Professor Diane Otto
Overview
Centre for the study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law
Visiting Fellow
- Name:
- Professor Diane Otto
Biography
Dianne Otto holds a Chair at the Melbourne Law School, where she is also Director of the International Human Rights Law Programme (IILAH) and Project Director for Peacekeeping (APCML). Dianne's scholarship explores how international legal discourse reinforces hierarchies of nation, race, gender and sexuality, and aims to understand whether and how the reproduction of such legal knowledge can be resisted. Her work draws upon and develops a range of critical legal theories particularly those influenced by feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism and queer theory. Her recent research focus has been on gender and sexuality issues in the context of the UN Security Council and peacekeeping operations. She is currently researching the League of Nations minority petitions procedures, as precursors to contemporary 'transitional justice' mechanisms.
Recent publications include chapters in Hilary Charlesworth and Jean-Marc Coicaud (eds), Faulty Lines of International Legitimacy (Cambridge University Press 2010), Mashood Baderin and Manisuli Ssenyonjo (eds), International Human Rights Law: Six Decades after the UDHR (Ashgate 2010), and Sandesh Sivakumaran, Sangeeta Shah, Daniel Moeckli and David Harris (eds), International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press 2010). She was author of the seminal 'Subalternity and International Law: The Problems of Global Community and the Incommensurability of Difference' (1996) Social and Legal Studies: An International Journal 337, which was republished in Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick (eds), Laws of the Postcolonial (University of Michigan Press 1999) 145.
