‘Can the feminist movement provide legal services to refugees?’ Feminist lawyering, women refugees and gender based violence in urban Uganda
Noir, Maëlle
Noir, Maëlle
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Publication Date
2024-04-03
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
‘Can the feminist movement provide legal services to refugees?’ This is the question that this thesis seeks to answer through an assessment of the applicability of feminist lawyering to address gender-based violence against women refugees. Feminist lawyering is a branch of feminist legal theory, described as both a disruptive mode of legal representation and a political commitment to dismantle patriarchal socio-legal norms. The literature on the topic, which reached a momentum in the nineties, before almost disappearing in legal scholarly work, has been particularly interested in applying such an approach to gender-based violence cases. However, the focus remains overwhelmingly Western-centric, restricting the conceptualisation of feminist lawyering to private lawyers operating in conventional criminal systems located in the Global North. As a result, feminist lawyering praxis as part of non-conventional modes of dispute resolution existing in many plural legal systems as well as its applicability to specific marginalised social groups such as refugees is significantly under-researched. Against this backdrop, this thesis investigates the relevance of feminist lawyering to address gender-based violence against refugees based on urban Uganda as a case study. Following a grounded-theory methodology and feminist decolonial approaches to research, the analysis relies on desk-based and empirical methods of data collection, gathering over 75 participants. It is argued that gender-based violence against women refugees in Uganda is exercised at several levels namely relational, situational and institutional. The latter is organisationally and discursively enabled by the Ugandan State and the international community, having direct and gendered impacts on women refugees. Such complex and intersectional experiences of gender-based violence thus call for a tailored approach to legal service provision such as feminist lawyering. The thesis offers a refined and updated conceptualisation of feminist lawyering praxis informed by Ugandan legal practitioners. However, despite the apparent relevance of feminist lawyering to support refugee survivors in accessing justice, a significant gap remains between the refugee and the feminist spaces. The reasons explaining this phenomenon are analysed in this study, with a focus on the structural barriers erected by the Ugandan State to ensure that gender-based violence against women refugee cases remain in a controlled and lucrative humanitarian realm. Finally, recommendations, co-formulated with participants to this research, are articulated with the view to bridging the gap between refugee survivors and feminist lawyers.
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NUI Galway