In a Declaration appended to the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) Advisory Opinion concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2024, Judge Hilary Charlesworth drew attention to the discriminatory effects of Israel’s policies on Palestinian women and girls.^[1] Having written the conclusion to the 2019 collection, Feminist Judgments in International Law,^[2] Charlesworth now appeared to be delivering a ‘real life’ feminist judgment. Not only did her Declaration ‘ask the woman question’ by paying attention to the gendered implications of purportedly gender-neutral policies and practices,^[3] but it also showcased several feminist legal methodologies. For example, Charlesworth adopted a ‘multiple or intersectional approach’^[4] to discrimination in international law by demonstrating ‘how being both Palestinian and female in the Occupied Palestinian Territory may interact to cause serious disadvantage’.^[5] As Ntina Tzouvala points out, Charlesworth’s Declaration also rendered visible ‘the violence and indignities of the everyday’^[6] by focusing on issues such as water and mobility. In issuing this Declaration, Charlesworth made it clear that feminist legal methodologies such as these do not only belong in feminist scholarship or in the work of international bodies explicitly focused on women, such as the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. They deserve to be front and centre in the decisions of the most prominent international court concerning some of the most pressing international issues of our time. 

What can feminist approaches to international law offer in our present moment? At a time when an escalating climate emergency is seeing tropical cyclones threatening non-tropical areas of the Australian coastline and Los Angeles ablaze with wildfires in the winter, when bombs are raining down on civilians in Gaza and Ukraine, and when authoritarian capitalism seems to be displacing democracy and freedoms around the world, what is the value of intersectional analysis or an attentiveness to structural and quotidian forms of oppression? How can these feminist methodologies and others help to shed light on the harms that are occurring and chart a pathway out? As the post-Cold War international legal order seems to be unravelling, can feminist approaches to international law help us to reimagine international law anew?

This workshop will explore these questions by bringing together papers and reflections on themes such as:

• The role of feminism in international responses to genocide, apartheid and other atrocities;
• Feminist perspectives on populism and authoritarianism; 
• International law from below, feminist political economy, and Marxist feminist approaches to international law;
• Post-human and eco-feminist approaches to international law;
• Decolonial and abolitionist feminist approaches to international law;
• Queer feminism and the rise of transphobia;
• Feminist perspectives on international legal issues relating to AI, Big Tech and outer space;
• Feminist engagements with the history of international law and its salience for our current moment;
• Feminist modes of litigating and judging; 
• Prefigurative feminist legal projects, including people’s tribunals, feminist judgment projects, and alternative approaches to transitional justice; and
• The future of feminist legal theory and other feminist methodologies.

Submissions:

Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words and biographies of up to 200 words to anzsil.gsil@gmail.com by 1 August 2025.

If you have any queries, please direct them to Claerwen O’Hara: claerwen.ohara@unimelb.edu.au or Tamsin Paige: t.paige@deakin.edu.au

ANZSIL Gender, Sexuality and International Law Workshop

Organisers: Claerwen O’Hara (Melbourne Law School) and Tamsin Phillipa Paige (Deakin Law School), GSIL Co-Chairs.

Date:  Friday, 31 October 2025.

Place: Melbourne Law School, Melbourne Australia.

Theme:

^[1] Declaration of Judge Hilary Charlesworth in the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (19 July 2024), Part I.

^[2] Hilary Charlesworth, ‘Prefiguring Feminist Judgment in International Law’ in Loveday Hodson and Troy Lavers (eds) Feminist Judgments in International Law (Hart Publishing, 2019) 479

^[3] Rosemary Hunter, ‘Can Feminist Judges Make a Difference?’ (2008) 15 International Journal of the Legal Profession 7.

^[4] Declaration of Judge Hilary Charlesworth (n1) [5].

^[5] Ibid [8].

^[6] Ntina Tzouvala, ‘International law as a discipline in crisis’ (2025) 79(1) Australian Journal of International Affairs 71, 73.