Law & Methods - Spring 2024, 4th session

Law and Methods Seminar

Guest Speaker: Paola Zichi, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Warwick Law School

The so-called ‘historical turn’ in international law has sparked new debates on the source doctrine in international law. The recent interdisciplinarity and hybridisation of different academic fields has prompted a series of methodological and historiographical debates around what counts as legal sources, and therefore as legal evidence, and thus questioning the disciplinary boundaries of international law and legal history. In her work, she explores these debates in the field of feminist approaches to international law and women’s legal history, where a focus on conventional legal sources has been equated with a quest for inclusion of women in the legal canon. Instead, the presentation will rearticulate the relation between law, history and feminism in a way that doesn’t only focus in disrupting legal histories by adding women to the canon, but rather looks at how epistemological feminist approaches have developed through the law itself. In other words, the question will be not only how feminists use law as a political means or strategy for empowerment and/or reform, but rather how concepts within international law and feminism function as historical constructions in and of themselves. This leads to the foregrounding of the problem of the archive, of the unbalanced power relations in producing and constructing the archive of international law and problematizing what counts as legal sources as much as what counts as a feminist historical record.