Dianne Otto

Power and Danger: Feminist Engagement with International Law Through the UN Security Council

In this paper, I examine the dilemmas of over a decade of efforts by feminist peace and human rights advocates to engage with the UN Security Council. These efforts have born fruit in 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 I am concerned about the concessions that have been 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. My goal is not to counsel against such dangerous liaisons because, after all, ‘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 and new thinking about how this can be contested.

From ‘Reluctance’ to ‘Exceptionalism’: The Australian Approach to Domestic Implementation of Human Rights

Dianne Otto teaches law at the University of Melbourne. I would like to thank my research assistant, Annie Pettitt, for all her assistance through many discussions and helpful research, which was funded by the Australian Research Council. email: d.otto@law.unimelb.edu.au ©2001 Dianne Otto (text) ©2001 Jane Cafarella (cartoon) The Committee [on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination] has apparently failed to grapple with our unique and complex history.

Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security: An Introduction

Collective security and peacekeeping, one of its progeny, have traditionally been thought to have little relevance to women, apart from providing a means to provide for their protection. Yet it takes only a moment’s reflection to see the gendered shape of this thinking, which casts military men and diplomats as the primary actors, and women, often together with children, as the vulnerable potential victims whose defence and rescue help to motivate or even legitimate military intervention — whether forceful or with the consent of the state in question. This gendered schemata continues to pervade laws, policies and practices relating to the maintenance of international peace and security, as seen with the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which both relied heavily on the rationale of protecting women and advancing ‘women’s rights’ to shore up waning public support in the west.1 The same rationale is also frequently used to explain and justify peacekeeping and the engagement of the international community in post-conflict reconstruction. Through these means, the well-worn gender hierarchy, of masculine capability associated with strength and female vulnerability connected to lack, is constantly repeated and reconstituted, even in those places where the international community claims that it is helping to construct post-conflict societies that respect and promote women’s equality.

Queering Gender [Identity] in International Law

ABSTRACT In a growing number of countries, developments in domestic law concerning transgendered people are moving towards a more social approach to recognising and regulating gendered bodies. International developments – illustrated here by the Yogyakarta Principles - appear to be taking a different course in which (bio)logic and heteronormative family forms are uncritically embraced. This article provides examples from the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women which illustrate a reluctance to fully pursue the opportunities opened by new understandings of sex/gender and the related unwillingness to address gendered discrimination suffered by men and other genders. To counter the reinstatement of biology as foundational in gender, the article argues for more feminist and queer coalitional work and the adoption of a performative understanding of ‘sex’. A more liberatory and inclusive conception of gender should be pursued, without obscuring the specificity and diversity of the human rights abuses felt by those who are, or who are perceived as, transgendered.

Beyond Stories of Victory and Danger: Resisting Feminism’s Amenability to Serving Security Council Politics

Feminist responses to the Security Council’s agenda on women, peace and security, which commenced with the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1325 (SCR 1325) in 2000,1 have been overwhelmingly celebratory, although feminist accounts of danger are mounting. While I understand the reluctance to cast a critical gaze over such an avowedly activist project,2 as it can feel like a betrayal of feminist activism and look like playing into the hands of those who are hostile to feminism, holding back from critical analysis gives credence to the idea that a distinction can be drawn between activism and critique. As Carol Cohn avers, with reference to ‘tensions’ between academic and activist approaches to SCR 1325, ‘perhaps we academics and researchers should slow down, engage in the appreciative aspect of critique and see what we can learn from it, before focussing on its possible dangers or limitations’.3 She is, I think, reflecting the view that feminist critique is damaging to activism.