Seminar Series 2024/2025: Thinking Gender, History and International Law
The series engages a global audience interested in contemporary and historical issues in international law and politics from a critical, feminist, and postcolonial perspective.
Where: Online, on Teams (pre-registration required)
When: Mondays, from 5pm to 6pm
A certificate of attendance can be provided to confirmed students who attend all sessions of the seminar series, upon request. For further information, please contact aisel.omarova@warwick.ac.uk or paola.zichi@warwick.ac.uk.
Seminars
Click the seminar you're interested in attending below to reveal more information and a registration link:
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.
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.
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.
This session interrogates the temporality of law by theorising the relationship between law and coloniality in African fictions and literature across the twentieth century, illuminating the contradictory temporalities that underlie narrative of progress, modernization, and development.
This session interrogates whether and how racism and patriarchy have permeated the international child rights and child protection field. Taking its cue from the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCR), 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 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 (often criminal) justice as the saviour of ‘innocent victims’ while erasing more complex and structural causes of international crimes.
Speakers: Mark Drumbl, Natalia Krestovska Chair:Aisel Omarova
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: Howard Morrison, Solange Mouthaan 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.
