Centring Care in International Law

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. 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. 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. 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? The question is addressed across four phases: concept refinement and theory development, by drawing on novel theoretical and methodological resources of feminist care theorisation to ask new questions of international law; generation of new and unique 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; methodological innovation in the ethnographic study of international law in order to ’surface’ care practices and their legal effects in international law-making institutions; and finally, advancing a prefigurative feminist legal methodology in order to produce international law outputs ‘as if’ care were at its centre. By centring care, this groundbreaking project will offer new ways to understand the core principles, institutions and processes of international law.