About the project

Despite the recent ‘turn to history’ in international law, research on past international lawyers not gendered men remains scarce. Today’s leading scholarship in history of international law and international thought excludes them, just as it for a long time excluded scholars and professionals from the Global South. Yet even in the hegemonic spaces there were individuals of various gender identities and backgrounds who thought about and worked for an international (legal) order. The project starts by making manifest the need of redressing the ignorance or neglect of them and their inputs. Benefiting from research on national and transnational contexts, as well as studies in international relations, the project calls for a greater diversity in imagining and representing international lawyers.

The socially, politically and in some cases legally constructed understandings of gender which divide roles, expertise and agendas into binaries of masculine and feminine have a temporality – with territorial and sectorial differences and without linear trajectories of emancipation – but remain relevant, nevertheless. The ‘difference’ has not been dissolved by the increased understanding of its complexity brought about by the gender studies. The project reaches beyond the corrective move to ‘redress old history’ by the mere integration of ‘women’, at times hagiographic. The project is driven by the desire to question the conditions of agency in international law and thereby to discover and engage with a broader range of ideas, even if at times expressed in idioms foreign to law.

The project has recourse to multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to tackle its questions that broaden the scope of research on ‘international lawyers’ and connect to the various narratives of international law not only as an academic and professional field but also as an ideological and political frame, today arguably under existential threats. Beyond advancing a more complete understanding of the profession of international lawyers and the ideological and material situatedness of its professionals, the project seeks for new or forgotten ideas and engagements of law-making, decision-taking, managing conflicts and resources, protecting the environment and co-existing with differences. It thereby underlines how the narratives of international law and lawyers in their (perceived) intellectual lineages and professional traditions matter to contemporary understandings of the desirable and plausible international order(s).

Getting started: Research Questions

Where do today’s ‘women in international law’ come from, whom did they follow, and why? Where to find answers? The indexes of the most- read history books have male names only, just as the footnotes of prominent textbooks reflect primarily scholarship by men. Was agency by women really that non- existent in international law’s past? Or has it been rendered invisible amidst the wealth of inherited images continuously reminisced and the gendered appreciation of the limits of horizon? Was the discrimination merely a consequence of the general socio- economic context or could one identify particular continuities of agency and policy of discrimination— and ruptures? How did the discriminatory institutional structures and processes in international law compare to other intellectual disciplines and professional fields? How, where, and why did changes in the intellectual and professional community (start to) take place? 

Little of this is known. Research on ‘the history of international law’ focuses either on telling ‘the mainstream narrative’ or retelling it from a critical perspective, deepening or reproducing analyses of the often- times same intellectual and professional identities. Research on what is called the ‘margins’, ie ‘women and non- Europeans’,40 lacks in intellectual investment and resources, perhaps audiences, too. There is no palpable corpus of pertinent research to represent ‘competing visions of the international lawyer and the institutional and social arenas in which he or she operates’.41

Labelling?

This gendered and racialized lacuna of research, its breadth, causes, and consequences are not considered inside the scope of international law history, as such,42 but further qualified— kept apart— as women’s, feminist, gender, or ‘socio- legal’ history. As a result, women and their eventual agency remain marked by their gendered deviance. No matter how integrated, conforming, and thriving in intellectual and professional arenas, ‘women in international law’ emerge from the shadows of the monumental male genesis. They are typically represented as if they just now ‘entered history’, without ownership of the intellectual estate of international law. In images of history, ‘women in international law’ are born to unknown parents, lacking a pedigree, whereas their colleagues are protected under the wings of their ‘fathers and grandfathers in the profession’.43 

A vast research programme for the future

This volume questions such broad, non-historicized categories of ‘women and non-Europeans’ and the absoluteness of their marginalization. In doing so, it is inspired by diverse social sciences where the forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized have been re- thought and reconsidered in the past thirty years, resulting in moves beyond clear- cut narratives indulging reductive interpretations. Various dislocations of identity and selfhood of the colonizers and the colonized, for example, are currently maintained to have taken place early on, in diverse works in post- colonial studies, anthropology, and global history. Explorations of fractured subjectivities are starting to capture disjuncture, blending, and assimilations between those ‘white men’ and the othered, no longer featured as powerless and voiceless victims only. The exhibition that follows makes such granularities visible via portraits of ‘women in international law’ 

Selecting persons to be portrayed

Since Christine de Pizan’s birth around 1365 to the current day— the stretch of the sitters’ lives— stances to history, law, and art as well as ideas, norms, and practices referred to as ‘international law’ in present times lack any immutable meaning or reference. The same concerns ‘sex’, ‘gender’, ‘agency’, and other words or concepts in this volume. What sense can attention to sex and gender of ‘international lawyers’ make? The key interrogations in historiographical philosophy and methodology, such as the standing of individuals in history, must here be contended with in the simplest terms, by letting the process situate the experiment, as follows. Curating and exhibiting a portrait is here— tentatively— assimilated with intellectual and professional histories, primarily authored by insiders of international law. Those histories have a role in imprinting the names and faces that matter in the collective images of history and in the ‘canon of international law’. Portraiture is here considered also as an event, and as such, a visible result of a process. Its critical potential lies in who portrays whom, and how the event enrols. The current re- curation process— from the idea to the selection of sitters, contributors, workshop sessions, visual images— is tentatively employed as a mirror to examine the gendered ideological, intellectual, and social contexts of production and transmission of international law histories.

First task was to identify the portrayed individuals and groups. 

The women portrayed in the exhibition are not represented as exemplary in all regards, either as women, feminists, or lawyers. Some have been accused of moral errors or wrong judgement, such as, racial prejudice, co-optation with white supremacy, colonialism, exploitation, or cowardice. They are represented in the dynamics of their lives and professional choices, sometimes erring, at others failing, and often criss- crossing the paths of other protagonists. The ambition was not to get some extra- ordinary women framed on the wall but to push all ‘women in international law’ out the cabinet of curiosities of international law history, to normalize the sight of them— not to sacralize and idolize them. The differences in the political and legal standpoints are laid out in open. Several of the portrayed confronted each other in the spaces of international law, not always seeing eye to eye on themes they were active on. One prominent example of this is the context of family planning/ population control.

Since Christine de Pizan’s birth around 1365 to the current day— the stretch of the sitters’ lives— stances to history, law, and art as well as ideas, norms, and practices referred to as ‘international law’ in present times lack any immutable meaning or reference. The same concerns ‘sex’, ‘gender’, ‘agency’, and other words or concepts in this volume. What sense can attention to sex and gender of ‘international lawyers’ make, by which methodology? The key interrogations in historiographical philosophy and methodology, such as the standing of individuals in history, must here be contended with in the simplest terms, by letting the process situate the experiment, as follows. Curating and exhibiting a portrait is here— tentatively— assimilated with intellectual and professional histories, primarily authored by insiders of international law. Those histories have a role in imprinting the names and faces that matter in the collective images of history and in the ‘canon of international law’.



Portraiture is here considered also as an event, and as such, a visible result of a process. Much of its critical potential lies in who portrays whom, and how the event enrols. The current re- curation process— from the idea to the selection of sitters, contributors, workshop sessions, visual images— is tentatively employed as a mirror to examine the gendered ideological, intellectual, and social contexts of production and transmission of international law histories. re- curation had to face the same epistemological challenges all (intellectual) histories and biographies of marginalized figures typically face: the struggle to gather sources to prove a veracity and verifiability is arduous, due to the exact circumstances of marginalization or erasure one aims at alleviating. Research in history is governed by rules of methodological best practices. Intellectual histories in law typically focuson written sources.119 The practices of documenting and archiving in the intellectual and professional communities have been, however, as gendered as the conceptions of merit and value. As Rosemary Auchmuty writes, women often face ‘double marginalisation’, 120 an inferior position both in their life contexts and in the sources that remain.121

In whose name?

Ownership of women’s ideas is cumbersome to discern with clarity also because women do not necessarily appear as signatories of their ideas. In the practice of collective authorship, their role used to get diluted, if not directly appropriated by men, as Reut Paz explains.124 Women’s written works are, furthermore, often out of print and not digitalized, and no longer accessible.125 The Covid- 19 epidemy coinciding in timewith the work on the portraits aggravated the epistemological struggles. The portraitists coped the best they could, at times with disparate and ‘subaltern’ sources. 

As the process advanced, many portraitists increasingly saw their role— this is the curator’s subjective impression— less as aiming at the customary tone of intellectual history as ‘objective’ judgements of the achievements and intellectual value of their sitter but building on personal interpretations. The stratagem of portraiture may have become, in several cases, a playful way of unsettling the discourse, questioning the choices of themes and agents worthy of attention. The contributors were invited to explain their personal choice of the sitter and to spell out their sitter’s relation to international law. Here the experiment may have accomplished other kind of work: it created the portraitist, an openly subjective intervening self in a mutual relationship, the triangle formed by the portraitist, the sitter and the public/ viewers. As Jean- Luc Nancy discussed, the relationship between the portraitist and the sitter is not one-dimensional, but an exchange.126