Lawfare, CVE, and International Conflict Feminism

Abstract

This chapter looks at the political purchase of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in helping constitute the normative framework guiding and legitimizing laws and policies advanced under the rubric of CVE (countering violent extremism). It attends to how these have intersected with the work of the international criminal court (ICC) in new modalities of lawfare that have taken place against the backdrop of Security Council action, including its military interventions in Muslim majority countries. These intertwined projects—ICF, CVE and International Criminal Law—can be situated in the dominant structures of global governance that have rendered their driving logics the thinkable default option, and their legitimacy the dominant common sense for diverse groups, from feminist lawyers to military strategists. This analysis comes together in reading the Al Hassan case at the ICC as the grain of sand through which we examine the universe at the crossroads of Sharia panic, sex panic, and security panic