Gaffield on international law after the Haitian Revolution

 Julia Gaffield (Georgia State University) has published "The Racialization of International Law after the Haitian Revolution: The Holy See and National Sovereignty" in the American Historical Review, 125:3 (June 2020), 841-68. Here's the abstract: 

The Haitian state shaped international definitions of sovereignty and national legitimacy after the Declaration of Independence in 1804. Haiti’s nineteenth century was not a period of isolation and decline; its first six decades were globally connected because the country’s leaders challenged their postcolonial inequality with diplomacy and state formation. This strategy aimed to establish Haiti’s membership in the “family of nations,” a central metaphor in European and American diplomatic, legal, and religious decision-making. In doing so, the Haitian state forced the Atlantic powers to redefine the boundaries of international relations. Haiti’s decades-long negotiations with the Catholic Church were tied to the racialization of the global hierarchy. After its Declaration of Independence, the Haitian state began clearing a theoretical path toward recognized sovereignty based on the dominant narrative that a society must be considered “civilized” on the world stage. But, as it cultivated internal policies and practices that rejected the dominant racist assumptions, these discriminatory ideologies became increasingly more explicit in international law.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Marino on feminism as international human rights movement

 Katherine M. Marino (UCLA) published Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement with the University of North Carolina Press in 2019.

From the publisher: 

This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domíngez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara González; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women’s suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today’s activists along class, racial, and national lines.

Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.

 Praise for the book:

“In this valuable contribution to the historiography of social movements in the Americas, Marino chronicles the impact of the women’s movement of leaders from six countries--Uruguay, Brazil, Panama, Cuba, the US, and Chile--in the interwar years . . . Marino successfully demonstrates that this was a vital period in Pan-American relations.”--Choice Reviews

“A brilliant and ambitious new account of the origins of global feminism . . . . Feminism for the Americas reconstructs a radical, transnational, and influential movement for women’s equality and social justice.”--International Feminist Journal of Politics

“The best book on Western Hemispheric feminism in at least two decades. . . . A necessary starting point for anyone contemplating research on inter-American feminism. . . . Marino has given us a masterpiece.”--Hispanic American Historical Review

The book has also won several book prizes, including the Ida Blom-Karen Offen Prize (International Federation for Research in Women's History), the 2020 Luciano Tomassini Book Award (Latin American Studies Association), and the 2020 Barbara "Penny" Kanner Award (Western Association of Women Historians).

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Special issue: Constitutional Legacies of Empire

 The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly has a special issue out on "The Constitutional Legacies of Empire," edited by Paul F. Scott (University of Glasgow). Here is the Table of Contents for vol.71, no.2 (summer 2020):

• Paul F. Scott, "Introduction: 'The Constitutional Legacies of Empire'"
• Jane Rooney, "Crown act of state and detention in Afghanistan"
• Courtney Grafton, "Foreign act of state and empire"
• Martin Clark, "'Something like the principles of British liberalism': Ivor Jennings and the international and domestic, 1920-1960"
• Devyani Prabhat, "Unequal citizenship and subjecthood: a rose by any other name...?"
• Donal K. Coffey, "Constitutional law and empire in interwar Britain: universities, liberty, nationality and parliamentary supremacy"
• T. T. Arvind and Daithí Mac Síthigh,"Constitutionalism in the periphery: revisiting the roots of self-rule movements in Ireland and India"
• Lindsay Stirton and Martin Lodge, "Constitutional legacies of empire in politics and administration: Jamaica's incomplete settlement"
• Paul F. Scott, "The Privy Council and the constitutional legacies of empire"
• Roger Masterman, "The constitutional influence of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on the UK apex court: institutional proximity and jurisprudential divergence?"

The articles by Donal Coffey and Martin Clark are available for download on an open-access basis.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi