Guest Speaker: Dr Paola Zichi, Warwick Law School

Title: (Work-In-Progress) 'On Feminist Governance and International Law: A Critical Legal History from Mandate Palastine'

Abstract: For this research seminar, I will present the introduction and provide an overview of my first monograph titled On Feminist Governance and International Law: A Critical Legal History from Mandate Palestine, soon to be submitted for publication with Routledge. The monograph investigates the shared history of international institutions and transnational feminism from the point of view of Mandate Palestine. Drawing upon archival research across different countries, the book unveils an underexamined history of global southern feminist transnational networks at the League of Nations. The book argues that a focus on the international legal activism of marginalised actors such as the Arab Women’s Union allows us to examine the historical formation of a prototypical form of ‘feminist governance’ in international history. It does so by looking at three different sites of legal intervention for interwar feminists: 1) family law, age of marriage and consent, nationality rights; 2) prisoners’ rights and political violence in an era of colonial penality and rising authoritarianisms; and 3) sex work, labour laws and human trafficking. By doing so, it demonstrates how today’s feminists’ missions enshrined in the UN Charters are the by-product of a much longer history of resistance and contestations at the global and colonial level. The book’s significance lies in the fact that, by highlighting Arab women’s activism and interventions at the League of Nations, it offers a pre-history of the Third World feminists’ critique of what constituted ‘international women’s rights’ long before the 1975 Mexico Conference.