This article focuses on the issue of domestic violence in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The analytical framework is comparative, emphasizing four factors and the interplay among them: shari'a (Islamic law), state power, intrafamily violence, and struggles over women's rights. The comparative approach historicizes the problem of domestic violence and impunity to consider the impact of transnational legal discourses (Islamism and human rights) on “local” struggles over rights and law. The use of shari'a creates some commonalities in gender and family relations in Muslim societies, notably the sanctioning and maintenance of male authority over female relatives. However, the most important issue for understanding domestic violence and impunity is the relationship between religion and state power. This relationship takes three forms: communalization, in which religious law is separate from the national legal regime; nationalization, in which the state incorporates religious law into the national legal regime; and theocratization, in which the national legal regime is based on religious law.

Religion, State Power, and Domestic Violence in Muslim Societies: A Framework for Comparative Analysis

(1997). Reinventing international law: Women's rights as human rights in the international community. Commonwealth Law Bulletin: Vol. 23, No. 3-4, pp. 1249-1262.

Reinventing international law: Women's rights as human rights in the international community †

The status of universalism has been much debated by feminists at the end of the twentieth century. Poststructuralist feminism is readily positioned in these debates as antagonistic to normative universalism. It is criticized as such: how is injustice to be judged and condemned if contestation and the openness of ungrounded universalism are the only ideals? This paper is a "sub-philosophical" enquiry into the normative commitments to equality implicit in poststructuralist feminism and its relationship to "actually existing" human rights for women as they have been re-worked by the international feminist movement. It argues that poststructuralist feminism can be used to provide support for one possible understanding of equality encoded in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It addresses feminist concerns over universal rights as androcentric and ethnocentric, arguing that extending human rights to women is compatible with poststructuralist commitments to anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism and required by the model of "deconstructive equality" implicitly shared by CEDAW and poststructuralist feminism.

/pdf/human-rights-for-women-an-argument-for-deconstructive-38bpwplsv7.pdf

Human rights for women: an argument for 'deconstructive equality'

On 20 September 2001, in an address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American people, President George W. Bush declared a ‘war on terror’. The concept of the ‘war on terror’ has proven to be both an attractive and a potent rhetorical device. It has been adopted and elaborated upon by political leaders around the world, particularly in the context of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. But use of the rhetoric has not been confined to the military context. The ‘war on terror’ is a domestic one, also, and the phrase has been used to account for broad criminal legislation, sweeping agency powers and potential human rights abuses throughout much of the world. This collection seeks both to draw on and to engage critically with the metaphor of war in the context of terrorism. It brings together a group of experts from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany who write about terrorism from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including international law and international relations, public and constitutional law, criminal law and criminology, legal theory, and psychology and law.

Fresh Perspectives on the 'War on Terror'

This article reviews the development of universal women's human rights since 1970. It begins by discussing how the international feminist movement influenced the development of women's legal human rights, and continues by reviewing three debates in the literature on women's rights. The first debate is whether human rights as originally formulated were actually men's rights; the second debate is about the relationship between culture and women's rights; and the third considers the effects of globalization on women's rights. The author defends a liberal approach to human rights via the principles of equality and autonomy for women, but also argues that the socialist approach is very important for women to achieve their economic human rights. Autonomy, moreover, is the means by which women can negotiate their own way between “Western” style personal liberation, and participation as they see fit in their own religions and cultures.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14754835.2011.619398

Universal Women's Rights Since 1970: The Centrality of Autonomy and Agency

https://penn.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/book/9780812201666/10.9783/9780812201666.116.pdf

Rhonda Copelon

Papers

Chapter 5. Intimate Terror: Understanding Domestic Violence as Torture