The end of the Cold War wrought a shift in international legal priorities and preoccupations, including among feminists. When feminist approaches to international law, particularly to human rights and humanitarian law, began to make headway in the early 1990s, they had already left behind some of the anti-imperial and anti-military emphases of much of the internationally informed feminism of the 1970s and 80s. Here, I revisit some of those Cold War feminist approaches, with the hope of informing today's much-needed international legal attention to peace, disarmament—including nuclear disarmament—and global inequality.

In 2015, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)—a progressive think tank on U.S. domestic and foreign policy—awarded its annual human rights awards to two criminal lawyers. The domestic award went to Daryl Atkinson, who advocates for the rights of convicted felons. Its international award went to Almudena Bernabeu, for what the IPS called her “successful prosecution of several of the worst Latin American perpetrators of crimes against humanity.” I do not think that the IPS was trying to be balanced by picking a lawyer working on behalf of the rights of the formerly incarcerated, on one hand, and a prosecutor, on the other. Rather, the organization sought to honor those it sees as promoting human rights. In the context of U.S. law, that means fighting for the rights of defendants and the convicted. For international law, it means the opposite.

Audience members asked questions regarding specific practices and in particular circled around the question of other ways forward—what other practices should be used to hold actors accountable for violence, especially the often still locally neglected problem of violence against women, as well as violence against people with diverse or stigmatized gender and sexual expressions and identities.

In February 2013, Navi Pillay, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, gave a speech to the General Assembly reflecting on the twenty years that had passed since the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. She discussed three principal achievements of the Vienna Declaration and Programmeof Action, two of which were “its role in advancing women’s rights” and “its impact on the fight against impunity.” With regard to the first, she discussed the success of the “Women’s Rights are Human Rights” slogan at the conference and the institutional gains it spawned around violence against women(VAW). As for the second, she noted that “[p]erhaps most significantly, just one month after the establishment of the first ad hoc tribunal since Nuremberg [the ICTY], the Declaration nudged the International Law Commission to continue its work on a permanent international criminal court.” Although Pillay did not connect those two achievements—the recognition of women’s human rights and a new focus on impunity alongside international criminal responses to combat it—they were in fact intertwined.