still with us today, as are the consequences of its failure.

With a focus on the Cold War and its aftermath, Socialist International Law features astute commentary on the history and present-day effects of socialist principles applied to international law, provided by an esteemed and diverse group of contributors from around the world.