Global norms and local action: the campaigns to end violence against women in Africa

Abstract

‘How and why do states implement international women’s rights norms?’ (p. 1). This is the crux of this important book by Peace Medie. Global Norms and Local Action finely parses the processes and conditions under which international women’s justice norms about violence against women (VAW) are adopted and implemented in post-conflict African states, in Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia specifically. VAW has been central to women’s international organizing and the women’s rights agenda at the United Nations (UN) since the 1970s at least, yet we do not really know how and why some states do or do not implement the women’s justice norms that have been widely adopted by states under international pressure. In this careful and detailed multi-year study, Medie engages extensive qualitative data to theorize the conditions that enable various levels of domestic implementation of anti-VAW laws and the effectiveness of specialized criminal justice sector mechanisms and units designed for this. While the literature documents the critical roles that women’s movements play throughout the processes of norm framing, norm diffusion, and norm implementation, there is no clarity about their continued influence and relative impact on women’s justice implementation inside national political and social systems. In distilling the process of norm implementation into three component stages and analysing the relative roles of international organizations, domestic women’s movements, and political and institutional factors at each of these stages, Medie illuminates the ‘black box’ of domestic gender policy execution inside post-conflict states and other kinds of transitional political systems.