A Dangerous Liaison: Feminist Engagement with International Law through the UN Security Council

Professor Diane Otto

In this paper, Professor Otto examine the dilemmas of almost a decade of efforts by feminist peace advocates to engage with the UN Security Council. These efforts have born fruit in the form of the Council’s adoption of four thematic resolutions on women, peace and security – SCRs 1325 (2000), 1820 (2008), 1888(2009) and 1889(2009). While marvelling at the productivity of this feminist engagement with power and the new possibilities that have been opened for feminist peace activism, the paper also highlights the ‘dangerousness’ of this strategy. In particular Professor Otto is concerned about the concessions that have had to be made in order to be ‘taken seriously’ by Council members, the further erosion of feminist ideas as they are deployed to serve the Council’s own agenda, the protective stereotypes of women that have remained dominant, and the legitimacy that the strategy ascribes to the Security Council as a protector of women and as a (hegemonic) creator of general international law. Her goal is not to counsel against such dangerous liaisons, because ‘everything is dangerous’ as Foucault has said, but rather to promote a deeper understanding of how feminist ideas can become the tools of powerful actors. New thinking and new activist strategies will always be necessary to counter the depoliticising effects of institutionalisation and the next ascendancy of protective representations of women, as the long history of feminist engagement with international law and institutions shows.

Bio

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 publications include chapters in Hilary Charlesworth and Jean-Marc Coicaud (eds), Fault 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).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk