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Article Excerpt
CONTENTS
I Introduction II Inclusion: The Institutional Spread of Feminist Ideas III A New Form of Exile? Assessing the Costs of Increased Institutional Engagement IV Conclusion
I INTRODUCTION
'But the Security Council is the most powerful body in the UN', the Director of the International Women's Tribune Centre in New York said, looking at me as though I was completely out of touch. 'Its resolutions [on women] are surely binding'.
It was January 2009 and I was sitting in the crowded office of the International Women's Tribune Centre ('IWTC') (1) in New York, its wide windows framing the United Nations Secretariat Building on the East River with its skirt of national flags, slowly absorbing the sense of accomplishment that was in the room. As I set about explaining the difference between resolutions of the Security Council that are adopted under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, and those that are not (only the former are legally binding), it soon became clear that the distinction did not really matter to anyone else in the room. The IWTC's strategies to promote women's equality and rights had followed the power that had been increasingly concentrated in the Security Council after the end of the Cold War (2) and, since September 11, had become unapologetically 'hegemonic'. (3) In response to the strategic lobbying of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security ('NGO Working Group'), (4) of which the IWTC is a key member, the Security Council had adopted two thematic resolutions that directly addressed women's concerns--undoubtedly a significant achievement. The first, in 2000, urged, inter alia, the increased participation of women in conflict resolution and post-conflict peace-building. (5) The second, in 2008, condemned the use of sexual violence as a 'tactic of war' and as an impediment to the restoration of international peace and security. (6) The question that the discussion at the IWTC raised for me was what this entry of feminist ideas into the sphere of influence of the Security Council would mean for the long feminist struggle to utilise international law to promote and protect women's rights and gender equality, and to secure peace. My insistence that it was important to acknowledge the non-binding character of the resolutions seemed unduly legalistic. Why was I championing the power of formal 'law' over that of 'politics'? Was I engaging the 'politics of expertise' because it gave me, as an international lawyer, a privileged position in the debate? Is it possible to combine feminist activism with critical engagement in both law and feminism, or is the role of scholarly critical thinking to raise issues, rather than resolve them? (7)
In thinking through these questions, as I reflect on gender issues in international law over the last decade, I will treat these two Security Council resolutions as bookends to my discussion. They allow me to begin by describing the remarkable spread of feminist ideas throughout the UN system, into the most unlikely places, and they illustrate the productivity that can flow from the institutional embrace of 'emancipatory' ideas, in the form of institutional developments as well as inspiring local and global movements for change. At the same time, the Security Council resolutions illustrate a number of major problems for feminists, which have emerged from increased institutional incorporation. These problems include a pattern of selective engagement with feminist ideas as they are instrumentalised to serve institutional purposes; an across-the-board absence of strong accountability mechanisms, even as the outside pressure for accountability grows; and the tendency for protective stereotypes of women to normatively re-emerge following an initial flirtation with more active and autonomous representations. I return, in conclusion, to my discomfort about the IWTC claim that the Security Council resolutions on women are binding as international law. I decide that my uneasiness has more to do with lending feminist support to the hegemonic power of the increasingly emboldened Security Council, and a worry about what this means for the future of international law generally, and for feminist efforts to shape the law in particular.
II INCLUSION: THE INSTITUTIONAL SPREAD OF FEMINIST IDEAS
There can be little doubt that feminist ideas have spread throughout the UN system in the last decade, in the wake of official commitments to system-wide gender mainstreaming, (8) and not least because of the activism of NGOs like the IWTC. There has been a 'quite noticeable installation of feminists and feminist ideas in actual legal-institutional power' which Janet Halley and her colleagues conclude is sufficiently institutionalised to warrant being described as 'Governance Feminism'. (9) I argue that the institutional reception and management of feminist ideas works to divest them of their emancipatory content, and therefore prefer to depict the result as 'cooption' rather than 'governance feminism', which implies the result is intentional. One example of institutional divestment of the liberatory potential of feminist ideas is the way that the terminology of 'gender' is used in the UN. Use of the term, from a feminist viewpoint, implies acceptance that differences between men and women, which have justified women's inequality, are socially and culturally constructed (rather than biologically inherent). (10) However, in institutional practice, the term is understood as a synonym for women's issues, (11) which significantly limits its progressive possibilities because the contestability of conceptions of femininity and masculinity, as well as their relationality, is ignored. (12) Stripped of its political content, the gender mainstreaming project is a long way from fundamentally challenging women's inequality, let alone the gendered assumptions that underpin the discipline of international law.
Nevertheless, after many years of marginalisation in institutions devoted specifically to issues of concern to women, (13) there are now many signs that 'women's issues' are in the process of becoming institutionally 'mainstreamed' in the UN, at least in the sense of integrating them into the existing systems. (14) I see the spread of feminist ideas as opening new spaces for feminist activism rather than shutting them down, although it is difficult to engage these new spaces without cooption. The General Assembly has repeatedly reaffirmed the importance of actively promoting gender mainstreaming throughout the UN system. (15) Likewise, the Commission on Human Rights (replaced in 2006 by the Human Rights Council) endorsed gender mainstreaming (16) and was quick to direct its Special Procedures to incorporate women's human rights violations into their mandates. (17) The human rights treaty bodies have almost all adopted General Comments (authoritative interpretations), which mainstream women's human rights into their treaty texts and inform their monitoring of states parties' compliance. (18) The UN High Commissioner for Refugees ('UNHCR') has accepted that gender discrimination and/or violence may constitute 'persecution' for the purpose of refugee determination. (19) The UN Development Programme Bureau for Development Policy ('UNDP') has reaffirmed that gender equality is a specific development goal, (20) and most of the UN specialised agencies and funds, including the World Health Organization ('WHO'), (21) the UN Population Fund ('UNFPA') (22) and the International Labour Organization ('ILO'), (23) have adopted gender mainstreaming policies. Even the World Bank has realised that women are critical economic actors. (24)
Although the effects of 'gender mainstreaming' in the UN are uneven and precarious (and characteristically double-edged as I will discuss further in Part III), there is much for feminists to celebrate. On the positive side of the ledger, I would include, first, the efforts by way of the new gender-inclusive language to recognise women as full subjects of international law, enjoying autonomy and rights, thereby eliminating, or at least reducing in importance, the protective representations of women that have persisted despite the long history of feminist attempts to eradicate them. (25) Second, it is clear that initial institutional change, which creates new or more prominent spaces for feminist ideas, can provide a vantage point from which further potentially supportive institutional developments may be launched. And third, the formal...
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