Authority

Chapter 6 examines what authority is given to specific feminist actors to speak and what authority is imagined lying within the domain of legal acts. A study of the convergence of the women, peace, and security agenda and the counterterrorism agenda is offered in this chapter, as is a study of alternative sites of feminist engagement with law, from the use of protest in Uganda to the manipulation of digital spaces by Chinese feminist activists. Connecting to the larger theme of the book as a feminist dialogue, the chapter evolves into a study of how different discourses converge to give the author voice and authority, questioning whose silences that authority depends upon. The chapter draws upon Black British feminists and indigenous Australian authors to question white, Western feminist’s complicity in the production of privilege and to explore the steps that are necessary to commence feminist dialogues on international law.

Expertise

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.

Sovereignty

Chapter 4 analyses the gendering of state sovereignty, via a focus on legal subjectivity articulated without assertion of traditional male models of personhood. Building on intersectionality and the articulation of plural subjectivities in the previous chapters, chapter 4 contemplates a model of split subjectivity as a useful redescription of how state sovereignty functions within global governance. The chapter considers the importance of gendered experiences and histories of law as informing legal knowledge while rejecting a feminist message centred on woman as subject. The chapter develops the split subject as a relational understanding of legal subjects that incorporates the temporal and territorial implications of inter-, cross-, and regional-state relations and analyses the responsibility to protect and secession via the split subject. The split subject is intended to engage international law at its foundations and to displace the masculine subjects implied in mainstream conceptions of state sovereignty.

Institutions

The chapter builds on the analysis of expertise and fragmentation that illuminates the risks for feminist engagements with global governance and law, to consider further strategies of reconstruction (and disruption) within the structures of the global order. In paying attention to international institutions, as non-state actors wielding legal power of sorts within global governance, this chapter takes dialogues from contemporary feminist approaches—the configuring of maternal subjectivity as interruption and feminist approaches to political economy—as initiating plural dialogues on international institutions from a feminist perspective. The chapter provides an analysis of the Human Rights Council, the World Health Organisation, and the Peacebuilding Commission, as well as an account of gender mainstreaming.

Fragmentation

Chapter 3 examines fragmentation and provides an analysis of the fragmentation of gender law reform: practically, within institutional apparatus, and substantively, through the segregation of diverse currents within feminist and gender theories from the developments that have materialised within international law. This is a departure from the existing feminist critiques of ‘governance feminism’, focusing instead on understanding of the structural limitations of international law as vital to any critique of feminist ‘successes’. Thus, chapter 3 demonstrates the need to appreciate the role fragmentation within international law and the global order plays in constraining the potential for inclusion of diverse feminist approaches in a system which mitigates against the very possibility of structural change at the level required. The chapter concludes by emphasising a diversity of feminist approaches as necessary for feminist dialogues and as leverage for a transformative feminist politics and ethics within international law.

Feminist Dialogues

Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the core concerns of the text, including the arguments made regarding gender law reform as a marker of feminist successes in international law, the range of feminist methodologies deployed throughout the text, and the structure of the book as a whole. The chapter reviews contemporary gender law reform, as successes and as embedding feminist tensions, to consider future feminist dialogues on international law. Chapter 1 argues for the use of intersectional feminist approaches alongside a politics of difference to embed feminist methodologies alongside feminist messages within international law. The chapter also identifies queer, crip, postcolonial, transnational, and critical scholarship that might be drawn into feminist dialogues on law.