Anka Godjevac Subbotić

Standing Alone but Standing Tall: A Female Perspective of International Law from the Interwar Yugoslavia

The interwar period was the best of times and was the worst of times. Following changes to the institutional and political landscape of Europe and beyond in the aftermath of the World War I, the new international legal order enthused the oppressed and unprivileged with the nascent liberal aspirations of a democratic world. International law was reinvented and reinforced with the sense of possibility and progress, while internationalism and universalism were upped to a new level of global governance in the form of the League of Nations. Those times witnessed some extraordinary individuals who personally experienced all illusions and realities of these changes, and how internationalism turned hostile and universalism failed to become egalitarian. Anka Godjevac Subbotić (Anka Godyevatz Soubbotitch, Анка Гођевац Субботић), the first and only female international lawyer of the interwar Yugoslavia, was one of these exceptional personalities. As an international lawyer, scholar, activist, feminist, journalist and novelist, active both in Yugoslavia and abroad, she was the pioneer of combining feminism and international law in the Balkans. This contribution aims to be the story about international law told both from her national and gender perspectives, set in different interwar contexts: of women in Serbia and Yugoslavia, of women in international law, and of the Balkans in international law and society. This will be the tale of international law told from different peripheries that only a woman in the interwar Yugoslavia and the Balkans could inhabit and experience.