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Susan Harris Rimmer and Kate Ogg (Eds.): Research Handbook on Feminist Engagement with International Law Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, ISBN: 2019 978 1 78536 391 7 Lynsey Mitchell1 

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

The editors of this ambitious handbook have successfully curated a collection of papers that seek to highlight the relevance and usefulness of feminism in international law. This collection showcases the breadth and depth of recent feminist engagements with international law, and as such seeks to position feminist approaches as both a tool and method of excavation within critical international legal scholarship. However, rather than merely offering a critique and summary of current and historical feminist legal scholarship, this collection provides a roadmap for using feminist legal methodologies to both engage in critiques of, and contribute alternative means of conceptualising, a whole host of international law disciplines as well as interdisciplinary legal issues. From Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright’s seminal article ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’ in 1991 (Charlesworth et al. 1991), the introduction of the text under review notes that there has been an explosion in feminist literature in international law throughout the 1990s and 2000s, all of which attempted to offer new perspectives and solutions to issues such as; human rights violations (Bunch 1990), humanitarian intervention (Engle 2007; Orford 2003), sexual violence during conflict (Gardam 1997; Mackinnon 1994), and the gendered nature of the international legal system itself (as well as a host of other issues that mainstream international law scholarship had tended to ignore). This ‘explosion’ of new perspectives, methods, and methodologies soon generated a series of edited collections that provided a summary and critique of the emerging discipline of feminist international law (Kouvo and Pearson 2011; Buss and Manji 2005). However, the editors of this collection concede that, despite this increase in feminist scholarship there has been little transformation outside the academy, which has led to “a sense of pessimism” (2) “despair” (2) and even a lingering unease that feminist perspectives are “no longer in vogue” (8). Additionally, the editors also concede that, while attempting * Lynsey Mitchell [email protected] 1



Abertay University, Dundee, UK

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to challenge and dismantle dominant hierarchies in law, feminist legal scholarship has all too often been dominated by white Western feminists whose solutions and priorities have often alienated women of colour and non-Western scholars (Kapur 2002; Mutua 2001) leading to so called schisms and fractures within feminist scholarship (7). These accusations have loomed large over feminist legal scholarship and in recent years had come to besiege the discourse. Thus, in the introduction to this collection, the editors address head-on, these tensions within feminist legal scholarship. They acknowledge that much of this dissolution and disquie