Women's Rights in Armed Conflict Under International Law

We are delighted that GLAD member Professor Catherine O’Rourke has won the Irish Association of Law Teachers (IALT) Kevin Boyle prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship for her book Women’s Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law (Cambridge 2020).

Catherine’s book was nominated by Professor Rory O’Connell. To quote from his nomination:

In Women’s Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law (Cambridge 2020) Professor Catherine O’Rourke powerfully synthesises research across different areas of international law (human rights law, criminal law, humanitarian law, UN Security Council) to address the position of women in conflict.

She expertly deploys feminist institutional methodologies to chart the development of international law and practice in this area and to identify optimum ways of effecting change going forward.

The book is an output of the Political Settlements Research Programme which was funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

About Professor O'Rouke's book 

Laws and norms that focus on women's lives in conflict have proliferated across the regimes of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law and the United Nations Security Council. While separate institutions, with differing powers of monitoring and enforcement, implement these laws and norms, the activities of regimes overlap. Women's Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law is the first book to account for this pluralism and institutional diversity. This book identifies key aspects of how different regimes regulate women's rights in conflict, and how they interact. Using country case studies to reveal the practical implications of the fragmented protection of women's rights in conflict, this book offers a dynamic account of how regimes and institutions interact, the extent to which they reinforce each other, and the tensions and gaps in regulation that emerge.