ABSTRACT
Across Asia and the Pacific, legal pluralist systems meet both cultural norms and address injustices at the local level. What is the capacity of these pluralist systems to provide justice and mitigate discrimination against women? This article examines women's experiences across five countries to identify the factors that enable and constrain women's engagement with legal pluralist justice systems in the Asia-Pacific region. Drawing on examples of women's individual and collective attempts to access justice specifically concerning custody, land, and violence, this article identifies three persistent conditions that perpetuate women's inability to access justice: the absence of gender mainstreaming resources in pluralist legal systems, most notably in rural, remote, and impoverished communities;cultural and religious preference for women's underrepresentation in decision-making;and women's low representation in justice-related civil service positions.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has disrupted social, economic and political life across the Asia Pacific region, with particularly deleterious impacts on women. Rather than equitably affecting all, COVID-19 has brought about a "patriarchal reset", exacerbating women's health and care labour burdens and heightening the physical violence against women and other threats to women's human rights. This paper examines global health governance in the region from a feminist political economy perspective. We ask how has the pandemic and associated lockdowns affected women's safety and access to economic resources and services on the one hand, and 'women, peace and security' (WPS) practitioners' capacity to safeguard women's rights in fragile settings on the other hand? We examine the gendered impacts of COVID-19 based on two surveys of WPS practitioners during 2020. Significant rises in domestic and gender-based violence, reduced access to reproductive health services, and increased income insecurity were all perceived and/or experienced during COVID-19 restrictions. WPS practitioners delivered services to mitigate these effects of COVID-19 despite overall less funding than before COVID-19. With the benefit of primary data, we explore how a more radical approach is needed to understand and transform gender relations in light of gender-based violence and depletion of women's labour. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Pacific Review is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
ABSTRACT
Living through global transformations – including our current pandemic – requires imagination to see through to the other side. How can Australian IR scholars contribute new understandings of the prospects for global change and security when they are so sorely needed? This essay reflects on two themes: First, the important role of Australian IR scholars and students in theorising change and envisioning alternative futures in a national context less constrained by the trappings of power and enduring forced isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic;and second, the significance of increasing gender diversity in political leadership for future transformations in international relations. A productive feminist subfield of IR scholarship has flourished in Australian universities, however, navigation of post-COVID global politics requires all IR scholars to critically examine the gendered games that political leaders, institutions, inter-state and global civil society actors play. Such gendered games both fuel and mitigate the dynamics of conflict and insecurity.