J. Jarpa Dawuni - Böcker

The Oxford Handbook of Women and International Law interrogates women's interrelationship with international law's institutions, norms, and theoretical approaches. Women have made tremendous strides in international law by contributing to its development and application; wielding power as representatives and leaders in international organizations; and serving as judges, legal experts, and leaders of non-governmental organizations pushing the law in new directions. Yet, as this Handbook demonstrates, full equality remains elusive while new threats emerge. Climate change, the rise in nationalism, and anti-gender ideology pose serious challenges to multilateral institutions and norms that protect and empower women.Featuring diverse and interdisciplinary contributions from across the globe by leading scholars, international judges, and legal practitioners, this Handbook explores the ways in which international law might meet its unmet potential for achieving gender equality for women and girls, in all their diversity, and counter these emerging challenges. All the while, the book wrestles with both who "women" are and the extent to which international law's norms and institutions are effective and worthwhile spaces for emancipatory change.

African Women in Law is the first empirical study to offer a comprehensive and contextually rich portrait of African women in the legal profession. Drawing on 153 interviews across six countries, 249 survey responses from 21 countries, and secondary literature from 15 countries, this groundbreaking book explores the representation of women in the bar, bench, and legal academia. It traces historical developments, examines current realities, and sets the stage for future research.Introducing the HISP framework—History, Institutions, Social (norms), and Position(ality)—the book analyzes how structural forces shape women's roles in law. Through original concepts such as exclusion versus accommodation, racehorses versus workhorses, and the women's other-bar and other-bench, it challenges conventional narratives and highlights the diverse experiences of African women in law. The volume also builds on matri-legal feminist theory to offer a fresh lens for understanding gender and justice in African contexts.Rejecting essentialist approaches, the book argues that there is no single narrative of the lived experiences of African women in law. Instead, it reveals how women have emerged from the margins of a male-dominated field to assume leadership roles, often through innovative strategies that overcome systemic barriers. As the first comparative study of its kind, African Women in Law establishes a vital foundation for future scholarship and inspires new questions, methods, and theories for exploring law, gender, and governance across the continent.

Women judges are playing increasingly prominent roles in many African judiciaries, yet there remains very little comparative research on the subject. Drawing on extensive cross-national data and theoretical and empirical analysis, this book provides a timely and broad-ranging assessment of gender and judging in African judiciaries.Employing different theoretical approaches, the book investigates how women have fared within domestic African judiciaries as both actors and litigants. It explores how women negotiate multiple hierarchies to access the judiciary, and how gender-related issues are handled in courts. The chapters in the book provide policy, theoretical and practical prescriptions to the challenges identified, and offer recommendations for the future directions of gender and judging in the post-COVID-19 era, including the role of technology, artificial intelligence, social media, and institutional transformations that can help promote women’s rights.Bringing together specific cases from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa and regional bodies such as ECOWAS and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and covering a broad range of thematic reflections, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of African law, judicial politics, judicial training, and gender studies. It will also be useful to bilateral and multilateral donor institutions financing gender-sensitive judicial reform programs, particularly in Africa.The Open Access version of this book, available atwww.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9780429327865/gender-judging-courts-africa-jarpa-dawuni, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Women judges are playing increasingly prominent roles in many African judiciaries, yet there remains very little comparative research on the subject. Drawing on extensive cross-national data and theoretical and empirical analysis, this book provides a timely and broad-ranging assessment of gender and judging in African judiciaries.Employing different theoretical approaches, the book investigates how women have fared within domestic African judiciaries as both actors and litigants. It explores how women negotiate multiple hierarchies to access the judiciary, and how gender-related issues are handled in courts. The chapters in the book provide policy, theoretical and practical prescriptions to the challenges identified, and offer recommendations for the future directions of gender and judging in the post-COVID-19 era, including the role of technology, artificial intelligence, social media, and institutional transformations that can help promote women’s rights.Bringing together specific cases from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa and regional bodies such as ECOWAS and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and covering a broad range of thematic reflections, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of African law, judicial politics, judicial training, and gender studies. It will also be useful to bilateral and multilateral donor institutions financing gender-sensitive judicial reform programs, particularly in Africa.The Open Access version of this book, available atwww.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9780429327865/gender-judging-courts-africa-jarpa-dawuni, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Intersectionality and Women's Access to Justice, edited by J. Jarpa Dawuni, propounds layered intersectionality as a paradigm for examining how gendered factors affect women's access to justice, whether as judges or litigants. Through intersectional and decolonial frameworks, the contributors analyze the lived experiences of women and their access to justice by situating the courtroom as both a spatial and a temporal arena for seeking justice (as litigants) and for seeking access to the bench (as judges). This book examines patterns of mutually reinforcing discriminatory practices that women share based on common gender identities and depending on which identities are at play at a given point in time in both traditional and statutory courts. The book provides recommendations for various justice sector providers.