Personal Knowledge within Intergovernmental Organizations: Advancing a Feminist Approach

• In Event: 4366 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Global and Transnational Feminisms

Abstract

Dominant scholarship focused on intergovernmental legal institutions—such as world society scholarship—typically treat these institutions and the bodies working within them as monolithic entities primarily defined by characteristics such as being rationalized, global, and secular. These institutions—world society scholars argue—shape the global culture through which global cultural norms are produced. However, prominent feminist scholars challenge that this type of scholarship takes for granted and reinforces gendered distinctions built into the international legal system (Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000). This, they assert, has stifled investigation and recognition of the influence that people, including women, have as change-making actors within it. As part of a larger project, this paper advances this critique through needed empirical investigation of the treaty body that oversees the monitoring procedure of the United Nations’ (UN) main convention on women’s rights. It demonstrates that UN experts making up this treaty body hold varying personal viewpoints about how religion and women’s rights relate. These views, I demonstrate, have been influenced by their varying lived experiences. Using these findings, I argue that Polanyi’s concept of “personal knowledge” can be used as a tool for advancing feminist efforts to move past limiting gendered distinctions in order to more accurately identify ways people working within intergovernmental legal bodies themselves bring “bottom-up” identities and knowledge into intergovernmental institutions. This paper provides the foundation for a separate paper in which I show how these UN experts’ varying identities and personal knowledge shape specific micro-interactive processes through which this intergovernmental body works to develop and translate norms about women’s rights and religion within this global-level arena. This project is based on an unprecedented body of interviews with current and former UN treaty body members and state representatives, fieldnotes based on observation of UN treaty body sessions, and documents produced as part of these sessions.

Author

• Shanna Corner, University of Notre Dame