Centring Care in International Law

Introduction

Feminist work in international law predominantly focuses on harm. This focus has revealed the inadequacy of much international law in capturing women's gendered experiences of harm.

Legal Reform Opportunities

Further, this work has engaged productively with legal reform opportunities to change international law in ways that better capture gender harm. Nevertheless, there is increasingly acute feminist concern about the harm-focus for manifold reasons.

Structural Transformation

Fundamentally, the focus on the individualized and episodic experiences of (gender) harm provides an inadequate basis for the sorts of structural transformation of international law that feminist work ultimately seeks.

Project Overview

CAREINTLAW opens up and reorients international law scholarship away from its harm focus towards the considerable though as yet unexploited resources of a focus on care. The central research question asks:

• How does the conceptualisation, regulation and practice of care through international legal doctrine and institutions change our understanding of international law?

Research Phases

The question is addressed across four phases:

1. Concept Refinement and Theory Development: By drawing on novel theoretical and methodological resources of feminist care theorisation to ask new questions of international law.

2. Generation of New Legal Findings: On the conceptualisation and regulation of care under diverse regimes of international law, through the refinement of a theoretically-informed and inductively-guided doctrinal research approach.

3. Methodological Innovation: In the ethnographic study of international law in order to surface care practices and their legal effects in international law-making institutions.

4. Advancing a Prefigurative Feminist Legal Methodology: In order to produce international law outputs as if care were at its centre.

Conclusion

By centring care, this groundbreaking project will offer new ways to understand the core principles, institutions, and processes of international law.