Gender and global justice: Lu’s justice and reconciliation in world politics

ABSTRACT

Catherine Lu’s important book argues that global justice must be conceived in structural terms, paying special attention to the way this approach applies to colonialism and its legacies. Lu shows how our states system perpetuates colonial injustice, and how deconstructing or disaggregating nation states reveal the ways that colonial legacies continue to permeate contemporary problems of justice. In this essay, I apply these arguments to key issues and institutions of global gender justice, that is, issues of ‘equality and autonomy for people of all sex groups and gender identities,’ focusing especially on problems of women’s rights and problems with global dimensions, which can be thought of as a subcategory of gender justice (Htun and Weldon 2018). Drawing on recent feminist analyses of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), I show how Lu’s approach illuminates our thinking about the justice of these institutions. Considering the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women (violence against Native American and Indigenous women more generally) further highlights the limitations of these institutions and the strength of the structural approach to global justice. Conversely, I also use these examples to assess the adequacy of Lu’s approach for guiding action, especially for those grappling with questions of institutional design and policy development. In each case, understanding gender justice initiatives as attempts to address structural injustice helps to understand the advantages and limits of various strategies of institutional design and reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• global justice
• ICC
• CEDAW
• MMIW
• structural injustice
• Iris Young

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Lu also addresses many other issues and questions, including issues of reconciliation, and issues other than gender, but I focus my attention here just on this theme of structural injustice and its relation to gender for reasons of space.

² VAW was not included in the original text of CEDAW (see Htun and Weldon, 2018).

³ The Optional Protocol was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 6 October 1999, and in force from 22 December 2000. As of October 2016, the Protocol has 80 signatories and 108 parties.

⁴ Note that this is not a case of ‘protecting brown women from brown men,’ in Spivak’s pithy terms. This is about protecting women on Indian Land from perpetrators of violence, the vast majority of whom are non-Indigenous.

⁵ An earlier report found that Status Indian (Indigenous) women between the ages of 25 and 44 were five times more likely than all other women of the same age to die as the result of violence (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada 1996; Amnesty International 2004.)

⁶ See Derrickson v. Derrickson [1986] 1 S.C.R. 285 which held that provincial matrimonial property laws cannot take effect on reserves because reserve lands fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government under section 91(24) of the Constitution.