In August 2021, the Taliban marched into Kabul and once again became the de facto government of Afghanistan, overthrowing the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan which held power from 2004 to 2021. The Taliban takeover came just a little less than two decades after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York that started the US-led ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan and beyond. For some, the Taliban takeover marks an end to the conflict: both the US forces and the elected Afghan president departed the country, leaving a security and governance void that the Taliban filled. For others, the relative stability of the first years of Taliban rule is simply a lull in the conflict. Since 1978, Afghans have experienced many phases of conflict, each with its own dynamic of human rights violations and war crimes.

This sub-chapter provides a critical reflection on the feminist reimagining of two selected decisions from the situation in Bangladesh/Myanmar at the ICC. It begins by providing background to the 2016 ‘clearance operation’ carried out by the government of Myanmar, as well as the procedural history of the situation at the ICC. It goes on to summarise the key facts and outcome of the ICC proceedings, before discussing how the authors of the reimagined decisions have departed from the original in adopting a feminist perspective. The sub-chapter considers what makes each decision ‘feminist’ and reflects upon how gender justice might be effected if we were to act beyond the existing rules of international criminal law.

The chapter presents a dialogue between Sellers and Grey, exploring how "absent jurisprudence" from past international tribunals shapes contemporary international criminal law. Through a discussion of cases from Tokyo and Nuremberg to the ICC, Sellers demonstrates how opportunities for gendered analysis of crimes like enslavement were missed, creating enduring gaps in legal understanding. The conversation focuses on the overlooked cases of "comfort women" at the Tokyo Tribunal, women’s detention at the Ravensbrück camp during World War II, and the evolution of enslavement jurisprudence from the ICTY’s Kunarac case to recent ICC proceedings. Sellers argues that had early tribunals conducted deeper intersectional analyses of gender, race, and class in enslavement cases, contemporary courts would be better equipped to address similar crimes. The chapter suggests the Rome Statute’s bifurcation of "sexual slavery" from "enslavement" obscures how enslavement inherently involves control over victims’ sexuality and reproduction. The conversation reveals how jurisprudential gaps continue to constrain judges’ ability to fully recognize and address gendered dimensions of international crimes.

This chapter reflects on the Mali situation and the cases before the ICC, including the reimagined judgments. It first offers background to the conflict in Mali, before outlining the ICC proceedings relating to ‘the situation in the Republic of Mali at the ICC. It then briefly introduces the original ICC cases in in this situation, the Al Hassan and Al Mahdi cases. The focus in on the Al Hassan judgment, sentencing decision, and reparations order, and the Al Hassan arrest warrant decision.

As noted in Chapter 2, the selection of situations and cases that authors have reimagined in this collection was shaped by several constraints. One of the most significant was the constraint of being limited to those situations and cases that have actually commenced in the ICC, thereby providing judicial decisions to rewrite. As editors and contributors, we struggled with this limitation in the feminist judgment method because it meant that the selection of cases and situations in this collection necessarily replicated the gaps and silences in ICC jurisprudence.

My observations on the contexts relevant here do not start with the alleged crimes in Côte d’Ivoire but the temporalities of feminist rewriting as a critical practice. The first feminist rewritings in international law that marked the audiences concerned old judgments, such as the judgment in the Lotus case by the Permanent Court of Justice, decided in 1927. Another important one was the International Court of Justice’s decision on the Reservations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of 1955. At the time when the original decisions were made, not only the international judges, counsel, and legal experts active on the cases, but almost all scholars, experts, negotiators, and professors – the most visible part of the intellectual and professional community of international lawyers – were men.

The chapter introduces the first collection of feminist judgments analysing decisions of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The editors outline how the book draws on the established feminist judgment methodology and extends it to international criminal law to present a range of re-written decisions from nine ICC situations. The chapter outlines the book’s three-part structure: conceptual foundations, re-written judgments with accompanying reflections, and concluding analysis. It details the editorial decisions regarding situation selection, contributor diversity, and methodological adaptations for the international context. It also describes how the book goes beyond traditional legal analysis by incorporating poetry and photography to transcend the limitations of judicial discourse. The chapter concludes that the feminist judgment method reveals significant opportunities for enhancing gender justice at the ICC, while acknowledging the Court’s political constraints. It argues that judges could deliver more gender-sensitive decisions within the existing Rome Statute framework, thereby contributing to both international criminal law scholarship and feminist legal methodology.

With the establishment of the national party convention, the process used to select the delegates to the national convention became of paramount importance. State and local party conventions selected the national convention delegates, but those conventions were often conducted in deeply undemocratic ways, excluding many party voters or using parliamentary rules such as winner-take-all and/or the unit rule to marginalize political minorities in the state. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party expressly endorsed the use of winner-take-all and unit-rule voting in the nomination process, which allowed party bosses to control the composition (and therefore candidate preference) of their state delegation. The Republicans were initially more hostile to boss control, forbidding the unit rule, but they, too, ultimately endorsed winner-take-all delegate selections in 1916. Moreover, both parties routinely seated delegates from states in which the convention process had been run in an undemocratic fashion. Thus, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the party convention process was run by a small coterie of party bosses, who ultimately chose the party’s nominee.

The Framers at the Constitutional Convention were initially uncertain regarding how the President should be elected. For most of the convention, they favored appointment by Congress, but fears that the President would become too dependent on Congress persuaded them to entrust his selection to an independent body of electors – the Electoral College. In the Framers’ expectation, however, the Electoral College would just identify and nominate potential candidates; the House of Representatives would do the actual electing, selecting the winner from among the top candidates nominated by the College. Moreover, the Framers envisioned that the choice of President would be made on meritocratic, not partisan, grounds. After the Washington administration, however, national political parties emerged, transforming the Presidential election into a partisan contest. In this newly partisan environment, each party assumed the responsibility for selecting its nominee, and they initially did so through informal discussions among prominent party leaders.

Following the end of Reconstruction, southern states began adopting legal restrictions to prevent African-Americans from voting. Although the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws that expressly banned African-Americans from voting, the Court allowed states to use other, ostensibly race-neutral means to disenfranchise African-Americans, such as the poll tax and onerous registration requirements. Following the Second World War, the two national parties struggled with how to address the fact that their southern parties were excluding African-Americans from the nomination process and sending all-white delegations to the national convention. The Democratic Party regularly seated all-white delegations from its southern wing. Only in 1964 did it warn its southern parties that they could no longer exclude African-Americans from party affairs. Meanwhile, in the Republican Party, “lily-white” party organizations gradually took over the southern Republican parties and similarly excluded or marginalized African-Americans in party affairs. As a result, even into the 1960s, African-Americans in the south were regularly excluded from the presidential nomination process in both parties.