Gender and global justice: Lu’s justice and reconciliation in world politics

Catherine Lu’s important book argues that global justice must be conceived in structural terms, paying special attention to the way this approach applies to colonialism and its legacies. Lu shows how our states system perpetuates colonial injustice, and how deconstructing or disaggregating nation states reveal the ways that colonial legacies continue to permeate contemporary problems of justice. In this essay, I apply these arguments to key issues and institutions of global gender justice, that is, issues of ‘equality and autonomy for people of all sex groups and gender identities,’ focusing especially on problems of women’s rights and problems with global dimensions, which can be thought of as a subcategory of gender justice (Htun and Weldon 2018). Drawing on recent feminist analyses of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), I show how Lu’s approach illuminates our thinking about the justice of these institutions. Considering the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women (violence against Native American and Indigenous women more generally) further highlights the limitations of these institutions and the strength of the structural approach to global justice. Conversely, I also use these examples to assess the adequacy of Lu’s approach for guiding action, especially for those grappling with questions of institutional design and policy development. In each case, understanding gender justice initiatives as attempts to address structural injustice helps to understand the advantages and limits of various strategies of institutional design and reform