This session discusses feminist or gender-centred approaches to the history of international law. This can be broadly defined as an object of investigation spanning from the study of the impact of international law on the status and treatment of women across different periods; the role played by women, both as individuals and as a group, as agents of international legal change; and their intellectual contribution to international legal scholarship over time.

Speakers: Gina Heathcote, Maria Drakopoulou, Aoife O’Donoghue, Diane Marie Amann

Chair: Paola Zichi

This session investigates the engagement of women’s rights in international law. It brings back the question, posed by Karen Knop, of interrogating the divide between private and public international law from a historical perspective. By looking at the critical relationship between family/household, market, and the state, and the fundamental role international law has played in implementing a specific economic vision through the organization of gendered power relations, the session aims to disrupt this binary.

Speakers: Matilda Arvidsson, Miriam Bak McKenna, Serena Natile
Chair: Paola Zichi

This session tackles the history of how violence against women has historically been defined as a concern in international law. The aim of this session is to question genealogies of carceral and penal approaches to the women’s rights framework put in place from the CEDAW to the Istanbul Convention.

Speakers: Silvana Tapia Tapia, Nikki Godden-Rasul, SM Rodriguez
Chair: Aisel Omarova

This session explores the relationship between law, temporality, and coloniality through the lens of (black) fictions and literature across the twentieth century. By examining literary works, we will deconstruct colonial narratives embedded in legal frameworks and interrogate the contradictory temporalities underlying notions of progress, modernization, and development. The seminar will delve into discourses on colonial utopias and their intersection with international law, while also highlighting the role of fiction in imagining and constructing alternative futures.

Speakers: Olauluwa Oni, Dr Ruth Houghton
Chair: Paola Zichi

This session interrogates whether and how racism and patriarchy have permeated the international child rights and child protection field. Taking its cue from the main human rights documents, which have children's rights provisions, such as 1949 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the session tackles the history of power dynamics and colonial legacy upon which views of children are formed, disrupting the success story often told about the UDHR, ICESCR, ICCPR and UNCR. Either due to its intrinsic failures or extrinsic legacies, the session tackles the epistemologies of children’s rights and the overall legal architecture of children’s protection, which positions international justice as the saviour of ‘innocent victims’ while erasing more complex and structural causes of international crimes.

Speakers: Mark Drumbl, Natalia Krestovska, Aisel Omarova
Chair: Paola Zichi

This session tackles the promises and pitfalls of the international criminal and transitional justice system in cases of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity from a gender and critical perspective. Starting from the consolidation of gender-based crimes in international law and following on problematising the notion of the ‘woman victim’, the aim of this session is to reveal problematic assumptions about how gender operates in conflict, which are embedded in the very foundations of legal imagination. The session will be of interest for those working on gender in international criminal legal history, but also to those interested in contemporary feminist approaches to law.

Speakers: Sir Howard Andrew Clive Morrison, Solange Mouthaan, Loveday Hodson, Charlotte Higgs
Chair: Christine Schwobel Patel

This session takes its cue from the understanding that the dismantlement the Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine is, among other things, a project against gender and sexual violence and oppression. From both a historical and contemporary historical lens, the panel tackles the variety of gendered and sexualised abuses that have characterised the experiences of Palestinians from the mandate period to the contemporary genocide in Gaza. Reclaiming the term feminism beyond its middle class, white, western, liberal, and orientalist view on Palestinians, the panel also tackles the importance for Palestinian communities to self-determine the meaning of feminism that works for the conditions of the country, one that is rooted in grassroots resistance to imperialism and settler-colonialism, entailing an understanding that national liberation is incomplete without gender justice.

Speakers: Paola Zichi, Christine Schwobel Patel, Michelle Burgis-Kashala and Nahed Samour
Chair: Aisel Omarova

Solange Mouthaan is Associate Professor at Warwick University Law School and teaches International Criminal Law. She is Co-Director of International Programs. Her research explores understandings and translations of gendered experiences of armed conflict in the interpretation and application of international crimes by tribunals. Solange is particularly interested in what the law invisibilises, and she does so by using a feminist/female and decolonial lens. Solange 's current research focuses on the gendered experiences of colonial harm within the context of current manifestations of the colonial relationship between the Netherlands and Indonesia.

Her publications include ‘A Hussy Who Rode on Horseback in Sexy Underwear in Front of the Prisoners’ (International Criminal Law Review, Volume 21 (2), 2021 with Mark Drumbl), ‘Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen: am I a child soldier too?’ (Women's Studies International Forum, 51, 2015. pp. 91-100) etc.

Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, Transnational Law Institute, at Washington and Lee University. He has held visiting appointments and has taught at law schools world-wide, including Queen’s University Belfast, Oxford University (University College), Université de Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), Free University of Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, Masaryk University, and John Cabot University in Rome. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts; he has served as defense lawyer in genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the ICC in Ongwen; and has been an expert in litigation including on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and with the UN Human Rights Council in the drafting of a global convention to criminalize racist hate speech.

His books include Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge 2007), Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford 2012), and Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford 2024, with Barbora Holá); and co-edited volumes Research Handbook of Child Soldiers (Elgar 2019, with Jastine Barrett), Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (Brill 2024, with Caroline Fournet), and Children and Violence (Routledge 2024, with Christelle Molima and Mohamed Kamara et al).

Christine Schwöbel-Patel is Professor of Law at Warwick Law School, where she is Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Legal Studies. She has published books and edited volumes on aesthetics and international justice (Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, Counterpress 2024), international criminal law (Marketing Global Justice, CUP 2021 and Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law, Routledge 2014), and global constitutionalism (Global Constitutionalism in International Legal Perspective, Brill 2011). Together with Nahed Samour and Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Christine has written on various legal aspects of international law and Palestine.

Sir Howard Andrew Clive Morrison is KCMG (Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George), CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), KC (King's Counsel).

He practiced criminal, civil, and family law until 1986, when he became Resident Magistrate and later Chief Magistrate of Fiji (1986-1988) and Attorney General of Anguilla (1988-1989) to pass anti-drug laws. He was also called to the Bars of Fiji and the Eastern Caribbearn Supreme Court. After returning to the UK, he served as a Recorder with authority over criminal, civil, and family cases, then moved into international law, defending in genocide and war crimes cases at the UN Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In 2008, he became Senior Judge of the Sovereign Base Areas of Cyprus, and in 2009, a Judge at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. He was a trial judge in the Radovan Karadzic case and later elected as the UK's Judge to the International Criminal Court (ICC), serving as Appeals Judge and President of the Appeals Division.

He has been awarded OBE, CBE, and KCMG by Queen Elizabeth and is a Senior Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre of Cambridge University, Hon Professor of Law at Leicester University and Visiting Professor at Northumbria University and has been a visiting lecturer at some 25 universities in the UK, Holland, Italy, Australia, the USA, China and the Middle East. In 2022, he became the UK Independent Advisor to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General for War Crimes, and in 2024, President of the Court of Appeal for the British Indian Ocean Territories.

Loveday Hodson is a Professor of Law at the University of Leicester. Her primary research interest lies in the intersection of international human rights law, gender, and sexuality. She has published widely in the area of women’s rights, as well as on conceptions of LGBT family rights in international law. She was co-organiser of a large, high-profile project in which a number of key international judgments were re-written from a feminist perspective, the output of which was published in September 2019 as Feminist Judgments in International Law (Hart). This book was the winner of the American Society of International Law’s 2020 Certificate of Merit for a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship. In 2019, she also published an edited collected, Research Methods for International Human Rights Law: Beyond the Traditional Paradigm (Routledge).She currently sits on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies.

Loveday has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for a project titled: ‘Memory, Mourning and the European Court of Human Rights’. During this period, she will be working on a book that pays attention to affect and the emotional dimensions of human rights in the decision of the European Court of Human Rights addressing the most harrowing, egregious, large-scale human rights violations. In this project she will explore the role that emotions can play in reaching understandings of rights, harms and responsibilities that can match the Court’s stated values.

Natalia Krestovska is a Head of the Maritime Law Chair, National University "Odesa Maritime Academy", Doctor of Law habil., professor, one of the founders of Juvenile Law studies in Ukraine. She advocates the idea of reforming juvenile justice in Ukraine. Natalia participated law-drafting “On child-friendly justice” (passed first hearing in Verkhovna Rada). She is author of more than 10 textbooks in various legal disciplines. In particular, a co-editor and co-author of the first Ukrainian textbook on juvenile justice. Her most recent publications are Mediation in restorative justice involving juveniles (with Katarzyna Stryjek and Iryna Fedorych, in the editorial office), ‘Juvenile law of Ukraine as a new area of legal regulation’ in Single educational space in the conditions of digital transformation (E-science space, 2021), ‘Children and the Armed Conflict in Eastern Ukraine’ in The Use of Force against Ukraine and International Law (Springer, 2018).

Natalia is a mediator, trainer of mediators, developer of training standards and training programs for mediators, co-editor and co-author of the first textbook on mediation for lawyers in Ukraine. Currently she works on restorative juvenile justice.

Aisel Omarova is Research Fellow and Associate Tutor at University of Warwick (UK) and Associate Professor at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (Ukraine). She has conducted research and proficiency enhancements at leading research institutions and universities in Czech Republic, Poland, the United Kingdom and other European countries. She currently works on historical and legal aspects of children's rights and the history of children's rights protection at the national and international levels.

Her most recent publications are ‘International Standards of Juvenile Justice: Its Creation and Impact on Ukrainian Legislation’ (Access to Justice in Eastern Europe, 1(13), 2022 with Serhii Vlasenko), ‘State and legal policy of combating juvenile delinquency in Ukraine in the 1920s’ in Juvenile policy as a component of supporting Ukraine’s national security and defense (Baltija Publishing, 2023), ‘Child homelessness and neglect in Ukraine and Poland in the 1920s: The state of the problem and legal measures to combat it’ (Access to Justice in Eastern Europe, 2 (19), 2023).

Prof O'Donoghue is based at the Law School at Queen's University Belfast, having previously worked at Durham University and the University of Galway. Aoife's work covers a range of topics including feminist legal histories, utopias, tyranny and legal theory. She has published on the use of history in international legal teaching and on Anti-Hagiographies.

She is the co-director of Doing Feminist Legal Work and Feminist Constitutional Futures projects having previous co-led the Northern/Ireland Feminist Judgments Project. Her monographs On Tyranny and the Global Legal Order (2021) and Constitutionalism in Global Constitutionalisation (2014) were published with CUP.

Professor of Law at Kent Law School, became an academic after practicing as a criminal barrister in Athens. Amongst many academic roles, she has held research fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence and Griffith Law School, Brisbane, has been academic advisor to centres for gender studies at the universities of Gothenburg and Umeå, and a Fellow of the AHRB Peer Review College (History and Law). She is a member of the Editorial Board of feminists@law, co-founder and director of Kent’s Centre for Critical Thought, and recently completed an AHRB funded project on ‘Law and the Human’. Her research is located at the intersection of law and the humanities, with her main areas of research interest including Feminist Theory and History, Jurisprudence, and Political Theory.

Relevant publications include Feminist Historiography of Law: an Exposition and Proposition,The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (2018) OUP; and ‘Clio’s Forgotten Consciousness: History and the Question of Feminist Critique in Law’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 38. (2013). Current projects are: ‘The Forgotten Foundations of Feminist Legal Scholarship’ (co-ed with Prof. R. Hunter) special issue, feminists@law (forthcoming, 2025) and a monograph on the genealogy of feminist legal thought.

Professor of International Law at Newcastle Law School and publishes across the areas of collective security, the law on the use of force, international law of the sea and ocean governance. Her enduring passion is the possibilities and limitations of feminist legal methodologies, and the scope for creative, interdisciplinary approaches that challenge disciplinary orthodoxies.

She has contributed a chapter, with Kate Grady, to Immi Tallgren's (award winning) Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces? (Oxford University Press, 2023), has, together with Paola Zichi, a chapter on Feminist Methodologies in Deplano and Tsagouris (eds.)Research Methods in International Law: A Handbook(Edgar Elgar 2021) and was co-editor of the Special Issue of Australian Feminist Law Journal on Hygiene, Coloniality and Law, all of which engage the role of gender and history in feminist approaches to international law.

Diane is at Oxford University during Michaelmas Term 2024, as a Research Visitor at the Faculty of Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a Visiting Fellow at Exeter College. Her home institution is the University of Georgia School of Law, where she is Regents’ Professor, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center. Amann served 2012-21 as Special Adviser to International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held leadership posts in the American and European societies of international law. Her scholarship includes publications on child and human rights, public international law, constitutional law, and women in international law, as well as an in-progress book on lawyers and other women professionals at the first Nuremberg trial.

Miriam is an Associate Professor of Law and Global Governance at Roskilde University. Her research takes an interdisciplinary and socio-legal approach to different areas of law with a particular focus on the history and theory of international law and law, gender and political economy. Her first monograph – Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill, 2023) traces the ways in which various actors have sought to reinvent self-determination in different juridical, political, and economic iterations to create the conditions for global transformation. Drawing on the law and humanities tradition, her research also examines the aesthetics and spatial politics of international law. A book based on this research is forthcoming.

Serena is a feminist socio-legal scholar based a Warwick Law School, University of Warwick. Her research lies at the intersection of international law, feminist political economy, and digital technologies. Serena’s work is mainly concerned with how international law enables the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and responsibilities and the impact that this maldistribution has on women at the margins of the global economy.

She is the author of The Exclusionary Politics of Digital Financial Inclusion: Mobile Money, Gendered Wall (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, Routledge 2020) and her current research projects include: Feminist Recovery Plans for Covid-19 and Beyond: Learning from Grassroots Activism; Rosa Luxemburg & International Law (with Christine Schwöbel-Patel); and Transnational Social Security Law in the Digital Age: Towards a Grassroots Politics of Redistribution for which she has been awarded the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) EC Fellowship for 2024-2025. Serena is also part of the newly launched network Pluralising Social Reproduction Approaches.

Matilda is a feminist legal scholar working in the intersection of gender, technology and history. Her current research includes questions of AI and democracy, histories of women’s knitting as technologies of anti-surveillance, and Nordic colonial legal history. She is based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she holds a position as an associate senior lecturer in jurisprudence and a visiting position at the Academy of art and Design. Recent publications include M. Arvidsson, G. Gonzáles Fuster & Jörg Pohle (2024), ‘Kerstin Anér, Pioneering Thinker of Data Power – Towards A Critical Reimagining of the History of Data Law and Policy’; M. Arvidsson & E. Jones (eds) International Law and Posthuman Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024);and M. Bak McKenna & M. Arvidsson (2024) ‘Gendering Public and Private International Law: Transversal Legal Histories of the State, Market and Women’s Private Property Rights’ American Journal of International Law (AJIL) Unbound Symposium in memory of Karen Knop, 118:12–17. doi:10.1017/aju.2023.53.

Dr Silvana Tapia Tapia is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birmingham Law School, where she has been appointed Associate Professor of Law. She was previously Lecturer in Law and Coordinator of Legal Research at the University of Azuay, Ecuador. Her book "Feminism, Violence against Women and Law Reform: Decolonial Lessons from Ecuador" won the Hart-Socio-Legal Studies Association Book Prize in 2023. Silvana's work examines the limitations of the criminal legal system and dominant human rights frameworks in addressing violence against women.

Using an anti-colonial and abolitionist perspective, Dr Tapia Tapia works with grassroots anti-carceral organisations to better understand the impact of penality on women's lives and the role of criminal law and hegemonic human rights in the production of carceral violence.

Dr Nikki Godden-Rasul is a senior lecturer in law at Newcastle University Law School. Her research expertise is in gendered violence, law and justice, and particularly focuses on non-conventional and alternative legal and other justice processes, such as restorative justice and transformative justice. With Alison Phipps and Tina Sikka she co-organises the Abolition Feminism for Ending Sexual Violence Collective. She is editing (with Lucia Kula) The Research Handbook on Gender, Violence and Law (Edward Elgar) and is Editor-in-Chief of Feminist Legal Studies.