''Similar to gender in the everyday, gender in international law is everywhere and nowhere.''

In this paper, Professor Heathcote examines the state of gender and feminist knowledge in times of genocide, the climate emergency, the disintegration of stable patterns of global governance, and the rise of significant anti-gender agendas globally. She makes two arguments.

First, that the first-world/ global north 'problem' of contemporary crisis ignores the long term knowledge of resistance and protest to the very same forms of disorder that currently capture the gaze of Western scholars, whether environmental, state violence, or intersectional and quotidian harms, discrimination, and inequality.

Second, she reflects on the deep structural dimensions of international law that have thus far resisted feminist-informed change, arguing for attention to legal pluralism as a means to understand feminist resistance, protest, and legal change that undoes rather than reinforces the status quo. 

Biography

Gina Heathcote is Professor of Public International Law at Newcastle University (UK); researching on feminist legal methodologies, international law, collective security and ocean governance. Her most recent book, Feminist Dialogues on International Law: successes, tensions, futures (OUP 2019) examines core international legal debates (expertise, fragmentation, sovereignty, institutions, authority) and the place of feminist legal thinking in the mainstream of public international law. Her forthcoming publications include, with Emily Jones, Sheri Labenski and Sidonia Lucia Kula, The Law of War and Peace: a gender analysis (Vol 2) (Bloomsbury 2026) and International Law of the Sea: a Feminist Analysis (Routledge 2026).