Suchergebnisse

Laws and norms that focus on women's lives in conflict have proliferated across the regimes of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law and the United Nations Security Council. While separate institutions, with differing powers of monitoring and enforcement, implement these laws and norms, the activities of regimes overlap. Women's Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law is the first book to account for this pluralism and institutional diversity. This book identifies key aspects of how different regimes regulate women's rights in conflict, and how they interact. Using country case studies to reveal the practical implications of the fragmented protection of women's rights in conflict, this book offers a dynamic account of how regimes and institutions interact, the extent to which they reinforce each other, and the tensions and gaps in regulation that emerge

Abstract
After over two decades of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda at the UN Security Council, involving the adoption of 10 thematic resolutions, there is now increasing momentum towards the de-centring of the Council from feminist engagement and from broader institutional activity on WPS. Against this backdrop, this article lays out arguments for centring the WPS agenda instead in the UN General Assembly. Given its broader membership and mandate, its role in international law-making, and critically, its leadership on disarmament, the article argues that the General Assembly offers more propitious opportunities for the institutionalization of a feminist peace agenda.

This Editorial introduces the Political Settlements Research Programme (PSRP) at the University of Edinburgh, and this Special Issue on Engendering Political Settlements which draws together findings and analysis from the gender theme of the PSRP.

Normative and legal developments in the protection of gender equality in conflict have proliferated in recent decades across diverse regimes of public international law. Nevertheless, the ultimate impact of such international norms on domestic conflict-affected settings is unclear. This article sets out to elucidate how international gender equality norms, underpinned by proliferating soft and hard legal sources, and implemented by separate institutions with widely varying powers of monitoring and enforcement, bring traction to women's and girls' rights in conflict-affected settings. While much discussion of fragmentation focuses on conflict between norms – and how to resolve such conflict within the non-hierarchical structure of international law – this article examines gender equality norms as they are operationalized by the institutions of international law charged with their monitoring and enforcement. International Relations literature suggests that, while international institutions are formally empowered through the consent and consensus of participating states, they in fact operate with considerable autonomy, due to their 'expertise' and consequent pedagogic function as 'teachers' of norms to states. The article investigates this thesis through the case study of the prohibition of sexual violence against girl soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, focusing on institutional activities under international humanitarian law, international criminal law and the United Nations Security Council. The case study reveals that the institutions of international law not only monitor and enforce relevant gender equality norms, but they in fact give substance to often-vague international norms through their operational activities in conflict-affected settings, though not necessarily in a consistent or coherent manner. The article concludes that studying international institutions in their operational activities in conflict settings is essential to understanding the impact of international gender equality norms on women's and girls' experiences of conflict.

AbstractWhereas the political settlements research framework is garnering growing policy attention in development programming, including in fragile and conflict‐affected states, there are concerns that political settlements constitute yet another global policy development with which feminist and gender analysis must 'catch up'. The article outlines four broad challenges to advancing gender analysis through the political settlements framework. The first is conceptual, that the focus on elites, and the reliance on public sphere dynamics to explain development outcomes, structurally excludes women. The second is epistemological, that the role of the scholar in designating certain groups to be 'elites' and others to be 'non‐elites' merits further interrogation. The third is methodological, that because of other exclusions, gender is infrequently identified as a pertinent variable or category of analysis in seeking to explain development outcomes through the political settlements framework. The final is political, that the avowedly non‐normative position of political settlements analysis risks overlooking norms implicit to the work, in particular implicit gender norms. Nevertheless, the article argues, in the prevailing context of technocratic approaches to global gender policy‐making, the political settlements framework may offer promise through its avowed focus on 'doing politics'. Moreover, the political settlements framework may usefully counter the tendency of global gender policy to essentialise the state as a single domain of activity, and to instead utilise more fully the different constituencies within the state, and the relationships between them, in order to effect positive change. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is frequently claimed that the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is more significant for the cultural, rather than legal, work that it does in reframing locally contested gender issues as the subject of international human rights. While this argument is well developed in respect of violence against women, CEDAW's cultural traction is less clear in respect of women's right to access safe and legal abortion. This article examines the request made jointly by Alliance for Choice, the Family Planning Association Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Women's European Platform to the CEDAW Committee to request an inquiry under the CEDAW Optional Protocol into access to abortion in the jurisdiction. The study found that the CEDAW framework was useful in underpinning alliances between diverse pro-choice organizations but less effective in securing the support of 'mainstream' human rights organizations in the jurisdiction. The article argues that the local cultural possibilities of CEDAW must be understood as embedded within both the broader structural gendered limitations of international human rights law and persistent regressive gendered sub-themes within mainstream human rights advocacy.