Feminist Dialogues on International Law

Author(s):  
Gina Heathcote

Reflecting on recent gender law reform within international law, this book examines the nature of feminist interventions to consider what the next phase of feminist approaches to international law might include. To undertake analysis of existing gender law reform and future gender law reform, the book engages critical legal inquiries on international law on the foundations of international law. At the same time, the text looks beyond mainstream feminist accounts to consider the contributions, and tensions, across a broader range of feminist methodologies than has been adapted and incorporated into gender law reform including transnational and postcolonial feminisms. The text therefore develops dialogues across feminist approaches, beyond dominant Western liberal, radical, and cultural feminisms, to analyse the rise of expertise and the impact of fragmentation on global governance, to study sovereignty and international institutions, and to reflect on the construction of authority within international law. The book concludes that through feminist dialogues that incorporate intersectionality, and thus feminist dialogues with queer, crip, and race theories, that reflect on the politics of listening and which are actively attentive to the conditions of privilege from which dominant feminist approaches are articulated, opportunity for feminist dialogues to shape feminist futures on international law emerge. The book begins this process through analysis of the conditions in which the author speaks and the role histories of colonialism play out to define her own privilege, thus requiring attention to indigenous feminisms and, in the UK, the important interventions of Black British feminisms.

Author(s):  
Gina Heathcote

Chapter 2 argues that there is a gap between gender expertise, as a technique of global governance, and the transnational feminisms that gender law reform becomes a near-replica of. This chapter examines the rise of gender expertise within global governance to pay attention to what is lost, subsumed, and forgotten in the techniques of global governance, examining how transnational feminist histories and actions become subsumed within and yet expunged from gender law reform within international law. Thus, chapter 2 considers how a great deal of gender law reform functions as a plastic, near-replica of the complex feminist transnational knowledge (or, in Arendt’s words ‘know-how’) and histories that the reforms are expected to incorporate and replicate within global governance—ultimately erasing more feminist knowledge than they integrate.


2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Horder ◽  
Kate Fitz-Gibbon

AbstractIn October 2010, the UK Parliament brought into effect law that replaced the partial defence to murder of provocation with a new partial defence of “loss of control”, applicable to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Although it retained some key features of its controversial predecessor, the new partial defence was in part designed better to address the gendered contexts within which a large number of homicides are committed. In examining the impact of the reforms, we will focus on long-held concerns about the treatment of sexual infidelity as a trigger for loss of control in murder cases. The article undertakes an analysis of English case law to evaluate the way in which sexual infidelity-related evidence has influenced perceptions of a homicide defendant's culpability, for the purposes of sentencing, both before and after the implementation of reform. The analysis reveals that, in sentencing offenders post reform, the higher courts have failed to follow the spirit of the reforms respecting the substantive law by effecting a corresponding change in sentencing practice.


1969 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-228
Author(s):  
Basil Ugochukwu

This paper uses the governance praxis of the Federation of International Football Associations [FIFA] to illustrate the impact of several intensive, discrete, and rarely-studied global governance actors whose internal processes and procedures mirror the core concerns of Third World Approaches to International Law [TWAIL] scholars regarding the legitimation of a hegemonic category and the marginalization of Third World and subaltern interests. It is argued that FIFA has become an important international organization and global governance actor whose transnational rule-making characteristics should be studied in light of the incipient migration from “international law” to “global governance”.      It will be shown that not only are FIFA’s rules impinging on sovereign imagination but that the tendencies of inequality, unfairness and domination afflicting the practices of traditional or state-centric international organizations are as prevalent in the procedures of such less-studied global governance actors regardless that their rule-making activities exert significant impact on governments, especially those in Africa and other parts of the Third World. More significantly, the essay looks at possible domestic political and socio-legal implications of discrete globalization of the kind exemplified by FIFA on Africa and the Third World and how important it is to integrate this concern into TWAIL scholarship going forward.


Author(s):  
Jan Wouters

The chapter focuses on the impact of globalization on public international law in times of anti-globalism and populism, where globalization itself has increasingly become contested. It submits that traditional public international law has been dangerously unreceptive in capturing new transnational regulatory actors and normative dynamics, which makes it more vulnerable to anti-globalist and populist attacks. It looks into the corresponding rise and certain features of ‘informal international law-making’ and ‘global governance’, as they may offer some responses to, or at least some defences against, anti-globalist and populist politics. It also addresses the current challenges which traditional forms of international law-making, like treaties and customary international law, are currently going through. It concludes that public international law will have to adapt to both the challenges of globalization and anti-globalism, if it is to remain relevant in regulating international life in the twenty-first century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Goldsmith ◽  
Shannon Togawa Mercer

This paper has two goals. First, it documents President Donald Trump’s primary influences on international law and institutions in his first two years in office. Second, it seeks to assess the medium- and long-term impact of those influences. The vast majority of international law and institutions remains untouched by Trump’s actions. He has brought significant change to high-profile international treaties and institutions such as the Paris Agreement, the Iran deal, and the global trade system. His verbal attacks on U.S. allies and international institutions that traditionally garnered U.S. support (such as NATO) promote disharmony among these allies, diminish trust in the institutions, and make it easier for leaders in other nations to adopt a similarly disdainful attitude. Trump’s influence has been significant. But other U.S. presidents have assaulted international institutions only to be followed by a president who embraces those institutions and dims the impact of the assaults. Trump’s ultimate impact will depend on who succeeds him in office. It will also depend on larger trends in international affairs, such as the rise of China and the re-ascendancy of Russia as global powers, the many failures of liberal internationalism, and the general disenchantment in liberal democracies with distant, elite, global institutions. These factors were operating before and independent of Trump, many of them were pushing in the same general direction as Trump, and they will make it challenging to return to anything like the pre-Trump international status quo. Keywords: Donald Trump, Liberal Internationalism, International Order, Paris Agreement, International Trade, WTO, Iran Deal, INF Treaty, United Nations, NATO, Syria, Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Laws of War


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
KENNETH KEITH

AbstractThis article addresses the question stated in its title by considering not only the role of national courts but also the roles of national legislatures and executives. That emphasis is called for because most of international law most of the time operates through national, rather than international, institutions and in particular through the executive and the legislature. Before I get to those national institutions, I consider two undisputed propositions of law, the varying characteristics of rules of international law and the impact of those characteristics on different national constitutional and legal systems.


Author(s):  
Mark Thomas ◽  
Claire McGourlay

Each Concentrate revision guide is packed with essential information, key cases, revision tips, exam Q&As, and more. This chapter discusses the effect of EU and international law. The UK is a signatory to multiple international institutions. Each of these institutions sets a framework for the UK to operate within, granting certain rights, benefits, and obligations. The most prominent institutions are the EU, the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR), and the United Nations. Although the UK’s continued involvement in these institutions will have a direct impact on the operation of UK law, relations with other states, whether they be good or bad, will also shape the face of the English legal system. The chapter then studies international law, considering basic matters such as the meaning of international law, the doctrine of state sovereignty, and the distinction between public and private international law.


Author(s):  
Mark Thomas ◽  
Claire McGourlay

Each Concentrate revision guide is packed with essential information, key cases, revision tips, exam Q&As, and more. This chapter discusses the effect of EU and international law. The UK is a signatory to multiple international institutions. Each of these institutions sets a framework for the UK to operate within, granting certain rights, benefits, and obligations. The most prominent institutions are the EU, the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR), and the United Nations. Although the UK's continued involvement in these institutions will have a direct impact on the operation of UK law, relations with other states, whether they be good or bad, will also shape the face of the English legal system. The chapter then studies international law, considering basic matters such as the meaning of international law, the doctrine of state sovereignty, and the distinction between public and private international law.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Ian Hurd

Abstract The idea that international law and institutions represent cooperative means for resolving inter-state disputes is so common as to be almost taken for granted in International Relations scholarship. Global-governance scholars often use the terms international law and cooperation interchangeably and treat legalization as a subset of the broader category of inter-governmental cooperation. This paper highlights the methodological and substantive problems that follow from equating ‘global governance’ with ‘international cooperation’ and suggests an alternative. The traditional model applies liberal political theory to the study of international institutions and interprets global governance as the realization of shared interests. It deflects research away from questions about trade-offs and winners or losers. In place of cooperation theory, I outline an overtly political methodology that assumes that governance – global or otherwise – necessarily favors some interests over others. In scholarship, the difference is evident in research methods, normative interpretation, and policy recommendations, as research is reoriented toward understanding how international institutions redistribute inequalities of wealth and power.


Author(s):  
Jo Shaw

This chapter examines the phenomenon of the shifting spatialities of citizenship. It studies the impact on ideas of constitutional citizenship of the dispersion of citizenship statuses and rights across vertical and horizontal axes. Under the influence of factors such as mobility and migration, the instability of state boundaries, subnational claims and movements, supranational/international institutions, including courts, such as the EU and the Council of Europe and cognates elsewhere in the world and a body of international law that addresses many issues of citizenship and rights, the chapter explores a scheme of fragmented citizenship governance. This raises new challenges, for example, in relation to the legitimacy of how international law impacts upon domestic constitutions. It cannot simply be assumed that the concerns with global justice and individual rights that stem from those international law sources which pertain to citizenship will in fact map comfortably onto citizenship in a constitutional context at the national level.


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