Problematising diversity: The change that international lawyers (do not) want for international courts

Abstract

Scholars working on international courts and tribunals (ICTs) have recently seized the agenda of the diversity of the international judiciary and international institutions more broadly. Focusing, above all, on the lack of women in the different international benches around the world, they have criticised and proposed reforms to the composition of ICTs. This paper argues that the burgeoning literature on the diversity in ICTs expresses a particular politics of inclusion for the composition of the international judiciary. We begin by explaining the importance of looking into knowledge production in international legal scholarship as a site of (re)production of the field’s boundaries and situating the literature under study within the broader universe of the scholarship on ICTs. We then lay out this paper’s main contribution: a reconstruction and critical analysis of the normative commitments of the politics of inclusion underlying the literature on diversity in ICTs.