Some books you pick up because they are assigned. Others you pick up because something about the title refuses to leave you alone. Catherine O’Rourke’s Women’s Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law1 fell into the second category for me. It is not an easy read. It is dense, ambitious, and at times not so easy to understand, but it is also the kind of book that earns every page it asks of you. I started reading this book as a law student with a lot of questions, and when I finished reading the book, I understood why my questions were important. That, I think, says a lot about what O’Rourke has done with her book.
Catherine O’ Rourke is a Professor of Human Rights and International Law.2 Her work sits at the intersection of gender, conflict, and transitional justice. She often works with institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court Trust Fund for Victims to conduct policy research on various gender related issues.3 She has published in some of the most respected international law journals. This book had won the Kevin Boyle Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, awarded by the Irish Association of Law Teachers,4 and also received an honorable mention in the American Society of International Law’s Women in International Law Interest Group scholarship prize.5 Reading this book helps people think deeper about these issues, and she hopes this book will bring feminist work to a wider audience in international law.
The central question the book asks is candidly simple: When the world’s legal frameworks for protecting people in war were written, were women actually included?6 This question is not whether women were included as an afterthought, or a special category tucked into a side provision, but genuinely and fully included as combatants, as civilians, as people with rights that matter for reasons beyond their role as mothers or potential victims of sexual violence. The answer she arrived at after careful and patient analysis is essentially, “no”. Catherine O’Rourke builds her arguments methodically, letting the legal texts and the institutional record speak for themselves, and that’s what makes this book so difficult to dismiss.
What makes O’Rourke’s work brilliant is this particular skill where she makes the style of her argument legible without flattening it. She starts by explaining the relevant frameworks clearly enough that a reader unfamiliar with their specifics can follow the analysis with ease. Then, she shows you exactly where the system breaks or, more accurately, where the system never bothered to work in the first place.7 Once she points out the gap, it’s glaringly obvious, which only makes it more alarming that it went ignored for so long. There is a particular kind of intellectual discomfort that comes from reading something like this and thinking: ‘Why did no one say something about this earlier? Why was this considered normal?’ O’Rourke’s book provokes that feeling repeatedly, and it does not let you settle back into comfort.
She moves through several areas of international law, laws governing armed conflict, international human rights law, and the laws around war crimes and criminal accountability, and in each one of these laws, she notices the same pattern. Women are explicitly mentioned in these laws and various frameworks, but only in certain limited ways. It’s agonizing to see that women are seen as victims who need protection and not as people or agents with rights. They are defined by what happens to them and not by who they are as people. O’Rourke explains that when women do not fit into these expected roles, the law gets confused. This happens when women step out of their expected roles and take up arms, when they resist or refuse to be categorized as victims. This confusion, O’Rourke argues, is not a coincidence. It is the result of legal frameworks that were built with a particular kind of subject in mind, and that subject was inherently male.
Among all the sections discussed in the book, the section dealing with sexual violence is the hardest to read, and I do not mean that as a criticism. O’Rourke shows how international law slowly started to see rape and sexual violence as crimes (serious war crimes) rather than inevitable or marginal harms. The international criminal tribunals established in the 1990s for Rwanda8 and the former Yugoslavia9 made landmark judgments on sexual violence,10 and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court included a broader record of sexual and gender-based crimes than any previous international instrument.11 She acknowledges this progress, but at the same time, she forces the readers to ponder upon a tougher question: What does criminal accountability actually achieve for the women who experienced these harms? She specifies that the trials are long and convictions are rare. She also highlights that the reasons why women were vulnerable in the first place, such as poverty, placement, and exclusion from political power, are not changed by a trial in the Hague.12 However, she also mentions that this does not mean that no trials should be held at Hague, but rather asks us to focus on questions of what trials cannot do, and whether our investment in international criminal justice has come at the cost of other forms of redress that might serve survivors better.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is her analysis of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, a framework that was made around the United Nations Security Council resolution from 2000,13 which called for women’s participation in peace talks and recognised that war affects women and men in different ways.
O’Rourke acknowledges the importance of this agenda as it has started talks in institutions. It has made countries create various plans, like the National Action Plans, to help women, and it has helped get more women to the negotiation tables.14 But in this book she probes an uncomfortable issue at the heart of it, which is that much of the advocacy for including women in peace processes has been justified on instrumental grounds. A lot of people say women should be included in peace talks because it helps create peace agreements faster, but they do not say that women should be included because their rights and participation are important. This might seem like an abstract philosophical point, but O’Rourke shows it has real consequences. If women’s inclusion is valued only as a means to better outcomes, then that inclusion can always be traded away when other priorities arise. The book makes a fierce, necessary case for women’s rights in conflict for its own sake and not as a useful strategy for achieving something else.
There is a broader theoretical argument threading through all of this, and the way that O’Rourke handles it is something I genuinely admire. She identifies that there are two ways that feminists deal with these problems in international law.15 One way is to work with what is there. This is within the existing framework, trying to include women more fully, to close gaps in protection, to ensure that women’s experiences of conflict are recognised by institutions that already exist. The other way is perhaps more extreme. It says that the current frameworks are built on ideas that hurt women.
It also says that just making changes won’t be enough. O’Rourke doesn’t try to solve this problem; rather, she uses it as a lens that helps us understand. The result is that the reader is left not with a straight answer but with a genuine understanding of why this debate is so difficult, and why it matters.
While reading this book, I kept thinking about who it is for, and I always ended up with the same answer: Everyone. This book is not just for lawyers or experts in gender and conflict. It is for anyone who wants to know how laws can fail the same people they are supposed to protect and see how failures can persist for decades while appearing neutral and technical on the surface. As a law student, I am still attempting to understand what the law is and what it can do. Books like this one are important because they force me to constantly challenge my own ideas before they become too fixed. O’Rourke reminds us that laws are not a set of rules that exist naturally. It is a set of choices made by human beings, at distinct historical moments, about whose experiences count and whose do not. Recognising that is the first step toward changing it.
I finished reading this book with an understanding, not just of facts but of how to look at things differently. Now that I see the gaps and silences in these global legal frameworks, I can no longer read the law the way I had before. That, in the end, is what the best scholarly work does: it does not just add to what you know, it fundamentally changes how you see everything else. More importantly, it forces you to question the limits of your own knowledge.
