Research team
Expertise
My work offers a multidisciplinary lens on how marginalised actors (re)shape international lawmaking. Both mainstream legal theory and existing feminist critique share one reflex: they draw a line between law and non-law—anchored in Article 38 of the ICJ Statute—and then judge feminist and LGBTQ+ lawmaking as "failed" for not crossing it. My doctoral research refused this line-drawing. Blending legal theory, gender studies, and decolonial thought, I built a framework that treats legality as plural, contested, and performed, and asks what the blurring of law and non-law reveals. I demonstrated it across three case studies: (1) Shadow lawmaking: how feminist activists sustained the ambiguous legal status of the Women, Peace and Security agenda to preserve its relevance at the UN Security Council. (2) Drag-like treaty-making: how the Yogyakarta Principles negotiators mimicked the making of a human rights treaty, exposing the theatricality of international lawmaking. (3) Lawmaking through silence: how LGBTQ+ activists broke deadlocks in the Crimes Against Humanity Convention by refusing to define "gender" in the treaty draft. For that, I employed a robust multi-method approach: critical discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews, and thematic coding.