Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article aims to show how, through a feminist methodological approach developed from iusfeminist doctrines, an analysis of the International Law of Refugees shows how it takes on an androcentric regulatory function. The ultimate objective is to demonstrate how, through the application of the iusfeminist approach, that women's refugee experiences are marked by the gender-based violence they suffer both at origin, on their journey, as well as in the State where they request to be recognized under the status of refugee protection. At the same time, it is the intention of this article to show how the reality of gender violence is not contemplated by the International Law of Refugees. The article will first illustrate, and in detail, what the premises of the feminist method are. Thus, a review of the elements of Haraway's ‘situated knowledge’ will be made, which suggests that knowledge is a virtue, and is traversed not only by the historical and cultural context in which the research takes place, but also by the gaze of the person who investigates. Second, the article will expose the premises of the feminist method that calls into question the alleged universality, objectivity and impartiality of International Refugee Law, while taking into account gender relations and the experiences of women. In the development of the feminist method that this article will carry out, it will be structured around the question of women, feminist practical reason and the principle of awareness. In relation to the third point of the feminist method, it will be described how the application of postcolonial feminism affects the regulation of the law of refugees, which allows the deconstruction of the concept of equality such as: non-discrimination and non-subordination as well as explicitly examining the hierarchies of colonial powers and gender at stake in the research process itself. As for the fourth point of the feminist method, Crenshaw's intersectionality is presented, which will make it easier for us to show the multiple factors that discriminate against refugees: gender-biological; sexual identity, sexual orientation-; race, cultural, social, economic, etc.After this first section of the research, the second presents the results of applying the values of the feminist method to the regulation of International Refugee Law. To this end, the first sub-section will expose the androcentrism inherent in the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. The Geneva Convention has been elaborated on masculine experiences and on the silence of women. This has meant that the interpretive framework of the refugee definition has been made from patriarchal structures, which leads to the homogenization and generalization of the male refugee experiences to all others. The first consequence of this is that many human rights violations committed against women have not been conceived as persecutory practices that entail protection through shelter. The result of this is that women find themselves in a position of not being subject to this Right because it seeks to universalize the male experiences that must be protected. The second sub-heading of this section indicates that in the International Law of Refugees the subjects "woman" and / or "feminine" have gone from being conceived as vulnerable subjects to subordinate and discriminated subjects. The most classical internationalist doctrine has been homogeneous when it has affirmed that refugee women are vulnerable subjects. In this article we position ourselves in the critical current that assumes that refugee women are subordinate and discriminated against. This distinction makes it possible to take vulnerability as an intrinsic issue of women and relate it to the fact that we live in patriarchal societies that create relationships of subordination and discrimination. Finally, and as a conclusion, "gender-based violence against women" will be conceptualized, for which we will rely on different international regulatory instruments of soft law in matters of gender equality and refugees: from the Convention on the Elimination of all forms Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW), as well as various Resolutions of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Thus, for this research, gender-based violence against women will be that which is suffered by women because they are women, -that is, because of their gender-, or where it affects them disproportionately. Within this category, sexual violence is understood to be included, and we shall explain why violence against women is conceptualized with the adjective "gender". In this article we recognize that gender violence can also be carried out by people whose gender is not the dominant male category. Thus, for this, we subscribe to the thesis that advocates overcoming the reductionist conceptualization of "gender equality" as equality between men and women, and therefore also that of "gender violence." The construction of gender has been developed under the male / female binary imperative, without taking into account the existence of other sexes, and also the construction of other genders. The result is that the principle of gender equality developed and internalized has been that of equality between men and women. Finally, within this section of conclusions we will point out how this gender violence affects the experiences of women refugees. Through this feminist analysis, it is concluded that violence against women based on gender directly interferes in the determination of refugee status. These constitute a form of persecution or may motivate the persecution itself. Therefore, the need to include the gender variable in the regulation of the granting of the Refugee Status is made clear to overcome the androcentrism with which this International Law of Refugees was configured. For this reason, we put forward that the maximum rules will be of no use to deal with refugee claims that present violence against women based on gender in their experiences; rather, they will have to be studied case by case to know how such violence configures either the “form" or the "motive" of the persecution, or both.  

In analyses of the relationship between literature and geopolitics I have turned on more than one occasion to a chapter in Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel where he contrasts the literary geographies in Jane Austen’s sentimental (“Silver Fork”) novels with Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels. Moretti points out that Austen, whose novels focus on a class-based marriage market, confines her geography to “a small homogenous England” (Moretti, 1998, p. 14). Her novels’ ideological perspective on space are unconcerned with the process of nation-building, while in contrast Scott, whose novels are mainly concerned with nation-building, constructs a much larger UK, one involved in a process of expansion, “the incorporation of the internal periphery into the larger unit of the state” (p. 40). The presumed methodological implication of Moretti’s contrast is that novelistic and other textual contributions to knowledge of geopolitics is afforded through expansive perspectives on space. The political geographer Peter Taylor challenges that implication in his analysis of “World Cities.” His investigation, which emphases the flows that shape much of global political economy, articulates a reduced rather than enlarged geographical perspective. In an inquiry that relies on what he refers to as “office geography data” (Taylor, 200, p. 5), Taylor’s spatial focus is on rooms. Moving on from analyses that shifted the “metageography” from the “mosaic of states” to the “networks of cities” (p. 11). In earlier inquiries, Taylor down-shifts to a still smaller space and analyzes the work in offices that contain some of the main protagonists in global political economy. In an analysis of “the global reach” of “networks of offices” operating in “world cities” (p. 11) his focus is on rooms filled with people involved in finance, accountancy, and legal services. If we imagine a distant future in which the files (both material and electronic) from those offices are recovered, the yield would be a mapping of the loci of control over twentieth and twenty-first century global commerce. To elaborate on that reflection, I want to turn back to a distant past and evoke a similar recovery of a mapping of global commerce, which also relied on room data, collected in a room in an ancient “world city.” A “social and economic history” dating from “the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries,” linked to middle level merchant classes, was available in a storage room adjoining a synagogue in Cairo (Goitein, 1960, p. 91). The ethnographic historian S. D Goitein recovered aspects of that history from letters and other papers – “discarded writings” – in the “Geniza” (storage room) of a Cairo synagogue. The documents constitute “the opposite of an archive”; they are “thrown away there only after they have lost all value to their possessors [and]…in most cases, only a long time after they had been written” (p. 92).Decades after Goitein interpreted the Geniza documents to recover aspects of a social and economic history, the novelist Amitav Ghosh perused some of the same documents to write a semi-fictional story of twelfth-century relationships among a Tunisian Jewish trader, Ben Yiju (mentioned in Goitein’s history), his Indian slave, Bomma, and their “merchant friends.” Following the protagonists on “an itinerary that links the Levant, or the eastern Mediterranean with the western shores of India (Shammas, 1993),” Ghosh’s novel recovers an ancient trading route in a story that begins with reference to Bomma’s “debut” in a 1942 article in Hebrew journal, based on a letter once stored in the Geniza. The novel picks up his story later with Bomma’s second appearance in another Geniza letter “translated and edited by Professor S.D. Goitein” (Ghosh, 1992, p 17). Like Goitein, Ghosh’s focus is on economic traders with humble backgrounds who left what he refers to as “those barely discernible traces that ordinary people leave upon the world” (p. 19). The discarded letters in the Cairo Geniza provided Ghosh with the resources to write a cultural history in the form of a travelogue that follows his protagonists’ medieval socio-economic itinerary. It’s a semi-fictional story that offers a view of exemplary mundane lives involved in ancient trading practices. Heeding the methodological implications of a room-oriented metageography, in the following section I shift to the experiences of more economically privileged characters in a home whose most significant feature is a room in a modernist glass and steel house whose design and changing uses are connected with global historical trajectories.

Interview with Iki Yos Piña Narváez.

Editorial Nº 49: Feminismos Críticos en Relaciones Internacionales: Nuevas Teorías, Metodologías y Agendas de Investigación  

Review of: San Román Gómez, A. (2021). Pensar el Tecnoceno, vivir el Cosmoceno. Distopía y esperanza en la era de la emergencia climática. Apeirón, 148 pp.

Firma Invitada section (Guest Signature section) of the 50th issue of Relaciones Internacionales journal.

Reseña de: Moreno Cantano, A.C. (2021). Tecnonacionalismo, guerra digital y videojuegos en China. Ediciones Complutense, 153 pp.

Reseña de Lois, M. y Akkaya, A. (2021). Estrategias descoloniales en comunidades sin estado. Madrid: Catarata, 213 pp.

Editorial Nº 50

Anarchy is one of the most important concepts in international theory; Thomas Hobbes is regularly invoked to illustrate the character and the consequences of anarchy. This article interrogates the theological aspect of Hobbes’ political philosophy in a bid to move beyond the distorting mythology that has grown up around ‘Hobbesian’ international relations. In doing so, it advances a positive argument that presents Hobbes as a theorist of interstate society that is made and unmade in the way that God made the universe. The concept of anarchy that is attributed to Hobbes is rooted in a theological dispute about the nature of God and the extent of his power, which entails a particular way of constituting and comprehending reality. When the implications of this dispute are taken into account, it becomes evident that anarchy is neither an objective feature of a world composed of independent states nor an inescapable logical condition that follows the absence of central authority. Rather, anarchy is an achievement of thought, born of a particular time and place, which seeks a reflection of itself in the mirror of eternity.