Karen Knop – författare

The growth of the women's international human rights movement worldwide and its emergence as a field of study has led to a valuable but increasingly self-contained literature, often cut off from developments in feminist legal theory, on the one hand, and conceptions of the different legal contexts in which international human rights operate, on the other. This collection of essays brings together feminist scholars in a number of areas including international law, rights, citizenship, queer theory, constitutional law and migration studies to reflect on gender and human rights. The result is a series of fresh and sophisticated essays that situates women's international human rights in broader debates about feminism, rights and international society, providing a variety of methods and vantage points. The essays both offer perspectives on gender and human rights drawn from women's experiences with national laws and contribute to feminist analyses of law in such international and transnational arenas as war, colonialism and globalization.

The growth of the women's international human rights movement worldwide and its emergence as a field of study has led to a valuable but increasingly self-contained literature, often cut off from developments in feminist legal theory, on the one hand, and conceptions of the different legal contexts in which international human rights operate, on the other. This collection of essays brings together feminist scholars in a number of areas including international law, rights, citizenship, queer theory, constitutional law and migration studies to reflect on gender and human rights. The result is a series of fresh and sophisticated essays that situates women's international human rights in broader debates about feminism, rights and international society, providing a variety of methods and vantage points. The essays both offer perspectives on gender and human rights drawn from women's experiences with national laws and contribute to feminist analyses of law in such international and transnational arenas as war, colonialism and globalization.

The emergence of new states and independence movements after the Cold War has intensified the long-standing disagreement among international lawyers over the right of self-determination, especially the right of secession. Knop shifts the discussion from the articulation of the right to its interpretation. She argues that the practice of interpretation involves and illuminates a problem of diversity raised by the exclusion of many of the groups that self-determination most affects. Distinguishing different types of exclusion and the relationships between them reveals the deep structures, biases and stakes in the decisions and scholarship on self-determination. Knop's analysis also reveals that the leading cases have grappled with these embedded inequalities. Challenges by colonies, ethnic nations, indigenous peoples, women and others to the gender and cultural biases of international law emerge as integral to the interpretation of self-determination historically, as do attempts by judges and other institutional interpreters to meet these challenges.