A sequel to Bauer and Dawuni's pioneering study on gender and the judiciary in Africa (Routledge, 2016), International Courts and the African Woman Judge examines questions on gender diversity, representative benches, and international courts by focusing on women judges from the continent of Africa. Drawing from postcolonial feminism, feminist institutionalism, feminist legal theory, and legal narratives, this book provides fresh and detailed narratives of seven women judges that challenge existing discourse on gender diversity in international courts. It answers important questions about how the politics of judicial appointments, gender, geographic location, class, and professional capital combine to shape the lives of women judges who sit on international courts and argues the need to disaggregate gender diversity with a view to understanding intra-group differences. International Courts and the African Woman Judge will be of interest to a variety of audiences including governments, policy makers, civil society organizations, students of gender studies, and feminist activists interested in all questions of gender and judging.

Lack of diversity within the judiciary has been identified as a legitimacy concern in domestic settings, and the last few years have seen increasing attention to this question at the international level. This book analyses the implications of identity and diversity across numerous international adjudicatory bodies.

Between 2000 and 2015, women ascended to the top of judiciaries across Africa, most notably as chief justices of supreme courts in common law countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Zambia, but also as presidents of constitutional courts in civil law countries such as Benin, Burundi, Gabon, Niger and Senegal. Most of these appointments was a "first" in terms of the gender of the chief justice. At the same time, women are being appointed in record numbers as magistrates, judges and justices across the continent. While women’s increasing numbers and roles in African executives and legislatures have been addressed in a burgeoning scholarly literature, very little work has focused on women in judiciaries. This book addresses the important issue of the increasing numbers and varied roles of women judges and justices, as judiciaries evolve across the continent. Scholars of law, gender politics and African politics provide overviews of recent developments in gender and the judiciary in nine African countries that represent north, east, southern and west Africa as well as a range of colonial experiences, postcolonial trajectories and legal systems, including mixes of common, civil, customary, or sharia law. In the process, each chapter seeks to address the following questions: What has been the historical experience of the judicial system in a given country, from before colonialism until the present? What is the current court structure and where are the women judges, justices, magistrates and other women located? What are the selection or appointment processes for joining the bench and in what ways may these help or hinder women to gain access to the courts as judges and justices? Once they become judges, do women on the bench promote the rights of women through their judicial powers? What are the challenges and obstacles facing women judges and justices in Africa? Timely and relevant in this era in which governmental accountability and transparency are essential to the consolidation of democracy in Africa and when women are accessing significant leadership positions across the continent, this book considers the substantive and symbolic representation of women’s interests by women judges and the wider implications of their presence for changing institutional norms and advancing the rule of law and human rights.

Current histories seem to suggest that men alone have been capable of the development of ideas, analysis, and practice of international law until the 1990s. Is this the case? Or have others been erased from the collective images of this history, including the portrait gallery of notables in international law? Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces? investigates the slow and late inclusion of women in the spheres of knowledge and power in international law. The forty-two textual and visual representations by a diverse team of passionate portraitists represent women and gender non-conforming people in international law from the fourteenth century onwards around the world: individuals and groups who imagined, developed, or contested international law; who earned their living in its institutions; or who, even indirectly, may have changed its course. This rich volume calls for a critical identification of the formal and informal institutional practices, norms, and rituals of (white) masculinities, both in the past and in the research of international law today. By abandoning reductive histories, their biased frames, and tacit assumptions, this work brings previously unseen glimpses of international law and its agents, ideas, causes, behaviour, norms, and social practices into the spotlight.

The Research Handbook on Law and Courts provides a systematic analysis of new work on courts as governing institutions. Authors consider how courts have taken on regulating fundamental categories of inclusion and exclusion, including citizenship rights. Courts’ centrality to governance is addressed in sections on judicial processes, sub-national courts, and political accountability, all analyzed in multiple legal/political systems. Other chapters turn to analyzing the worldwide push for diversity in staffing courts. Finally, the digitization of records changes both court processes and studying courts. Authors included in the Handbook discuss theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches to studying courts as governing institutions. They also identify promising areas of future research.

This book examines the factors that facilitate the inclusion of women on high courts, while recognizing that many courts have a long way to go before reaching gender parity. Why did women start appearing on high courts when they did? Where have women made the most significant strides? To address these questions, the authors built the first cross-national and longitudinal dataset on the appointment of women and men to high courts. In addition, they provide five in-depth country case studies us to unpack the selection of justices to high courts in Canada, Colombia, Ireland, South Africa, and the United States. The cross-national lens and combination of quantitative analyses and detailed country studies examines multiple influences across region and time. Focusing on three sets of explanations —pipelines to high courts, domestic institutions, and international influences- analyses reveal that women are more likely to first appear on their country's high court when traditional ideas about who can and should be a judge erode. In some countries, international treaties, regional emulation, and women's international NGOs play a role in disseminating and linking global norms of gender equality in decision-making. Importantly, while informal institutions and reliance on men-dominated networks can limit access, women are making substantial strides in their countries' highest courts where the supply grows, and often where selectors have incentives to select women. Further, sustained pressure from advocacy organizations-at the local, national, and global levels-contributes to some gains. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit www.ecprnet.eu The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.

This book explores the reproduction of colonialism at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and examines international criminal law (ICL) vs the black body through an immersive format of art, music, poetry, and architecture and post-colonial/critical race theory lens. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the book interrogates the operationalisation of the Rome Statute to detail a Eurocentric hegemony at the core of ICL. It explores how colonialism and slavery have come to shape ICL, exposing the perpetuation of the colonial, and warns that it has ominous contemporary and future implications for Africa. As currently envisaged and acted out at the ICC, this law is founded on deceptive and colonial ideas of ‘what is wrong’ in/with the world. The book finds that the contemporary ICL regime is founded on white supremacy that corrupts the law’s interaction with the African. The African is but a unit utilised by the global elite to exploit and extract resources. From time to time, these alliances disintegrate with ICL becoming a retaliatory tool of choice. What is at stake is power, not justice. This power has been hierarchical with Eurocentrism at the top throughout modern history. Colonialism is seen not to have ended but to have regerminated through the foundation of the ‘independent’ African state. The ICC reproduces the colonial by use of European law and, ultimately, the over-representation of the black accused. To conclude, the book provides a liberated African forum that can address conflicts in the content, with a call for the end of the ICC’s involvement in Africa. The demand is made for an African court that utilises non-colonising African norms which are uniquely suited to address local conflicts. Multidisciplinary in nature, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international criminal law, criminal justice, human rights law, African studies, global social justice, sociology, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and philosophy.