Gina Heathcote, Professor of Public International Law at Newcastle University, talks about her paper in which she examines the state of gender and feminist knowledge in times of genocide, the climate emergency, the disintegration of stable patterns of global governance, and the rise of significant anti-gender agendas globally. She makes two arguments.

First, that the first-world/global north ‘problem’ of contemporary crisis ignores the long term knowledge of resistance and protest to the very same forms of disorder that currently capture the gaze of Western scholars, whether environmental, state violence, or intersectional and quotidian harms, discrimination, and inequality.

Second, she reflects on the deep structural dimensions of international law that have thus far resisted feminist-informed change, arguing for attention to legal pluralism as a means to understand feminist resistance, protest, and legal change that undoes rather than reinforces the status quo.