Project description
Rethinking international law through care
International law has long struggled to reflect women’s lived realities. Feminist scholars have highlighted how its focus on harm, particularly gender-based harm, fails to capture the broader, structural injustices women face. While this focus has driven important legal reforms, many now argue it limits the transformative potential of feminist international law. With this in mind, the ERC-funded CAREINTLAW project takes a bold new approach: it shifts attention from harm to care. Specifically, it explores how legal systems conceptualise, regulate and practice care across different international regimes. Through ethnographic methods and prefigurative legal approaches, the project aims to reshape international law, putting care, not just harm, at its heart.
Objective
Feminist work in international law predominantly focuses on harm. This focus has revealed the inadequacy of much international law in capturing women’s gendered experiences of harm. Further, this work has engaged productively with legal reform opportunities to change international law in ways that better-capture gender harm. Nevertheless, there is increasingly acute feminist concern about the harm-focus for manifold reasons. Fundamentally, the focus on the individualized and episodic experiences of (gender) harm provides an inadequate basis for the sorts of structural transformation of international law that feminist work ultimately seeks. CAREINTLAW opens-up and reorients international law scholarship away from its harm focus towards the considerable though as yet unexploited resources of a focus on care. The central research question asks: How does the conceptualisation, regulation and practice of care through international legal doctrine and institutions change our understanding of international law? The question is addressed across four phases: concept refinement and theory development, by drawing on novel theoretical and methodological resources of feminist care theorisation to ask new questions of international law; generation of new and unique legal findings on the conceptualisation and regulation of care under diverse regimes of international law, through the refinement of a theoretically-informed and inductively-guided doctrinal research approach; methodological innovation in the ethnographic study of international law in order to ’surface’ care practices and their legal effects in international law-making institutions; and finally, advancing a prefigurative feminist legal methodology in order to produce international law outputs ‘as if’ care were at its centre. By centring care, this groundbreaking project will offer new ways to understand the core principles, institutions and processes of international law.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
DH1 3LE DURHAM
United Kingdom
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