CFP: Women and International Criminal Law

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From the FLP mailbox, this CFP:

Call for Papers: Women & International Criminal Law
Special Issue of the International Criminal Law Review
Dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald

The International Criminal Law Review invites submissions for its 2010  special issue entitled “Women and International Criminal Law,” to be  guest-edited by Diane Marie Amann, University of California, Davis,  School of Law; Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Temple University Beasley School of  Law; and Beth Van Schaack, University of Santa Clara School of Law.

The  Special Issue is dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald, a pathbreaker in  international criminal law who has served as Chief Judge for the U.S.  Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a Judge on the  International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a member of  the Iraq Intelligence Commission, Co-Chair of the American Society of  International Law Task Force on the International Criminal Court, and  Chair of the Board of Directors of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

This special issue is devoted to the topic of women and international  criminal law. Although the majority of the articles have been solicited  from prominent academics and practitioners in the field of international
criminal law and feminist jurisprudence, the editors have reserved  several slots for submissions in response to this call to papers.  Submissions should be inspired by this theme statement:

Special Issue Theme: Women & International Criminal Law

The law, it has been noted, “has not always served women well.”  The critique extends readily to international law.  Until very recently, women were absent from the processes of  international law formation and enforcement, and invisible within  substantive law reflective of the male experience. Mirroring the  public/private divide running through much of law and society, the law,  and those with the power to use it, tended to treat all forms of gender  violence as opportunistic, peripheral, or private crimes reflecting  personal motives and desires unconnected to issues of international  importance.

Thanks to the tireless work of committed advocates, jurists  and diplomats, international criminal law now treats many forms of  gender violence as prosecutable offences against the physical and mental  integrity of the victim. With the promulgation of the Statute of the  International Criminal Court and the voluminous jurisprudence of the ad  hoc criminal tribunals, the law now sanctions the prosecution of gender  crimes as war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and the  predicate acts of genocide.

Women have stood front and center to push these developments. Other  international institutions often are dominated by men.   Yet women have  served in top posts in all of the modern tribunals, as Presidents  (Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, Navanethem Pillay, and Renate Winter),  Registrar (Dorothee de Sampayo Garrido-Nijgh), Chief Prosecutors (Louise  Arbour and Carla Del Ponte), Deputy Prosecutors (Fatou Bensouda), Gender  Advisors (Patricia Viseur Sellers and Catharine MacKinnon), and in many  other judicial, prosecution, defense, and administrative capacities.

The tribunals are approaching gender parity in staffing, although women  remain concentrated in the lower professional grades.   International  criminal law is thus one area of international law in which women have  made headway in terms of substantive law and institutional access;  still, significant obstacles remain to ensure a robust system of gender  justice in the face of continued violations.

The field of international criminal law nears a watershed moment, as ad  hoc tribunals wind down and the International Criminal Court becomes  fully operational.  This opportune time invites reflection on whether  international criminal law should be considered a feminist project.  Accordingly, this volume offers sustained study of how international  criminal law affects women and how women have affected international  criminal law. We welcome submissions on the following topics:

* Can, and has, international criminal law improved the material  conditions of women’s lives and promoted the dignity of women?
* Is participation in international criminal justice liberating and  transformative, or alienating and regressive?
* What legal reforms, procedural devices, advocacy strategies, and  institutional arrangements can be employed to ensure that women  experience the former and not the latter?
* Does fixation on criminal penalties constrain imagination and  implementation of other ways to respond to the needs, demands, and  aspirations of women in situations of armed conflict, mass violence,  abuse, and repression?
* How have women as activists, victims, lawyers, and perpetrators changed the field?
* How has the gender jurisprudence advanced, or impeded, the  development of international criminal law?
* Has international criminal law changed the way we think about  violence against women?

This volume looks beyond sex crimes to consider multiple ways that  women experience war and repression, as agents of change, as victims,  and as perpetrators.   The study adopts critical perspectives to  challenge conceptual boundaries between and within public  international law, international criminal law, international  humanitarian law, and international human rights that tend to eclipse  the intersectionalities of women’s identities and to fragment women’s  experiences with violence, based upon whether violence occurs in a time  of war or peace, whether it occurs at home or in a detention center, or  whether the perpetrator is a state actor or a private person. Our hope  is that the new perspectives presented in this collection will advance  our thinking about gender and international law across a number of  disciplines.   We welcome your participation in this historic effort to  examine the impact of international criminal law on women, and vice  versa.

Special Issue Logistics

The volume will be published in spring 2011. Judge Wald and other  contributors will present their works at a roundtable hosted at the  American Society of International Law’s Tillar House in Washington,  D.C., on October 29, 2010, days before the tenth anniversary of the  first U.N. Security Council resolution on Women, Peace and Security.

To ensure anonymity in the selection phase, please submit a solid draft  essay or article, in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 words, with all  identifying information redacted, to Kathleen A. Doty, by way of an  e-mail attachment in Word format (kadoty@ucdavis.edu), by April 15,  2010.   Please note the paper’s title (which should match exactly the  title of the redacted paper) and your name and contact information in  the body of the e-mail.

Once papers have been selected, they will be subject to a full edit and  peer review in advance of the October roundtable. The final draft of the  paper will be due no later than March 1, 2011, and should adhere to the  International Criminal Law Review style sheet, which is available here.

-Bridget Crawford

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