Vasuki Nesiah: “Victim: Gender as Tool and Weapon”

Northeastern Law’s Center for Global Law and Justice 2024 Speaker Series, Issues in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law

Featuring:
Vasuki Nesiah
Professor of Practice, Galatin School, New York University

Respondent:
Jelena Golubović
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and International Affairs
Northeastern University, College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Title:
“Victim: Gender as Tool and Weapon”

Abstract:
This chapter is a window into the work of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in relation to the International Criminal Court. ICF is a project of ideas and passions, legal proposals and policy orientations; in making knowledge claims about women in conflict it is also helping to interpolate that subject position. This intervention looks at the political purchase of ICF as part of the normative framework guiding and legitimizing “counterterrorism” policies with particular attention to how these have intersected with the work of the ICC in new modalities of lawfare. Against the backdrop of SC action, including its military interventions in Muslim-majority countries, I argue that the driving logics of ICF and ICL have come together in reinforcing and further legitimating hegemonic approaches to counterterrorism, including their often latent, but frequently explicit, Islamophobia. This chapter pays particular attention to how lawfare got defined in contexts such as Afghanistan and Mali, with particular attention to the Al-Hassan case at the ICC as the grain of sand through which we examine the universe at the crossroads of sharia panic, sex panic and security panic.

Questions? 
Please contact Professor Zinaida Miller at z.miller@northeastern.edu.

The lecture series is open to the Northeastern University community and the general public