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This epilogue identifies some general themes in the collection. These include the important contribution of the portrayed women to shaping ideas about international law; the recovery of details of the women’s lives; the significance of their relationships with men; the variety of feminist methodologies they used; and ways of challenging the absence of women in histories of international law. What emerges is the profound contribution of these women to shaping ideas about international law as well as the radical nature of their thought—often against barely-veiled misogyny and dismissive treatment that many encountered trying to express their ideals. But it is also the systems and structures of the world of international law that restrict women’s progress within it that is revealed in these portraits, making the contributions of these women even more remarkable.

International lawyers study international law primarily through its written texts—treaties, official documents, judgments, and scholarly works. Critical to being an international lawyer, it seems, is access to the written word, whether in hard copy or online. Indeed, as Jesse Hohmann observes, “the production of text can come to feel like the very purpose of international law.”

The chapter questions international human rights lawyers’ focus on compliance and institutional reform. It argues instead for attention to social practices surrounding the international human rights system in order to understand how the system operates and where it can be influenced. The chapter uses the distinct but related ideas of rituals and ritualism to study a central mechanism of the UN human rights system, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The chapter offers a case study of Australia’s participation in the first two cycles of the UPR, suggesting that a human rights ritual such as the UPR may have some power in countering the practice of human rights ritualism.

Countries engage with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as litigants, as participants in advisory proceedings and, less directly, through contributions of nationals as judges or lawyers. A broad range of scholarship within the discipline of public international law examines this engagement. Specific regional experiences are often emphasized and grouped, for example, by western, African or Asian accounts. Yet the nature and extent of scholarship on a single country’s engagement with the Court are less commonly explored. This article surveys scholarly approaches to specific domestic engagement with the ICJ. It focuses on six countries—Australia, France, Nicaragua, Russia, the UK and the USA—and examines the scholarship generated by each of these countries’ encounters with the Court. This scholarship provides insights into politics, history, institutional practice, professional experience and international legal doctrine. Preliminary in scope, the article points to the value of empirical, historical and country-specific accounts of the work of the ICJ.

This chapter considers a number of critical theories 1 of law which provide alternative explanations of the function and position of law in (post)modern, (post)liberal states. These approaches can be distinguished from the models discussed in the previous chapter by their refusal to accept that law is essentially a benign, neutral and autonomous institution. The critical theorists discussed are particularly opposed to the conceptions of law considered in chapters 2 and 3 (favoured by liberal scholars and lawyers) which assume certainty and stability in legal doctrine and a degree of consensus within the society on which it acts. The approaches to law outlined here are reactions against the accepted, traditional mythology about the nature of law that is imbibed by law students, expounded by judges and legislators, assumed by practitioners and which comforts the general public. According to this mythology, the legal system can be differentiated from the political system or its cultural setting because, in contrast to activity in these spheres, law operates on the basis of abstract rationality and is thus universally applicable. 2 The durability and appeal of law can be accounted for within this mythology partly by its apolitical appearance. This account of the nature of law argues that law is above politics (or at least distinguishable from it) and merely resolves the competing claims of equal members of society. Accordingly, law involves the application of principles and rational argument. Logic and doctrine rather than power and influence are considered decisive.

The world of international relations and law is constantly changing. There is a risk of the systematic undermining of international organisations and law over the next years. Feminist approaches to international law will need to adapt accordingly, to ensure that they continue to challenge inequalities, and serve as an important and critical voice in international law. This article seeks to tell the story of feminist perspectives on international law from the early 1990s till today through a discussion between three generations of feminist international legal scholars: Hilary Charlesworth, who, with her colleagues, contributed to the area in the immediate post-Cold War years, Gina Heathcote, who over the past decade has published extensively on feminist perspectives on the use of force and collective security, and Emily Jones, an early career scholar working on feminist approaches to international law. The conversation, which began as a Skype discussion, considers both the ways in which feminist approaches to international law have changed over the past two decades, as well as the ways in which they have been shaped by global politics, before turning to consider the future for feminist approaches to international law. The impact of feminist approaches to international law has been considerable. However, it seems that feminist approaches still lack legitimacy and credibility in many mainstream circles, remaining on the disciplinary periphery. Charlesworth, Heathcote and Jones discuss potential ways in which to manage some of these tensions, noting both the importance of ‘speaking to ourselves’ (Charlesworth in Feminist perspectives on contemporary International Law: Between resistance and compliance? Hart, Oxford, pp. 17–32, 2011) as a creative and nurturing space, as well as the need to be seen as a more credible voice in the mainstream. They note the need, too, for further feminist work beyond the realms of sexual violence and women’s representation. While the great amount of work in this area is, indeed, foundational, having achieved many important legal and political outcomes, feminist approaches should now develop beyond these areas. Doing so will not only propel this area of scholarship in new and exciting directions, but it might help feminist scholarship gain further traction by avoiding categorisation only under the umbrella of “women’s issues” and thus ready dismissal as just another specialist area of international law in the era of fragmentation.

The language of democracy has become common in international law, the legal system that regulates relations between nation states. This interest in democracy has however largely ignored democracy at the international level and focused instead on national democratic standards. In this paper, I start by sketching the threadbare debates about democracy beyond political borders in international law and then turn to the way that international institutions have developed this concept, particularly in the peace and state-building boom associated with the end of the Cold War. The two contexts for democracy have taken different directions. In the case of democracy at the international level, the discussion has become polarised between global North and South, with democracy being promoted by the South as an omnibus agenda to remedy economic and political inequalities. In the case of democracies within states, international lawyers have taken democracy to have a fixed form, associated with specific institutional practices and structures, limiting its capacity for transformation.

This chapter investigates the conceptual limits of the field of women’s rights. It identifies two main currents of activity in the field: the elaboration of human rights standards, particularly through the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women of 1979; and the development of the ‘Women, Peace and Security’ agenda by the UN Security Council since 2000. Both areas are limited in their understandings of the diverse lives of women. The chapter argues that campaigns for the recognition of women’s rights shuttle between the mainstream and the margins of international law and that the structural bases of women’s disadvantage remain obscured in both locations.

This chapter offers an overview of UN approaches to women’s lives in legal instruments. It begins by describing the engagement of women’s organizations with international institutions from the start of the twentieth century, particularly the League of Nations. It then moves to UN treaties dealing with women. Its focus is the major UN treaty in this area, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the work of its monitoring body, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (. The chapter also describes the extensive reservations states parties have entered to the Convention. It discusses the different accounts of nondiscrimination and equality that emerge in UN treaties. The international sphere illustrates the paradox for feminists of, on the one hand, insisting that differences between women and men should be irrelevant in claiming political rights; while, on the other hand, acting in the name of the category of women, thus bolstering the idea of difference. One strand of provisions in UN treaties aims to eradicate differences in the treatment of women, compared to men. Another strand has sought to recognize the particularity of women’s lives, calling for special treatment and often endorsing a rather limited notion of womanhood in the process. These two strands coexist and are regularly included in the same treaty, even though they can be in normative tension.

This volume engages in conversation with the thinking and work of Max Charlesworth as well as the many questions, tasks and challenges in academic and public life that he posed.

This chapter offers a family perspective on Max Charlesworth, recalling aspects of his life and career through the eyes of a child.

This chapter offers an account of Australia's engagement with the international legal order, through different aspects of the relationship: designing international institutions, litigating in the World Court, and implementing international standards. These are only fragments of the full picture, but they illustrate both Australia's embrace of and distancing from the international legal order. Australia's relationship with the international legal order overall is marked by a deep strand of ambivalence. It has played both the part of a good international citizen as well as that of an international exceptionalist. In some fields, Australia has engaged creatively in international institution-building, even if with a wary eye to protect certain Australian interests. In other areas, particularly human rights, the relationship is distinctly uneasy, with Australia appearing to believe that international standards should regulate others and that it is somehow above scrutiny.

The structure and institutions of the international legal order set up under the United Nations reflect and ensure the continued dominance of a male perspective. Many generally applicable international human rights principles are inherently biased against women. An important aspect of international human rights law is that, like many national legal systems, it operates primarily in the public sphere, that is, within the world of government, politics, economics, and the workplace, areas traditionally associated with men. The traditional construction of civil and political rights, then, obscures the most consistent harms done to women. It might be thought that "second" generation rights—economic, social, and cultural rights—by their nature transcend the dichotomy between public and private spheres of life and thus offer more to women's lives. The theoretical and practical development of third generation rights has, in fact, delivered very little to women.

This chapter investigates the relationship between the concepts of international justice and international law. It suggests that the idea of an international rule of law is constructed on procedural, rather than substantive, accounts of justice. Against the background of two opposing tendencies in the international legal order that influence ideas of international justice, namely the Westphalian and UN Charter accounts, the chapter considers various attempts to incorporate notions of justice in the international legal order. Examples are drawn from the 1970s campaign for a New International Economic Order at the UN, from international adjudication, from feminist campaigns, and from the work of international legal scholars such as Thomas Franck and Steven Ratner. The chapter argues that the concept of international justice has become associated largely with international criminal law, and indicates the limitations of this linkage.

This article is partly based on observation of the High Court deliberations on the Koowarta case in 1982 and partly on reflection on its significance in defining the relationship between the Australian legal system and international law. It also contrasts the broad approach of the majority to the external affairs power with its analysis of the races power. The article suggests that the intense legal debates about the proper spheres of international, national and state law contained in the judgments are reflected in political debates today.

UN Reform in the 21st century has been motivated by the perceived need for institutional coherence. This was at the heart of UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan’s ambitious program for reform that he pursued throughout his term of office, seeking to ensure greater UN effectiveness through streamlining institutional functions. A significant development in the reform process was the creation in 2010 of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, known as UN Women. UN Women incorporates the four existing parts of the UN system dealing with women and has been styled as the new UN “gender architecture”. This article considers the implications of this new institutional structure for the situation of women worldwide from the perspective of international law, asking in particular whether institutional reform is matched by normative progress.

Almost twenty years ago our friend and colleague Judith Gardam offered an original and illuminating perspective on the law of armed conflict. She deployed the persona of an alien — filling in time during an intergalactic storm — for the purposes of reading the laws of armed conflict. Back in the person of a scholar of international humanitarian law (IHL), Judith then engaged in a conversation with the alien, comparing its observations on the texts alone with her understanding of how the law operates in practice. Judith’s alien-scholar dialogue allowed her to illustrate the malleability of the legal concept of objectivity and the way that the law constructs particular realities while obscuring others. This striking approach was both playful and disconcerting. It revealed, among other things, the gendered nature of the law of armed conflict and its incorporation of Western images of femininity and masculinity.Inspired by Judith’s imaginative method, in this chapter we reflect on international developments over the last two decades that address the lives of women in the area of armed conflict. In 1997, when Judith was in dialogue with the alien, the primary relevant legal framework was that of IHL — notably the Hague and Geneva Conventions and Protocols. In the intervening years the number of international legal lenses has multiplied. Human rights law, international security law and international criminal law now also regulate the situation of women in armed conflict. Moreover, the plight of women in conflict and its aftermath has achieved much greater political prominence. After sketching a range of issues that shape the situation of women and conflict, we focus on two international documents on this topic, adopted in 2013 by different United Nations institutions, and speculate on what Judith’s alien might make of them.

Introduction On 24 September 2003 the United Nations (UN) Security Council (UNSC) inaugurated a new agenda item entitled ‘Justice and the Rule of Law’, acknowledging the UNSC’s ‘heavy responsibility to promote justice and the rule of law in its efforts to maintain international peace and security’.1 This book examines how the UNSC has responded to this mandate, particularly in the areas of peacekeeping, sanctions and the use of force. The contributors to this volume discuss both how the concept of the rule of law (ROL) regulates, or influences, UNSC activity and how the UNSC has in turn shaped the notion of the ROL. The UNSC’s designation of the ROL as an important theme offers principled law as the solution to the problem of unprincipled politics, and stable peace as the alternative to destabilising war. The idea is that threats to peace and security should be managed in accordance with the norms and values enshrined in the UN Charter. However, as many contributors to this collection note, the concept of the ROL is famously opaque and contested. Some commentators question the ability of the ROL to guide actions to maintain international peace and security on the basis that it is insufficiently coherent.2 Others criticise attempts to transplant a notion with western origins and an associated suite of western rule-oflaw institutions into other contexts.3 The veto power accorded to the UNSC’s five permanent members by the UN Charter is also regarded as undermining the capacity of the ROL to temper the exercise of raw power in and through the UNSC.4 The relationship between the UNSC and the ROL provides a fascinating case study of how powerful actors both shape and are shaped by powerful ideas. Terence Halliday has pointed to the tension between two different modes of UNSC interaction with the ROL – the external and the internal. Halliday describes the UNSC’s external invocations of the concept as ROL ‘on the offense’ and claims of internal disregard of the ROL placing the UNSC ‘on the defence’.5 It is difficult for the UNSC to claim to act in the name of the ROL externally, without at the same time accepting the concept’s applicability to the internal workings of the UNSC. Given these tensions and weaknesses in the ROL, how does it regulate behaviour in the international arena?

Feminist analysis in international law began to emerge two decades ago. It has taken many different forms and is now a lively feature of international legal debate. But has it had any effect? And is it worth pursuing? In this short article, I will argue that feminists have been successful in bringing the language of women's empowerment into international law but less adept at identifying methods to give this language life on the ground. Copyright © Asian Journal of International Law 2010.

This paper offers a feminist analysis of the responsibility to protect principle. It outlines some themes in feminist scholarship in international law and then uses these to explore the idea of a responsibility to protect. The paper argues that, despite some resonance with feminist concerns, the doctrine has been developed in a limited context, effectively privileging male elites and masculine modes of reasoning.

This paper examines the way that women’s relationship to peace is constructed in international institutions and international law. It identifies a set of claims about women and peace that are typically made and considers these in light of women’s experience in the conflicts in Bougainville, East Timor and the Solomon Islands.