'We Are Not Leaving the Istanbul Convention': Disappearance of Istanbul Convention from Turkiye and presence of unlikely feminist legal spaces in international law-making

Abstract

International law is typically a State-centric space, consisting of a body of positive laws made by sovereign States. Law and the production of laws are dominated by vertical and linear legal spaces, governed by a hierarchical normative order, whose single author is the State. Feminist engagements with law can sometimes be reduced to interactions with the laws made within those vertical legal spaces and pertain to demanding new rights. As pointed out by Margaret Davies, an absence of feminist legal spaces is presumed when feminist analyses of law are made. In this article, we investigate feminist legal spaces that are part of the legal realm, but not an extension of vertical normativity. Feminist legal spaces co-constitute law, along with different scales of law, including vertical State law. Therefore, those feminist spaces create feminist legality, and they are not visible when looked at through vertical and linear lenses. In this article, we put our untraditional lenses on, decentralising the vertical sight of law while aiming to find feminist legal spaces within the feminist resistance against Türkiye’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. With this aim, we interviewed eight activists who resisted Türkiye’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention. Considering law as a non-vertical space, we examined the interviews through a combined reading of Zoe Pearson’s ‘unlikely’, Sally Engle Merry’s ‘hybrid’, and Margaret Davies’ ‘horizontal’ or ‘flat’ analyses of legal spaces. Following their analyses, we deprioritise vertical legalities, focussing instead on the middle, sideways, backwards, around, hybrid, horizontal, unexpected, and unpopular spaces of international law-making. In the example of resistance against Türkiye’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, we identified feminist legal spaces in the activists’ words, emotions and campaign slogans, emerging from the land and found on platforms and in courtrooms.