Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV) has become 'hyper-visible' in international criminal justice, yet scholars disagree whether this is a good thing for feminism or not.
In focusing on the normative question of whether international criminal law can be a force for good, the empirical question, namely what exactly happens when critical concepts such as gender are incorporated into international criminal justice institutions has been neglected. Drawing on 63 interviews at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and in Uganda, this paper argues that a gender backlash has been fomenting in international criminal justice with some practitioners expressing their discomfort with the ‘ubiquitous gender discourse’. They point out that the Court’s ‘gender agenda’ is in no small part driven from ‘outside’ and lament that it neglects sexual crimes against men. The paper shows how gender is recuperated by playing into legal sensibilities that see procedure (impartiality) rather than substantive change as the essence of (criminal) law. While patriarchy is often mystified as a ‘historical legacy’ in legal institutions, this paper explores the ongoing discursive and institutional reproduction of patriarchal assumptions by making them more palatable to contemporary sensibilities.
