with: @karolinefaerber.bsky.social @emiledenborg.bsky.social Lena Kempermann Tonka Kostadinova Bibi Imre-Millei Rahime Süleymanoğlu-Kürüm Hongli Liu Shireen M. Stephen Brown Bartosz Neumann Estel Nepomuk Otte Emma Limane

We challenged our conceptual frameworks and discussed strategies for understanding the world we live in without obscuring complexity. Academia at its best.

For two days, we traced ambiguity in our analyses of female agency, state institutions, diplomacy, national imaginaries, feminist foreign policies, gender equality contestation, and geopolitics.

I am particularly happy with this article because it allowed me to wear my lawyer hat and diplomacy scholar hat at the same time 🙂 It is also now the fourth and the last publication from my PhD dissertation (it was a great graduation gift to have this article accepted the day before my defense!)

Diplomatic legal talk is not 'mere talk' and matters for whether and how legal interpretations become international norms and what normative difference does to international relations. This is why we should pay more attention to diplomacy and its logics in socio-legal research.

In bilateral diplomacy it can take a form of navigation of legal principles through ambiguity which enables co-existence when argumentation is unlikely to be successful. This practice takes very interesting discursive forms which I analyse in the article.

International contestation around gender and sexuality norms is highly polarized and legalized, but the language of law is not always deployed "strategically". Appropriate use of legal talk differs between actors and sites.

In this piece I look at how legal language of human rights and national sovereignty is used in everyday diplomatic practice.

It calls for more research on the constitution of European and international meanings and reflection on the multi-discursiveness of “Europe”.

Enjoy!

The article has a lot of cool empirics about history of gender equality discourse in Europe and diplomatic practice of the Council (based on interviews). It also looks at "gender equality" discourse as a status marker for states.

It finds that “gender equality” is a concept negotiated through bargaining between member states. Because of that, it can function as an ambiguous concept that accommodates different nationally situated lifeworlds. This relates to, but also goes beyond the 2020 “gender crisis”;

It brings meaning-making to negotiation theory and looks at international meaning as something that can emerge either from problem-solving or bargaining;

While most scholarship studies Europeanization of discourse (from “Europe” to states), this article looks at the constitution of meaning on the European level (from states to “Europe”);