The boundaries of international law: A feminist analysis, with a new introduction

By Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin

In the first book-length treatment of the application of feminist theories of international law, Charlesworth and Chinkin argue that the absence of women in the development of international law has produced a narrow and inadequate jurisprudence that has legitimated the unequal position of women worldwide rather than confronting it.

The boundaries of international law provides a feminist perspective on the structure, processes and substance of international law, shedding new light on treaty law, the concept of statehood and the right of self-determination, the role of international institutions and the law of human rights. Concluding with a consideration of whether the inclusion of women in the jurisdiction of international war crimes tribunals represents a significant shift in the boundaries of international law, the book encourages a dramatic rethinking of the discipline of international law.

With a new introduction that reflects on the profound changes in international law since the book’s first publication in 2000, this provocative volume is essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526163561

Hilary Charlesworth

Hilary Charlesworth is Professor and Director of the Centre of International and Public Law at the Australian National University, Canberra

Book preview

The boundaries of international law

MELLAND SCHILL CLASSICS IN INTERNATIONAL LAW

General editors Jean d’Aspremont and Iain Scobbie

Founded as a memorial to Edward Melland Schill, a promising scholar killed during the First World War, the Melland Schill Lectures (1961–74) were established by the University of Manchester following a bequest by Edward’s sister, Olive B. Schill, to promote the understanding of international law and implicitly lessen the possibilities for future conflict. Dedicated to promoting women’s employment rights and access to education, Olive’s work is commemorated in both the Melland Schill series and the Women in International Law Network at the University of Manchester.

The Melland Schill lecture series featured a distinguished series of speakers on a range of controversial topics, including Quincy Wright on the role of international law in the elimination of war, Robert Jennings on the acquisition of territory, and Sir Ian Sinclair on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

In the 1970s, Gillian White, the first woman appointed as a Professor of Law in mainland Britain, transformed the lectures into a monograph series, published by Manchester University Press. Many of the works previously published under the name ‘Melland Schill monographs’ have become standard references in the field, including: A.P.V. Rogers’ Law on the battlefield, which is currently in its third edition, and Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin’s The boundaries of international law, which offered the first book-length treatment of the application of feminist theories to international law.

Closely linked to the Melland Schill Studies in International Law series and carefully supervised by the editors, these volumes have been updated and reissued in paperback with new material.

The decay of international law? With a new introduction: A reappraisal of the limits of legal imagination in international affairs Anthony Carty

The acquisition of territory in international law with a new introduction by Marcelo G. Kohen R.Y. Jennings

The boundaries of

international law

A feminist analysis

With a new introduction

Hilary Charlesworth

and Christine Chinkin

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin 2000

New introduction copyright © Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin 2022

The right of Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6357 8 hardback

ISBN 978 1 5261 6358 5 paperback

First published by Manchester University Press in 2000

This edition first published in 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Foreword

Preface

List of abbreviations

Introduction to the 2022 edition

Introduction

What is feminist analysis?

Feminism in international law

Women, Peace and Security

Conclusion

1Women and the international legal system

Introduction

Gender and sex

The global position of women

International legal responses to the position of women

The approach of this book

2Feminist theories and international law

Introduction

Theories of international law

Natural law

Positivism

Liberal international legal theory

The ‘New Haven’ school

‘Newstream’ theories

‘Southern’ theories of international law

Feminist theories of law

Liberal feminism

Cultural feminism

Radical feminism

Post-modern feminism

Third world feminisms

Using feminist theories in international law

Essentialism

Exploring public/private distinctions in international law

Conclusion

3Modes of international law-making

Introduction

Sources of international law

Statute of the ICJ, article 38(1)

Other sources

Debates on the sources of international law

Women’s participation in international law-making

Customary international law and ‘soft’ law

General principles of law

Subsidiary sources of law

Broadening the sources of law

NGOs

International civil society

Conclusion

4The law of treaties

Introduction

The process of treaty-making

Treaty negotiation

NGOs and treaty-making

Reservations

Implementation of treaties into domestic law

Jus cogens

Treaty termination

Conclusion

5The idea of the state

Introduction

The concept of statehood in international law

A permanent population

Defined territory

Government

Capacity to enter into relations with other states

Jus cogens

The sex of the state

Recognition and statehood

State jurisdiction

Immunity from jurisdiction

State responsibility

Self-determination in international law

The right to self-determination

Self-determination and Palestinian women

Rethinking self-determination

Recasting the state

6International institutions

Introduction

International inter-governmental institutions

Women in the UN

Participation of women

UN responses

Sexual harassment

Women’s participation and representation in decision- and policy-making

Gender mainstreaming

Conclusion

7Human rights

Introduction

The evolution of human rights law

Feminist critiques of rights

Women’s rights in international law

General instruments

Women-specific instruments

Inadequacies of human rights law for women

Marginalisation of women’s rights

Inadequate enforcement and implementation

The influence of cultural relativism

The limited understanding of ‘equality’ in international law

‘Human’ rights as men’s rights

First generation rights

Second generation rights

Third generation rights

Women and human rights law

Invocation of international rights in national fora

A complaints mechanism for the Women’s Convention

Gender ‘mainstreaming’ in human rights treaty bodies

Conclusion

8The use of force in international law

Introduction

The impact of armed conflict on women

Rape and sexual violence

Daily survival

Changing roles of women in armed conflict

Women and the use of force

The use of force under international law

Self-defence

Self-determination

Humanitarian intervention

Conclusion

9Peaceful settlement of disputes

Introduction

Identification of an international dispute

Dispute resolution under the UN Charter

The concept of collective security

Peace-making

Peaceful dispute resolution

‘Alternative’ dispute resolution and women

Women and international dispute resolution

Peacekeeping

The scope of peacekeeping

Peacekeeping: the absence of women

Legal protection and regulation of peacekeepers

Preventive diplomacy and peace-building

Economic sanctions

Conclusion

10Redrawing the boundaries of international law

Introduction

Women in international criminal law

Women’s participation in the Tribunals

Jurisdiction of the Tribunals

International humanitarian law

Genocide

Crimes against humanity

Prosecution policies and judicial interpretation

Rules of procedure and evidence

Has international criminal law been transformed?

Conclusion

Bibliography

Table of cases

Table of treaties

Index

Foreword

The law has not always served women well. For centuries, the legal system, shaped and enforced exclusively by men, denied women the attributes of citizenship and personhood, and subordinated them to the decisions of men. Lacking standing, women who fought to overcome their legal disabilities had to enlist the support of fair minded men. Gradually, the most blatant forms of discrimination and disability were removed, so that women could be considered as ‘persons’, be guardians of their children, exercise the right to vote and enter professions.

Women anticipated that when the main barriers went down, when they were able to take part in making and applying laws, the legal system would deliver equal justice. They turned to the law to protect their interests. But the law remained insensitive to many concerns of women, and did not protect them, for example, as victims of rape and domestic violence.

Feminist legal scholars analysed the law and legal institutions. Their work revealed that the legal system remained permeated by outmoded but nevertheless deeply entrenched attitudes concerning the roles and status of men and women in society. The inherent conservatism of legal institutions, and respect for precedent and established categories, helped to perpetuate the underlying gender bias of the law.

Now, and not before time, feminist scholars have turned their attention to international law. The authors are in the vanguard of the attack on what is indeed a formidable bastion. Their aim is to deconstruct international law, to investigate the ways in which international law has brushed aside the injustices of women’s situations around the world, and to ‘redraw the boundaries’ of international law so that it responds to these injustices.

In mounting their assault, the authors have drawn upon their depth of knowledge of international law and of feminist legal theory and their commitment to equity and justice. By exposing the elements of international law to the clear light of feminist analysis, the authors show that it suffers from defects parallel to those of domestic legal systems. Although in classical theory the subjects of international law (and those most vitally concerned in its content) are states, rather than individuals, international law, as any system of law, is the creation of human beings and its ultimate impact is on individual behaviour. Whatever theory is preferred, whether international law is seen as a manifestation of the universal values of natural law or as derived from state practice, whether it is considered as a neutral set of rules impartially applied or as a process of decision-making, international law is influenced by choices between competing values and by policy considerations. Like all legal systems it is based on values and assumptions about how people should live together in society and how organised communities should relate to each other.

When it is considered that the same individuals and groups who have traditionally controlled laws within the state also determine how the state will act in its relations with other states, it is hardly surprising to find that international law speaks from the perspective of an exclusively male hierarchy of power or that it shows little concern for women, their interests and their special vulnerabilities.

A recurrent theme in this study is that of the absence of women from the processes of international law, starting with the organs of the state, and extending to the make up of international organisations, international courts and tribunals. It is within the power of states to change this; they have international obligations to promote equality of participation. But state action has not gone much further than their many exhortations to each other to take action on this issue. As a consequence, at least until the arrival of scholars like the present authors, women have been denied the opportunity to contribute to the shaping of international law, its goals and its priorities.

The strength of this work is that the authors have used their knowledge of international law to throw new light on its underlying theories and to stimulate new ways of thinking about its traditional concepts. Take, for example, the authors’ challenge to the central concept of the sovereign state and the current approach to the legitimacy of states. The recognition of a state allows it to enter the community of nations on equal terms. In theory the concepts of self-determination, and the implied consent of its people, underpin the validity of the state. But, as the authors show, double standards apply in assessing the legitimacy of the state. The entity of Southern Rhodesia and the Bantustans of South Africa were denied recognition because they were founded on racial discrimination. But the systematic exclusion of women from participation in the institutions of government and in decision-making does not have the same consequences. There is no challenge to the legitimacy of a state such as Kuwait, which excludes one half of its population from the right to exercise political rights and to participation in public affairs and discriminates against them in many other ways. Has consistency of principle been replaced by expedience? Will the Palestinian women, whose story is so graphically told here, find that their struggle alongside men for self-determination does not guarantee their right to participate on equal terms in the new entity, or that recognition will not be withheld on that basis?

The entirely unacceptable situation in international law is that the fundamental norms which all states must observe include systematic racial discrimination but not systematic discrimination against women, or even widespread gender-based violence. Women have had to mount a campaign to have violence against women, in all its forms, recognised as an international legal wrong, for which states can be held responsible. Their efforts, described here, show clearly just how states have been complicit or have acquiesced in this kind of abuse, and why the exercise of state power is essential to ensure the right to life and personal security of women and their freedom from cruel and inhuman treatment.

The international law of human rights ought to have a better record than other areas in regard to women’s interests, bearing in mind that its central principles are those of equality and non-discrimination. But even when the promotion of universal human rights was made a principal goal of the United Nations Charter, women feared that they would be overlooked. To ensure that their rights were given full attention, they lobbied to have a separate UN body to deal with women’s status. Paradoxically, the creation of the Commission on the Status of Women, and the adoption of a separate Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women allowed the other UN human rights institutions and treaty bodies to overlook the gender dimension of their own instruments, and to pay little attention to such issues as violence, sexual abuse and forced prostitution.

There is some good news, however. The past failures of mainstream human rights law to deal adequately with issues of women’s rights and with the finer points of discrimination, have been partly offset by recent positive developments. These have been prompted at least in part by the work of feminist scholars and activists.

Some of the treaty bodies are now acting to bridge the gap between women’s rights and human rights and to give more attention to issues affecting women. An example of the new approach is the recent work of the Human Rights Committee. Its current draft general comment on article 3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights involves a comprehensive gender analysis of every provision of the Covenant to identify issues of special relevance to women. The draft incorporates the recent practice of the Committee and addresses some of the concerns raised by the authors. For example, although, as the authors point out, the Committee did not include female infanticide in its general comment on the right to life (article 6), the Committee now raises this issue, as well as prenatal sex selection and abortion of female foetuses, in the reporting process, where relevant to the situation in a particular state. Issues such as restrictions on freedom of movement, forced labour and trafficking, whether in relation to prostitution, domestic service, threats to life from unsafe abortion, compulsory sterilisation, violence and sexual abuse of women are given equivalent treatment. The principle underlying these developments is that for the state to fulfil its obligation to respect and to ensure Covenant rights to women, it must take effective measures to protect them against widespread and systematic threats to their life and personal security.

Other good news, the result of extensive campaigning by women, is that the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has been strengthened by the adoption in October 1999 of an Optional Protocol allowing for the right of petition, and providing for an inquiry procedure; and CEDAW’s meeting time has been extended. Successful lobbying by women has also resulted in the project for the international criminal court including rape and sexual violence as violations of the laws of war, as crimes against humanity, and in some cases as war crimes in situations of armed conflict.

These advances by no means displace the central thesis of the authors that women’s interests and concerns have played little part in the development of international law. Nor do they put right the many, long standing injustices of the international system in regard to women. Nevertheless, they show that those working for change can achieve practical results.

This feminist analysis of international law is an important contribution to the process of change and to the redressing of past wrongs. If it provokes debate and even dissension, its purpose will be well served. For its objective must be to bring about a change in thinking about the basic concepts and practice of international law and to lead to a new understanding of the limitations of international law, and also of its untapped potential as a force for justice. One can only hope that the authors’ insights will provide a fruitful source of inspiration for the future development of international law, and that their brave assault on the bastions of tradition will be rewarded by a gradual moving forward of the boundaries.

Elizabeth Evatt

Member, Human Rights Committee

Sydney

December 1999

Preface

As our children regularly remind us, this book has taken many years to complete. It was conceived in 1991, when Vaughan Lowe, then general editor of the international law series at Manchester University Press, encouraged us to write on the implications of feminist theory for international law. Moves across countries and around the world, babies, deanships, car accidents and other aspects of real life have pushed back our deadlines time and time again. In his Lives of the English Poets, Samuel Johnson ponders the question of why it took Alexander Pope five years to complete his translation of Homer’s (relatively short) Iliad. ‘[T]‌he progress of Pope may seem to have been slow’, writes Johnson, ‘but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility.’ He goes on:

It is natural to suppose, that as much as had been done to-day may be done tomorrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker’s mind. He that runs against Time has an antagonist not subject to casualties.¹

This book cannot claim the literary qualities of Pope’s translation, but it shares its unsuccessful race against time.

Over all these years we have incurred debts to many people and institutions and are pleased to be able to thank them in print at last. We have benefited greatly from the energy and work of research assistants: Jillian Caldwell, Jane Cox, Anna Funder, Urfan Khaliq, Jyoti Larke, Suzanne Leal, Wai Quen, Shaki Sansui, Aaron Shumway, Jane Stratton and Belle Yang. Cassie Chinkin provided helpful research and organisational assistance. Max Charlesworth and Dianne Otto generously read the manuscript and made many useful comments. Dominic McGoldrick, now the editor of this series, also helped us with comments. Philip Alston, Elizabeth Evatt, Judith Gardam, Michelle Jarvis, Suzanne Karstedt, Anne Orford, Bruno Simma, Cate Steains and Patricia Viseur-Sellers provided valuable information. We were also fortunate to be able to talk to Palestinian women in Gaza in 1993 and Saharawi women in the Western Sahara and London in 1993 about their experiences of struggles for self-determination.

The Law Faculties at the Universities of Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Southampton, the Australian National University, the London School of Economics and the Law Program in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University supported this research in many different ways. The Frances Lewis Center at Washington and Lee Law School and its Director, Scott Sundby, offered a peaceful haven in the last stages of the book. Colleagues and students at all these different institutions gave us insights, advice and encouragement. We have also benefited from conversations and participation in conferences and workshops with colleagues and friends in academic institutions, non-governmental and inter-governmental organisations around the world. Charles Guest gave tremendous support to this project on many levels throughout its long development. The Australian Research Council provided funding for much of our research and the Oxford Peace Project supported work for chapter eight. We offer our warm thanks to all these people and institutions. In particular we thank Shelley Wright with whom we began this intellectual adventure and who has been consistently generous in her friendship and encouragement.

The book builds on some research that has already been published, although it has been revised and updated. Parts of chapter two draw on H. Charlesworth, ‘Feminist critiques of international law and their critics’, [1994–5] Third World Legal Studies 1 and H. Charlesworth, ‘Current trends in international legal theory’, in S. Blay, R. Piotrowicz and M. Tsaymenyi eds, Public International Law: An Australian Perspective (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1997) 251. Parts of chapter four are built on C. Chinkin, ‘Reservations and Objections to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women’, in J-P. Gardner ed., Human Rights as General Norms and a State’s Right to Opt Out (London, British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 1997) 64 and H. Charlesworth and C. Chinkin, ‘The gender of jus cogens’, 15 Human Rights Quarterly (1993) 63. Parts of chapter five draw on H. Charlesworth, ‘The sex of the state in international law’, in N. Naffine and R. Owens eds, Sexing the Subject of Law (Sydney, Law Book Co. Ltd, 1997) 251; H. Charlesworth, ‘International human rights law: prospects and problems for Palestinian women’, in S. Bowen ed., Human Rights, Self-Determination and Political Change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (The Hague, Kluwer Law International, 1997) 79 and C. Chinkin, ‘The potential and pitfalls of the right to self-determination for women’, ibid. at 93. Chapter six develops H. Charlesworth, ‘Transforming the United Men’s club: feminist futures for the United Nations’, 4 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems (1994) 421. Chapter seven draws on H. Charlesworth, ‘What are women’s human rights?’, in R. Cook ed., Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) 58 and C. Chinkin, ‘Women’s human rights: guaranteed by universal standards or discounted by cultural bias?’, 5 (2) Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law (1997) 11. Chapter eight builds on C. Chinkin, ‘Women and peace: militarism and oppression’, in K. Mahoney and P. Mahoney eds, Human Rights in the 21st Century: A Global Challenge (Dordrecht, Martinus Nijhoff, 1993) 405 and chapter nine on C. Chinkin, ‘Rape and sexual abuse of women in international law’, 5 European Journal of International Law (1994) 326.

In general, the text is up to date to December 1998, although in some cases it has been possible to refer to more recent developments.

Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin

Canberra and London

January 2000

1S. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1906) 255.

Abbreviations

For

Cassie, Mark, Stephanie and Will

Introduction to the 2022 edition

Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin*

Introduction

The world of international law has changed profoundly since this book was first published over twenty years ago. In 1999, when we finished writing Boundaries, international law was in a period of renaissance. The ending of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc, symbolised by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, appeared to have freed international law from its political shackles. For example, alongside its mandate to apply coercive measures, the United Nations (UN) Security Council had begun to create new institutions and adopt new thematic agendas, such as the protection of civilians and children in armed conflict.¹ Long-running conflicts, including those in Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Guatemala, had culminated in political settlements under international auspices.²

Regionally and nationally, international law was the foundation of standards for state and individual accountability for breaches of human rights and international criminal law, for example through the creation of the ad hoc criminal tribunals for former Yugoslavia (1993)³ and Rwanda (1994)⁴ and the International Criminal Court (1998) (ICC),⁵ the inclusion of extensive human rights provisions in peace agreements⁶ and the introduction of what became known as transitional justice processes.⁷ International institutions adopted multilateral standards to regulate areas such as the environment, climate change and landmines.⁸ Civil society movements prompted much of this activity through creating coalitions and associations with states in resorting to the fora and processes of international law to advance a reform agenda. It seemed that the state-centric nature of international law was under challenge and an era of openness and transparency was well under way.

This sense of the blossoming of international law applied also to women. While international legal standards traditionally obscured or overlooked women’s lives, the 1990s produced significant developments in norms and institutions. The Vienna Conference on Human Rights (1993), the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (1994) and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) had all adopted progressive standards with respect to women’s lives. The burgeoning of international criminal law included attention to sexual violence against women.⁹ In 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted a protocol to the 1979 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) allowing individuals to seek redress for breaches of the treaty and establishing an inquiry procedure where there is ‘reliable information’ of ‘grave or systematic violations’ of the Convention.¹⁰ International institutions began to recognise violence against women as an international concern. For example, following the CEDAW Committee’s 1992 General Recommendation 19 on violence against women and the General Assembly’s Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women in 1993, the UN Commission on Human Rights appointed a Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women in 1994.¹¹ The dynamic first mandate holder, Radhika Coomaraswamy, and her successors have documented the prevalence of violence in women’s lives, furthered normative frameworks and proffered practical recommendations.

At the same time, there were signs that the ‘new world order’ may not necessarily improve the lives of women. Widespread violence against civilians, including violence targeting women and girls, accompanied the ‘new wars’ and ethno-nationalisms in, among others, Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and the Balkans.¹² The rise in trafficking in women and girls with the opening of borders between Eastern and Western Europe and the deployment of peacekeeping troops, the increasing prominence of fundamentalist religious groups, commitment to neo-liberal economic ordering and the inequalities and violence accompanying free market zones were other signs that patterns of systemic oppression of women and girls would continue in the post-Cold War era.¹³

Much of the optimism of the first years following the fall of the Berlin Wall was dissipated in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. The intensification of the global ‘war on terror’ in conjunction with conflicts in, among others, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen enhanced militarism and lessened commitment in many areas to the international rule of law upheld by multilateral institutions and human rights.¹⁴ Right-wing populism and authoritarian regimes have further reduced the certainties of progressive reform.¹⁵

The main argument of Boundaries was that the conceptual and institutional borders of mainstream international law excluded many women’s lives from its scope. We based its structure on a classic text, Ian Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law, with the aim of connecting our critique directly with mainstream doctrine. Our idea was to investigate the structures, processes and concepts of international law from the perspective of women’s lived experiences. Like many mainstream international legal texts, we left some important gaps, however, for example the areas of international environmental law and international economic and trade law.

Boundaries described institutional and substantive barriers to the recognition of women and identified silences and gaps in international legal doctrine. The book nevertheless assumed that a refigured international law could improve women’s lives and promote social progress and justice. Twenty years later, however, this optimism seems misplaced and the international legal order emerges as an ambivalent site for advancement for women.

Progress towards the equality of women is disorderly and globally uncertain, occurring in fits and starts, sometimes going backwards. This is illustrated by UN Women’s Progress of the World’s Women report for 2019–20. This documents that although some aspects of women’s lives have improved, such as greater numbers of women achieving higher educational standards and a reduction in maternal mortality, over the past two decades there has been an overall increase in women’s economic and social inequality.¹⁶ Persistent and systematic discrimination against women and girls is deeply rooted and normalised.¹⁷ Abuses such as child and forced marriage are widespread in many regions, and violence against women and girls remains at epidemic levels.¹⁸ What the UN Secretary-General describes as the ‘strong and relentless push back against women’s rights’¹⁹ makes it difficult to imagine international instruments such as the 1994 Cairo Declaration on Population and Development, with its emphasis on sexual and reproductive health, or the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action being adopted today. Indeed, fears that the Beijing Platform’s normative standards would be weakened meant that there was little appetite within the UN or civil society to hold a ‘Beijing plus 25’ conference in 2020.²⁰

In this new introduction, we begin by reflecting on how we use the term feminist analysis. We then review some of the history of feminist engagements with international law, observing that the international sphere has long provided a beacon of hope for women. We do not chart a full map of the travels of feminist ideas in the international arena,²¹ but focus on an area that had barely emerged when Boundaries was published: the UN Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda, which commenced with resolution 1325 adopted in October 2000. This field illustrates a pattern of apparent normative progress, which is undermined by gendered institutional cultures.

Overall, we suggest that, while some feminist concerns and language have been absorbed into the international legal order, they have been shorn of radical potential and restricted in effect. There has been limited inclusion of women in some of the primary rules in certain areas of international law while the foundational, secondary rules such as sources, state responsibility and jurisdiction have remained largely untouched by feminist approaches.²² The most acceptable feminist ideas internationally have been increasing the participation of women and combating violence against women, although these have faced many hurdles. It has been even more difficult to achieve normative and cultural change to support transformative equality for women, or an international legal order where issues of sex and gender and other structural inequalities are given sustained attention and adequate resources for achievement.

What is feminist analysis?

The term ‘feminism’ remains controversial. At a popular level, it is regularly portrayed as a politics of distinction between women and men, or as an inversion of patriarchal structures. But the categories ‘women’ and ‘men’ are uneasy ones, implying a fundamental cohesion on the basis of biological markers, which in any event are unstable. Once feminist ideas are projected onto the international plane, new dilemmas emerge. As the art historian Griselda Pollock has observed, politically influential rallying cries such as ‘Women of the World, Unite!’ depend on an imagined global community. The claim of commonality, Pollock argues, has to be made before the differences between women become evident:

Only once you create, only once you summon into the political space, the political entity ‘women’, do the forms of difference between women become visible and demand their own urgent articulation and agonistic reconciliation. . . . The invocation of a new collectivity reveals the specific fault lines. . . . This means that this initial collectivity alone makes visible how class, race, sexuality, and other oppressions are always mediated by the omnipresent relations of gender.²³

We use the term feminism here to signal a concern with gender as a category of analysis. The idea of gender is central to feminist politics because it refers to the various social, political and cultural constructions that attach to concepts of womanhood and manhood in different societies. Gender has no fixed content, but its potency depends on the creation of binary oppositions, and the establishment of hierarchies between them. Common features of these constructions are, first, that masculinity and femininity are defined in dualistic terms, as opposites. Second, those qualities or traits deemed masculine are assigned a greater value than those defined as feminine.²⁴ Gender is integral to the creation and maintenance of power and authority and it interacts in complex ways with other axes of power, such as race, religion, disability, class and sexuality. Rather than being a category of identity that people belong to – or not – gender is an activity, something we do.²⁵ In this sense, gender is a logic – ‘ideas about bodies that inform [. . .] practice through processes of masculinization and feminization’.²⁶

The term feminism signals a set of values. Feminist theorists typically wear their political commitments on their sleeves: the goal of transformative equality. Sandra Fredman has identified four dimensions of equality that promote transformative equality.²⁷ These are, first, the redress of disadvantage, which may require redistributive measures. Second, recognition of the prejudice, stereotyping and violence that are caused by inequality. A third aspect of equality is ensuring the participation of people in decisions that affect them. The achievement of structural or transformative change is the fourth dimension of equality. This involves, for example, understanding the way that reproduction and other markers of gender interact with access to the public world of work and recognised ‘productivity’ and changing patterns of caregiving. All four dimensions are critical in achieving equality, although they are rarely all brought to bear on particular problems.²⁸ The last element opens up a feminist politics that has a broader vision. As the African Feminist Forum’s Charter of Feminist Principles (2007) records, ‘[b]‌y naming ourselves as Feminists we politicise the struggle for women’s rights, we question the legitimacy of the structures that keep women subjugated, and we develop tools for transformatory analysis and action’.²⁹

We also understand feminism as an intellectual method, challenging traditional lenses and investigating the politics of apparently neutral principles. It is, for example, concerned with the way ideas about gender structure our understanding of the international arena. We follow Gina Heathcote’s observation that feminism entails the recognition, rather than the rationalisation, of tensions arising from identifying the subject of feminism, from the relationships between gender and race, coloniality, sexuality, able-bodiedness and political economy.³⁰ She points out that there has been little development of feminist theory in the context of international law over the last two decades; the focus has instead been on developing legal remedies, taking the system on its own terms.³¹ Heathcote has drawn attention to the question of how the idea of the universal eviscerates particularity. This is illustrated by the debate over international legal strategies with respect to women’s equality: should there be a demarcated space for the advancement of women or is integration, the so-called policy of mainstreaming, more effective? The former (particularity) risks women’s continued marginalisation, the latter (universality) that of their being submerged by other imperatives.

Western, particularly American, histories of feminism often invoke the images of eras or ‘waves’. ‘First wave’ feminism is linked to the suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when women’s groups in the West organised around seeking political equality through obtaining the vote and equal property rights.³² Women were also prominent in the peace movements of the time, many seeing women’s political progress and peace as entwined. Campaigns for legal and social equality in the 1960s, and the identification of a global sisterhood facing universal male oppression, are elements of ‘second wave’ feminism; while the term ‘third wave’ feminism is linked to attention to the diversity of women and challenges to universal emancipatory projects, starting in the 1990s.³³ The popular metaphor of waves, however, suggests a linearity of feminist thought, which does not readily capture the co-existence of all these types of projects today and the intersections and frictions between them. It also obscures the influence of socialism on feminism in many places. The Global South offers other rich feminisms that are closely associated with histories of resistance to colonial domination, national liberation struggles and seeking full citizenship in the post-colonial state.³⁴

Another set of classifications of feminist thought, outlined in Boundaries, relies on identifying the central projects of particular approaches – ‘liberal’, ‘radical’, ‘cultural’, ‘third world’ and so on.³⁵ These are often presented as in competition with one another. The tensions between different forms of feminism cannot be resolved, however, and they imbue feminist politics with a provisional character, particularly at the international level. As Dianne Otto has suggested, feminist theories are more usefully understood as a network, drawn upon according to the context, rather than as rival sets of ideas.³⁶ In turn, Griselda Pollock has proposed the idea of feminism as a space, ‘a landscape, variously populated by different settlements of speech and action, with many different routes of connection and even walls of agonistic division’.³⁷ On Pollock’s conception, feminism ‘is a space of diversity and movement, not a single story of development or failure, or generational antagonism’.³⁸

All feminist approaches are constrained by the patriarchal systems to which they are applied, and their value should be measured not by their genealogy but by the types of strategies they promote.³⁹ In the context of international law, the tensions between feminist visions and feminist strategies manifest in debates over women-specific reform versus mainstreaming; and over adding women into the existing international legal system or changing it more radically.

Feminism is, then, a capacious umbrella term under which many different theories and orientations jostle for space. We acknowledge the particularity of our approach, grounded in our own identities and lives, not least as white women working in elite environments. We have both worked in colonial settler societies built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Here, our race and class have given us privileged entrée and shaped our experiences, reducing the burden of marginalisation.⁴⁰

Feminism has a complex relationship to ideas of universality, which are central to the power of international law. On the one hand, many feminist theorists have resisted universal accounts of women’s oppression, seeing it as fixing women as victims. On the other hand, feminist activists have deployed claims of universal problems facing women, such as violence, and invoked universally applicable principles to counter them. Legal anthropologists, such as Sally Engle Merry, have challenged the asserted divide between the universal and the particular by studying the processes used by local groups to ‘vernacularise’ international principles to promote women’s equality.⁴¹

In Boundaries we argued for an eclectic approach to international law, drawing on a variety of analytic strategies, even if risking charges of theoretical incoherence.⁴² While feminist scholars in law share some intellectual interests with critical legal scholars, they give much greater attention to social context. In other words, feminist theories do not start with the law or regard it as an autonomous field. They are concerned with the material conditions of women’s lives and how the law interacts with disadvantage. They embrace feminism as a political agenda and seek ways of using law as an emancipatory tool.

Our work encountered objections from within the discipline that we were promoting an absurd or unsustainable account of international law. The major flaw for some was that we were bringing an overtly political agenda into the subject.⁴³ For others we did not go far enough in challenging the structural inequalities of which sex/gender inequality was merely one manifestation, in particular those wrought by the global neo-liberal political economy.⁴⁴ For the most part, however, international lawyers have ignored feminist inquiries in international law or regarded them as an exotic anomaly. Boundaries became at best a footnote in mainstream texts that moved quickly onto matters deemed more central to the discipline.⁴⁵

The liveliest debates about the role of feminism in international law over the past two decades have been between feminist lawyers. This is consistent with Carol Smart’s observation that feminist research generally has been ‘its own most trenchant critic’ and that feminist methodologies have operated ‘in a state of constant challenge and continual reformulation’.⁴⁶ Boundaries has attracted significant feminist critique for its promotion of ‘governance feminism’, for its muddled theoretical framework, for its essentialism, for its simplistic solutions, and for its constrained horizons and ambitions.⁴⁷ Re-reading Boundaries, we are reminded of our limitations as feminist theorists. We borrowed ideas from feminist thinkers and deployed them in international law, not always doing justice to the original formulation. For this reason, it has been exciting over the past two decades to see the sophisticated theoretical work of friends and colleagues emerge to trouble the boundaries of international law in more profound ways⁴⁸ and across further specialised regimes of international law.⁴⁹

Feminism in international law

Boundaries referred only broadly and briefly to international feminist activism,⁵⁰ but it has a long history in the international sphere. There has been considerable scholarship in this field since Boundaries was published.⁵¹ As Karen Knop has noted, this history ‘complicates our understanding of who has power in international law’, by demonstrating women’s participation in, and influence on, law-making.⁵² From the end of the nineteenth century, women’s groups saw the international arena as a useful site for their campaigns, hoping that change in international legal standards might transcend those pursued by socially conservative national polities. A series of International Congresses of Women were held from the late nineteenth century to promote women’s equality.⁵³ Some focused on women’s right to vote, but others also made broader claims for women’s rights and for inclusion in decision-making about global affairs.⁵⁴ For instance, the 1915 Women’s Congress, held in The Hague, emphasised women’s critical role in ending international conflict and adopted proposals aimed at ending the Great War and establishing a ‘conference of neutral Nations’ for mediation between warring parties.⁵⁵

International (primarily European and American) women’s organisations sent representatives to lobby state delegates at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and advocated for the representation of women in all aspects of the League of Nations’ operations.⁵⁶ They also urged the League to address issues of concern to women, such as participation in the plebiscites to be held in the inter-war years,⁵⁷ human trafficking, equal political and economic rights, and health and education.⁵⁸ This lobbying achieved some recognition of women in the Covenant of the League. One provision stated that all positions in the League ‘shall be open equally to men and women’,⁵⁹ while another designated eliminating trafficking in women as part of the League’s work.⁶⁰ The International Labour Organisation Constitution referred to protecting women workers and the principle of equal pay for work of equal value.⁶¹ Although women at the Second International Congress of Women held in Zurich in 1919 expressed their regret that the Covenant of the League of Nations omitted provisions they regarded as essential for world peace,⁶² the League quickly became a repository of hope for national and international women’s movements.⁶³

Later, feminists believed that the League’s support might counter moves to limit women’s rights within states, prompted by the 1930s Depression and the spread of nationalist conservative movements.⁶⁴ One focus for feminist action was the nationality of married women: many legal systems denoted a woman who married a foreigner as automatically losing her original nationality and assuming the nationality of her husband, limitations that did not apply to men who married a foreign woman.⁶⁵ This could place women in a precarious position in times of conflict, in the event of separation or divorce, or in a violent relationship. Women’s groups worked, ultimately unsuccessfully, to persuade the League to adopt a treaty to redress this serious inequality.⁶⁶ The League did however adopt a number of specific treaties to deal with concerns relating to women. These included slavery⁶⁷ and trafficking in women and children.⁶⁸ Women’s groups promoted pacifism, campaigning for peace through pilgrimages, rallies and a global petition for universal disarmament. Hopes were high when the disarmament conference was convened in 1932⁶⁹ with several states appointing women delegates and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) lobbying successfully for a woman delegate, Emma Mary Woolley.⁷⁰ But this too ended in disappointment when negotiations failed and no agreement on disarmament could be reached against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.⁷¹

Another expression of faith in the capacity of international organisations to alleviate women’s inequality at the national level was a campaign for the League to adopt an equal rights treaty in the 1920s and 1930s.⁷² A draft treaty, proposed by the American feminist Alice Paul in 1926, contained a single operative clause: states parties agreed that, on ratification of the treaty, ‘men and women shall have Equal Rights throughout the [ratifying state’s] territory subject to their respective jurisdictions’.⁷³ This initiative exacerbated dissent among international women’s groups. Its proponents viewed the treaty as an antidote to the restrictive approach to the regulation of women’s work taken in some national jurisdictions and by the International Labour Organisation. Other women’s groups advocated treaties to protect working women’s social roles as mothers and wives and saw an equal rights treaty as a threat.⁷⁴

While the equal rights treaty campaign ultimately failed, the work of the League of Nations elevated the status of women from a purely national to an international issue. Latin American women were at the forefront in organising and in 1928 the International Conference of American States established the first inter-governmental organisation mandated to address the situation of women – the Inter-American Commission on Women.⁷⁵ This promoted the enhancement of women’s legal status⁷⁶ and, along with other women’s organisations, it kept lobbying the League Secretariat to focus on the lives of women. During the 1930s the League began to amass information on women’s social and legal situations and the Legal Committee of the League Assembly instituted an inquiry into the comparative status of women in 1937.⁷⁷ This prompted the Assembly to launch a major inquiry of its own later that year into the legal status of women throughout the world, at least in part to forestall moves to adopt some form of equal rights treaty.⁷⁸ In any event, this inquiry by a committee of experts was truncated by the start of the Second World War.

Women’s engagement with the League had other political implications. For instance, in some respects, it served to legitimise European imperial interests. Susan Pedersen has suggested that the presence of a woman on the nine-member Permanent Mandates Commission (a rare instance of women’s representation in an international body) operated to give a sense that the mandate system was based on education and tutelage, rather than on imperialistic coercion. Calls for self-determination by mandate populations could be deflected by insistence on social progress, steered by a womanly sensibility.⁷⁹

Women’s groups were also active from the outset of the United Nations. At the San Francisco conference for drafting the UN Charter in 1945, a few women delegates, mainly from Asia and the Americas, along with NGOs, lobbied successfully for the inclusion of a reference to ‘the equal rights of men and women’ in the Preamble to the UN Charter as well as to non-discrimination on the basis of sex with respect to human rights in defining one of the purposes of the UN.⁸⁰ This group also succeeded in including Article 8 in the UN Charter, which provides that the UN ‘shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality’ in its work. Article 8’s negative phrasing contrasts with the more inviting language of Article 7 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (that all positions in the League ‘shall be open equally to men and women’).⁸¹

The UN initially established a Sub-Commission on the Status of Women as a subsidiary body of the Commission on Human Rights in 1946. After much lobbying by NGOs and women delegates to avoid women being relegated to a ‘queue’ of human rights issues, the Sub-Commission became in 1947 the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), reporting directly to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).⁸² It has since played an important role in promoting the drafting of treaties dealing with women’s rights, picking up on some issues raised by women before the League. A series of treaties addressing discrimination against women in certain areas of public life include the Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1952),⁸³ the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women (1957)⁸⁴ and the Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages (1962).⁸⁵ In 1979 the UN’s most comprehensive normative instrument, CEDAW, was adopted.⁸⁶

Civil society groups have been at the heart of all these developments, bringing women into specific instances of international law, enrolling states in supporting feminist projects. Catharine MacKinnon has summarised feminist confidence in the international realm in arguing that ‘the further away from home women go, the experience has been, the more rights they get . . . making it more likely that women’s violations . . . will be recognized as real’.⁸⁷

In the four decades since the adoption of CEDAW, the international community has narrowed its attention to certain facets of women’s lives, notably the issue of violence against women, particularly sexual violence in conflict.⁸⁸ While all forms and sites of violence against women present a significant problem, it has been framed in a way that presents women as perennial victims and has obscured other forms of inequality, such as structural economic inequalities.⁸⁹ The CEDAW Committee, however, has bucked this narrowing trend. Through its General Recommendations, the Committee has addressed such aspects as women’s access to justice⁹⁰ and education,⁹¹ disaster risk reduction and climate change,⁹² and given attention to specific categories of women – migrant women,⁹³ older women,⁹⁴ refugee and stateless women,⁹⁵ and rural women.⁹⁶

Feminism’s ambivalent progress in the international sphere over the past twenty years can be charted in the journey of the term ‘gender’. As we noted above, gender refers not to the characteristics of particular men and women but to a set of social constructions, varying over time and place, which interact with other dimensions of inequality, such as race, class and sexuality. The notion of gender has been important in drawing attention to the power, and artifice, of apparently ‘natural’ distinctions.

The term ‘gender’ was slow to enter international discourse and has been much contested. Early appearances were in the CEDAW Committee’s definition of ‘gender-based violence’ and UN ‘gender mainstreaming’ programmes which were designed as a response to campaigns for women’s equality. In this context, attention to gender boiled down to a headcount of women; ‘gender’ became simply a synonym for biological sex.⁹⁷ We can see the merging of sex and gender in the calls for ‘gender equality’ found in the Millennium Development Goals (2000)⁹⁸ and the Sustainable Development Goals (2015).⁹⁹ In both these instruments, the elaboration of the notion of gender equality refers only to the comparative position of women and men, rather than challenging the ways in which gender hierarchies structure what comes to be valued. This has resulted, in Nancy Fraser’s words, in a ‘strange shadowy version’ of feminism, an ‘uncanny double’ that feminists ‘can neither simply embrace nor wholly disavow’.¹⁰⁰

A more explicit source of opposition to the term gender has come from alliances of states that promote conservative social and religious views, notably to resist women’s sexual and reproductive rights.¹⁰¹ These states view the term ‘gender’ as a code for undermining religious and social traditions and promoting homosexuality.¹⁰² Resistance to the word gender on this basis emerged at the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women.¹⁰³ It also became a hotly contested issue during the negotiation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted in 1998.¹⁰⁴ Article 7(3) defines the term ‘gender’ in the context of gender-based persecution as a crime against humanity as ‘the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society’.¹⁰⁵ This elision of sex and gender, linking gender with biology, seems to imply that gender is a fixed, objective fact about a person. Valerie Oosterveld has argued however that the Rome Statute definition of gender creates a ‘constructive ambiguity’, leaving open the possibility of a less restrictive approach.¹⁰⁶

The international legal account of gender remains contentious, however. In its Draft Articles on Crimes against Humanity, issued in 2017, the International Law Commission (ILC) initially simply repeated the Rome Statute’s definition of gender.¹⁰⁷ This caused an outcry. Belgium, for example, commented that ‘[a]‌ny text whose definition of gender fails to reflect the current state of international human rights law could marginalize women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons, as well as other groups, and would risk exacerbating the impunity of sexual and gender-based crimes that amount to crimes against humanity’.¹⁰⁸ The ILC responded by simply removing the definition from the Draft Articles, although gender-based persecution remains as a crime against humanity.¹⁰⁹

International human rights bodies have developed more complex accounts of gender. In 1992 the CEDAW Committee explained ‘gender-based violence against women as violence that occurs to a woman because she is a woman’, reducing the term to the man/woman binary. By 2004 the CEDAW Committee proposed a definition of gender that emphasised the social construction of gender and its role in creating and maintaining hierarchical relationships between women and men.¹¹⁰ The Committee has now expanded its understanding of gender to express concern about discrimination, harassment, violence and hate speech against lesbian, bisexual and transgender women and intersex persons.¹¹¹ It has also clarified that the Convention prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and gender, and that all people are able to pursue their lives free from the constraints of gender stereotypes.¹¹²

Feminism has, then, influenced some aspects of the international legal order. These developments tend to be limited, however, occurring mainly in the human rights field. We turn now to consider the Security Council’s WPS agenda, which has come into being since Boundaries was published.

Women, Peace and Security

The UN Security Council’s WPS agenda commenced formally with the adoption of Security Council resolution 1325 in October 2000. Resolution 1325 was based on a long history of peace activism by women, described earlier, and more recent antecedents such as the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action¹¹³ and its five-year follow-up.¹¹⁴ Resolution 1325 marked the first time that the Security Council had promoted the ‘full involvement [of women] in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security’.¹¹⁵ Over the following twenty years nine further WPS resolutions have been adopted.¹¹⁶ WPS builds on existing regimes of international law – international humanitarian law, human rights law, international criminal law and refugee law. It is an apparent feminist success story, with resolution 1325 described as ‘the focal point for galvanizing worldwide efforts to deal with the many challenges that women face in situations of conflict’.¹¹⁷

WPS has generated normative changes in the international landscape. It has underscored the importance of women’s participation and representation in decision-making with respect to conflict prevention, management and resolution, as well as in peacekeeping field operations, transitional justice processes and as special envoys and representatives of the UN Secretary-General. The WPS agenda has recognised sexual violence as a tactic of war that can ‘significantly exacerbate situations of armed conflict’¹¹⁸ and as a tactic of terrorism.¹¹⁹ It has emphasised the need to end impunity for sexual violence. Institutionally WPS has introduced an array of new positions: women protection officers, gender advisors, teams of experts deployed to deal with sexual violence in armed conflict and the creation of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.¹²⁰ The Annual Reports of the Special Representative and those of the UN Secretary-General on WPS ensure the subject’s continued inclusion on the Security Council’s agenda.¹²¹

The Security Council’s WPS agenda has been amplified regionally and nationally, for example through the introduction of WPS policies by the African Union, the European Union and NATO. It has been incorporated into military training and foreign policy.¹²² Over ninety states have adopted National Action Plans (NAP) for the implementation of resolution 1325. They include states in conflict such as Mali and South Sudan and ‘post-conflict’ states such as Rwanda and Nepal. The Nordic states, with little overt conflict, and states that regularly undertake military actions abroad such as the United States and the United Kingdom have also adopted NAPs.¹²³

This apparent success of the WPS agenda illustrates, however, the simplification of feminist ideas. In using the language of gender and urging a ‘gender perspective’, the UN Security Council reduces the meaning of ‘gender’ to ‘women’, who are assumed to have ‘special needs’¹²⁴ in post-conflict reconstruction and in protection from sexual violence in armed conflict. In contrast, sexual violence against men is referenced in only two WPS resolutions¹²⁵ and harms to other persons targeted for their sexuality or gender identity are not directly mentioned at all. Women and girls are portrayed as permanent victims in need of protection by (male) peacekeepers and military forces. Their experiences of conflict are largely reduced to their sexual vulnerability rather than to other conflict-related harms such as displacement, or to pre-existing inequalities and disadvantage.

While the WPS texts call for greater participation of women in resolving conflict, they do not explore the potential of women’s agency, resting on an assumption that women are simply ‘good at peace’.¹²⁶ This instrumentalism is also evident in their call for women’s empowerment that is said to be ‘critical to efforts to maintain international peace and security’, and contributing to ‘the stabilization of societies emerging from armed conflict’.¹²⁷ There is no endorsement of women’s advancement and enjoyment of human rights on their own terms¹²⁸ and only fleeting reference to the equality framework of CEDAW.¹²⁹ In contrast the CEDAW Committee has recognised the WPS resolutions as important political springboards for advocacy and has urged an integrated approach that locates WPS in the context of the Convention.¹³⁰

The limited impact of the WPS agenda reflects a tension between the civil society objectives for the enhancement of women’s human rights and a feminist peace from which WPS emerged and the Security Council’s narrower security agenda. For example, the Council has called for ‘greater integration by Member States and the United Nations of their agendas on women, peace and security, counter-terrorism and countering-violent extremism’.¹³¹ This call narrows the frames of conflict addressed by the WPS agenda by tying women to a pre-ordained definition of terrorism and its causes. Women are not involved in considering the elements of terrorism, how terrorism and counter-terrorism affect women or what counter-terrorism strategies might promote equality.¹³² Women’s human rights appear harnessed to their usefulness to counter-terrorism activities.

Even on its own terms, the UN Security Council’s WPS agenda remains poorly implemented at the national and