International Journal of Refugee Law: Special Issue on Gender

The International Journal of Refugee Law has released a Special Issue on Gender. Here's the abstract:

This special issue emerges from conversations among the members of the International Journal of Refugee Law Editorial Board about ways to present an overview of key themes and issues in distinct areas of refugee law. The goal of having an open call for a special issue on gender was to invite scholars from around the world to come forward with research reflecting current concerns and projects, and thereby to develop a sense of the state of this important branch of refugee law practice and scholarship.

A great deal has changed since the late 1980s and 1990s when scholars and advocates began devoting serious attention to how women did or did not fit into the refugee law paradigm. The early frontier of this battle was, of course, that the refugee definition focused on the public sphere and, shaped as it was by the backdrop of the Cold War, male political dissidents were the paradigmatic case informing interpretations of the pivotal concept of ‘being persecuted’. These two factors in combination led inexorably to a focus on men’s experiences that risked overlooking or minimizing the ways in which women experience persecution. An early flashpoint came from the obvious concern that, in comparison with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and indeed the United Nations Charter, neither women nor sex were mentioned in the Refugee Convention.

-KitJ