Engle, Nesiah, & Otto: Feminist Approaches to International Law

Karen Engle (Univ. of Texas, Austin - Law), Vasuki Nesiah (New York Univ. - Gallatin School), & Dianne Otto (Univ. of Melbourne - Law) have posted Feminist Approaches to International Law. Here's the abstract:

This chapter offers accounts of three feminist “success stories,” each of which has invoked a sense of crisis to call for carceral and militarized international legal responses. We argue that these projects have reinforced many dangerous aspects of both feminism and international law, as they have used a focus on harm to women – particularly sexual harm – to aid in the legitimization and extension of legal, military and economic institutional arrangements that exacerbate the precarity of marginalized individuals, communities, and states. Their use of crisis has participated in the crowding out of a variety of alternative feminist (and other) perspectives, particularly those that take aim at the often quotidian forms of violence based in the overlapping structures of colonialism, racism, gender normativity, and gross economic inequality. We contend that anti-imperial and sex-positive feminisms as well as queer theory offer important vehicles for challenging the dominant approaches. We gesture toward how they might even consider invoking crisis (such as the often everyday and unnoticeable crises of neocolonial, neoliberal, carceral, and militarized dimensions of global governance) to foster transformative feminist, queer, and redistributive ends.

Call for Submissions: Translating Feminist Jurisprudence

The Australian Feminist Law Journal has issued a call for submissions for a special issue on "Translating Feminist Jurisprudence." The call is here.

Call for Papers: Transnational Legal Feminism – Beyond Western Hegemonies of International Law and Feminist Theory

The Transnational Legal Theory journal in collaboration with the London South Bank University and Cornell Law School have issued a call for papers for a virtual conference to be held on March 25-26, 2021. The theme is: "Transnational Legal Feminism – Beyond Western Hegemonies of International Law and Feminist Theory." The call is here.

Gagliardi: Minority Rights, Feminism and International Law: Voices of Amazigh Women in Morocco

Silvia Gagliardi has published Minority Rights, Feminism and International Law: Voices of Amazigh Women in Morocco (Routledge 2020). Here's the abstract:

Investigating minority and indigenous women’s rights in Muslim-majority states, this book critically examines the human rights regime within international law. Based on extensive and diverse ethnographic research on Amazigh women in Morocco, the book unpacks and challenges generally accepted notions of rights and equality. Significantly, and controversially, the book challenges the supposedly ‘emancipatory’ power vested in the human rights project; arguing that rights-based discourses are sites of contestation for different groups that use them to assert their agency in society. More specifically, it shows how the very conditions that make minority and indigenous women instrumental to the preservation of their culture may condemn them to a position of subalternity. In response, and engaging the notion and meaning of Islamic feminism, the book proposes that feminism should be interpreted and contextualised locally in order to be effective and inclusive, and so in order for the human rights project to fully realise its potential to empower the marginalised and make space for their voices to be heard.

Dowds: Feminist Engagement with International Criminal Law: Norm Transfer, Complementarity, Rape and Consent

Eithne Dowds (Queen's Univ., Belfast - Law) has published Feminist Engagement with International Criminal Law: Norm Transfer, Complementarity, Rape and Consent (Hart Publishing 2020). Here's the abstract:

This work introduces and further develops the feminist strategy of 'norm transfer': the proposal that feminist informed standards created at the level of international criminal law make their way into domestic contexts. Situating this strategy within the complementarity regime of the International Criminal Court (ICC), it is argued that there is an opportunity for dialogue and debate around the contested aspects of international norms as opposed to uncritical acceptance. The book uses the crime of rape as a case study and offers a new perspective on one of the most contentious debates within international and domestic criminal legal feminism: the relationship between consent and coercion in the definition of rape. In analysing the ICC definition of rape, it is argued that the omission of consent as an explicit element is flawed. Arguing that the definition is in need of revision to explicitly include a context-sensitive notion of consent, the book goes further, setting out draft legislative amendments to the ICC 'Elements of Crimes' definition of rape and its Rules of Procedure and Evidence. Turning its attention to the domestic landscape, the book drafts amendments to the United Kingdom (UK) Sexual Offences Act 2003 and to the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999: thereby showing how the revised version of the ICC definition can be applied in context of the UK.

Hodson & Lavers: Feminist Judgments in International Law

Loveday Hodson (Univ. of Leicester - Law) & Troy Lavers (Univ. of Leicester - Law) have published Feminist Judgments in International Law (Hart Publishing 2019). Contents include:

• Loveday Hodson & Troy Lavers, Feminist Judgments in International Law: An Introduction
• Christine Chinkin, Gina Heathcote, Emily Jones & Henry Jones, Bozkurt Case, aka the Lotus Case (France v Turkey): Ships that Go Bump in the Night
• Kasey McCall-Smith, Rhona Smith & Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko, Reservations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
• Kathryn Greenman & Troy Lavers, The Lockerbie Case (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya v United States of America)
• Zoi Aliozi, Bérénice K. Schramm & Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko, Germany v Italy
• Marta Carneiro, Kirsten Ketscher & Freya Semanda, Gómez-Limón Sánchez-Camacho v Instituto Nacional de la Seguridad Social (INSS) and others
• Sara Bengtson, Damian Gonzalez-Salzberg, Loveday Hodson & Paul Johnson, Christine Goodwin v the United Kingdom
• Amel Alghrani, Amal Ali & Jill Marshall, Leyla Sahin v Turkey
• Nicola Barker, Burden v the United Kingdom
• Shazia Choudhry & Jonathan Herring, Opuz v Turkey
• Helen Fenwick, Wendy Guns & Ben Warwick, A, B and C v Ireland
• Merris Amos, Maribel Canto-Lopez & Nani Jansen Reventlow, Ruusunen v Finland
• Lolita Buckner Inniss, Jessie Hohmann & Enzamaria Tramontana, Cecilia Kell v Canada
• Olga Jurasz, Sheri Labenski, Solange Mouthaan & Dawn Sedman, AFRC Trial Judgment (Prosecutor v Brima, Kamara and Kanu)
• Yassin M Brunger, Emma Irving & Diana Sankey, The Prosecutor v Thomas Lubanga Dyilo
• Celestine Greenwood, Prosecutor v Radovan Karadžic
• Hilary Charlesworth, Prefiguring Feminist Judgment in International Law

Charlesworth: Prefiguring Feminist Judgment in International Law

Hilary Charlesworth (Univ. of Melbourne - Law; Australian National Univ.) has posted Prefiguring Feminist Judgment in International Law (in Feminist Judgments in International Law, T. Lavers & L. Hodson eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Prefigurative politics is a form of activism harnessing theories of social change. In essence, it means a group’s adoption of structures and styles of reasoning that the group is promoting, a modelling of the desired political and social outcomes; the aphorism ‘be the change you want to see’ sums up the practice of prefiguration. The term ‘prefigurative tradition’ first emerged in the 1970s in the context of Marxist methods, describing them as a movement embodying ‘within the ongoing political practice … those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.’ The idea was that Marxist prefigurative politics would undermine ‘the division of labor between everyday life and political activity.’ The women’s camp at Greenham Common, established in 1981 to protest against the presence of Cruise missiles at a US Air Force base in the United Kingdom, was a prefigurative venture in challenging traditional family structures. Another example is the Occupy! movement in 2011, which set out to establish public spaces in the heart of large urban areas where free food, medical care and education were available.

Heathcote: Feminist Dialogues on International Law: Success, Tensions, Futures

Gina Heathcote (SOAS, Univ. of London) has published Feminist Dialogues on International Law: Success, Tensions, Futures (Oxford Univ. Press 2019). Here's the abstract:

In the past decade, a sense of feminist 'success' has developed within the United Nations and international law, recognized in the Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, the increased jurisprudence on gender based crimes in armed conflict from the ICTR/Y and the ICC, the creation of UN Women, and Security Council sanctions against perpetrators of sexual violence in armed conflict. Contributing to the development of feminist and gender scholarship on international law, Gina Heathcote provides a feminist analysis of the central pillars of international law, noting the advances and limitations of feminist approaches.

Through incorporating into mainstream international legal studies specific critical and feminist narratives, this book considers the manner in which feminist thinking has changed international law, and the manner in which international law has remained impervious to key feminist dialogues. It argues for a return to structural bias feminism that engages the foundations of international law and uses gender as a method for challenging post-millennium narratives on fragmentation, the role of international institutions, the nature of legal authority, sovereignty, and the role of international legal experts.

Engle: Feminist Governance and International Law: From Liberal to Carceral Feminism

Karen Engle (Univ. of Texas, Austin - Law) has posted Feminist Governance and International Law: From Liberal to Carceral Feminism (in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché & Hila Shamir eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Feminist legal theory came to international law and discourse later than it came to many other legal fields. It primarily emerged in international human rights where, in a surprisingly short amount of time, it went from being extremely marginal to relatively mainstream. Not unrelatedly, it has primarily grown, and also developed significant influence, in the doctrinal areas of international humanitarian and criminal law. This piece, written as a chapter in a book on governance feminism, chronicles the trajectory of feminist engagement with international law, paying special attention to how both feminisms and feminists have played governing roles in its development and operation.

The chapter provides an account of three distinctive feminist approaches to women’s human rights that developed from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. Each of the three approaches is identified according to its distinctive concern: liberal inclusion, structural bias, and the Third World, respectively. During the early period of feminist engagement, these approaches variously competed, complemented, and exchanged with each other in the push for a feminist foothold in human rights law. But the end of the Cold War, a compromise around “culturally sensitive universalism,” the emergence of a preoccupation with sexual violence in conflict, and the pursuit of criminal law as the primary response to it all ultimately functioned to favor a strand of structural bias feminism focused on female sexual subordination and to suppress and sideline the other feminist critiques, especially their material dimensions.

Tracing this genealogy, the chapter calls into question a dangerous common sense about sexual violence in conflict, a common sense that bears upon culture, sex, economic distribution, and criminalization, and that still dominates human rights law and discourse today. It seeks to motivate a return to, and reevaluation of, other possibilities of feminist critique that were left by the wayside when the structural bias critique prevailed, and when sexual violence and carceral responses became central to feminist approaches to human rights law.