Abstract
Notwithstanding the recognition of select gender-based crimes as international crimes and the International Criminal Court’s prosecutors’ professed commitment to seeking justice for gender-based crimes, core doctrines of international criminal law (ICL) obstruct accountability for gendered violence. This article identifies the overlooked gendered implications of a few substantive pillars of ICL: a de facto insistence on a connection to war (“war fetish”), a preoccupation with powerful men, and a focus on the “mastermind” of the crime to the exclusion of other culpable perpetrators.
These substantive pillars, some long-standing and some more recently erected, obscure the vast landscape of gender-based crimes and narrow accountability to a thin slice of gendered violence. The article examines ICL’s current architecture, revealing the ways it systematically shields perpetrators and proposes steps to remodel it to better accommodate the important goal of combatting gender-based harms.
Recommended Citation
Caroline L. Davidson,
The Gender of International Criminal Law,
47
Mich. J. Int'l L.
261
(2026).
Available at:
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol47/iss2/4