The Law of War and Peace

This powerful, ground-breaking analysis explores how gendered, raced and heteronormative ways of thinking underpin the international laws that purport to regulate and even humanize armed conflict and bring peace. The authors show how feminist efforts to change this script have been co-opted to expand legal justifications for using military force because it will protect or rescue women. In consequence, long-standing feminist prescriptions for peace, including general disarmament, demilitarisation and redistributive economics, are marginalised and the many quotidian violences left unattended. * Professor Dianne Otto, University of Melbourne, Australia *
This book is a critical conceptual reckoning with the 20th century-laden structures and objectives of the laws of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Present-day wars unmask the gender fissures in doctrines such as military necessity, proportionality, and the use of force. The authors’ intentions, however, compel the reader to perceive the legitimacy of constructing a gender-responsive peace to truly achieve our security. * Patricia Viseur Sellers, Special Advisor for Gender to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court *
“He words me my women”. The observation of Cleopatra on Ceasar coursed through my mind as I read this book. Joy and despair! Joy at the clarity of the analysis and the accessible, compelling narrative –(you don’t need a legal back ground to enjoy this!) despair at the extent to which we have, indeed, been ‘worded’. The authors beautifully pull back their feminist lens providing a fuller picture to emerge, one which exposes how; the language of our WPS resolutions has been subverted of meaning when it comes to practice, how perhaps our focus or even ‘distraction’, on WPS has enabled exponential international violence to become legitimized, how gender is, perhaps, the determinative issue in law, war and peace and how there is an absolute imperative to expose at all times the duplicity that flows from the patriarchal assumptions which regulate them. This book shows that we know what they do and like Cleopatra we ‘will not be conquered’. * Madeleine Rees, Secretary General of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom *