Constructing gender justice

2025 CAP Professorial Lecture Series 
This lecture series aims to celebrate our esteemed academics and showcase their areas of expertise in research and teaching.

Agenda 

• 6-7.15pm - Academic Lecture

• 7.15-8pm - Networking drinks and canapés 

Constructing gender justice

Conflict and the climate emergency disproportionately affect women and minoritised groups, and the destruction of built environments exacerbates vulnerabilities and makes public and private spaces more dangerous. Reconstruction provides opportunities to address systemic inequalities by redesigning built environments to achieve social justice, yet the advocacy and needs of minoritised groups are rarely taken into account by decision makers when rebuilding, and pre-existing inequalities are often reinforced by donor-led reconstruction projects rather than gender justice being achieved. This topic is particularly timely given the 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that finds that Israel is obliged to make reparation for all damage caused in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and the 2025 ICJ Advisory Opinion that sets out the obligations of states in respect of climate change and opens the door to claims for reparations from powerful states for climate-related harm. Until now, rebuilding after conflict or climate disaster has largely been understood by donors to be a matter of charity, but the ICJ judgments have empowered activists who have long argued that reconstruction is a matter of justice, and should be carried out with the aim of increasing equity and welfare. The lecture builds on feminist work on transformative justice and ‘building back better’ to examine how gender justice can be achieved through interventions in built environments.  

About the speaker 

Kirsten Ainley is a feminist scholar of international relations who works on gender and justice in conflict-affected states. She was until recently Co-Chief Investigator of the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub, a five-year project working at the overlap of Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality, Goal 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions, and the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. In addition, she is principal investigator on the Hybrid Justice project, analysing the impact of ‘hybrid’ domestic-international criminal justice mechanisms in post-conflict and transitioning states, and on the ESRC Conflict, Justice and Development project, researching the links between transitional justice and development in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Syria and Uganda. She has recently published ‘Hybrid Justice: Innovation and Impact in the Prosecution of Atrocity Crimes’, co-edited with Mark Kersten, with Oxford University Press.

Image caption and credit

Palestine refugee children watch as an Israeli bulldozer pushes over the remaining wall of a destroyed shelter in Ein El Hilweh camp, Lebanon; UNRWA Archive Photographer Unknown.