Catharine A. MacKinnon, well-known feminist legal scholar and Eliza­beth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan , spoke about “Women’s September 11th: Rethink­ing International Law of Conflict” on Thursday, April 14th in the law school.

The talk was based on her new book Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws and was sponsored by the Women of Stanford Law. MacKinnon focused on what she alleged were parallels between interna­tional terrorism and violence against women. According to MacKinnon, both involve violence by non-state actors and therefore should be treated more equally.

MacKinnon attempted to dispel mis­conceptions regarding the roles of state and non-state actors, explaining the traditional use of international law in order to draw domestic parallels.

MacKinnon noted that international law deals with the interaction of nation states. Thus when only non-state actors are involved in a conflict, MacKinnon said that international law is not applied to the conflict. She says that typically, in cases of armed attack, international laws regulate only the use of force by states against states. If states are not the units, the conflict may not qualify to be regulated by international law.

MacKinnon believes the War on Terror signifies a change from this tra­ditional requirement that conflict exist between state units to be governed or addressed by international law. First and foremost, she claims that the attacks on September 11th themselves, which incited the war, do not qualify as between state units or state actors. MacKinnon argued that the attacks of September 11th were committed by non-state actors against non-state actors. The perpetrators were not nation states nor directly affiliated with them. The victims were not mainly U.S. troops, but rather civilians.

But despite the lack of state units in the attack, MacKinnon noted that the UN, the world’s traditional enforcer of international law, quickly set out on what MacKinnon calls a “big, comprehensive review” of international law. In so doing, the UN addressed the issue internationally, reforming traditional conceptions of what may be addressed under international conventions.

MacKinnon further claims that even the United States ’ War on Terror is not directly targeting a certain nation state, but rather targeting the ideology of terrorism. Thus MacKinnon again perceives an international approach to combating the problem of terrorism.

All of which is well and good, according to MacKinnon, except that neglected in this internationalization of non-state conflict, are the women who suffer from violence all around the world. MacKinnon believes that there is an ongoing full-fledged world war between the men and women of the world, spurred by historical misogyny and compounded by the rapes, genital mutilations, and assaults of today.

What angers MacKinnon is that since this conflict takes place typically between non-state affiliated actors, the everyday men and women of the world, it has not been historically addressed by international law. MacK­innon claims that as a result, interna­tionally, women are offered little effective protection against men.

“Violence against women does not look like a war since it is not about state conflict [and] neither sex is in uniform, or look like combatants,” Mackinnon said.

She noted that the acts of violence men commit against women have a higher death toll than September 11th, citing that while, according to MacKin­non, 2800-3000 men and women were killed on 9/11, this number is almost identical to the number of women who die at the hands of men every year.

MacKinnon said that in this war against women, as she terms it, women do not typically fight back, but the atrocities do not count as war crimes only because they not committed at the level of states. MacKinnon bemoaned the insufficient level of protection that domestic criminal law provides for women.

MacKinnon believes women should have the rights of protected combat­ants. If violence against women was to be considered a war, she said that women would at least be protected by the Geneva Convention against some forms of violence. She claimed that as it is now, in many countries, the daily life of a woman often lacks the protection that non-combatants receive in time of war.

MacKinnon asked: if the interna­tional community addresses September 11th, why do they refuse to address violence against women in an interna­tional manner? MacKinnon believes that the precedent has been set by the War on Terror and that the UN should act on the “war on women.” She wants international attention and protection for individual women against indi­vidual men.

Many members of the audience questioned the practicality of her proposal. An audience member won­dered whether this ability to declare war between men and women might lead to a slippery slope where wars were declared between big brothers and little brothers, for example. Oth­ers questioned who would form the peace-keeping brigade, and whether the international community might be reluctant to allow this attempt to fur­ther take sovereignty away from the states in a domestic issue.

A widely cited author of legal theory, MacKinnon specializes in sex equality issues under international and consti­tutional law. A pioneer in the field of sexual harassment as sexual discrimination, she also played a key role in the court’s recognition of pornography as a civil rights violation. In the interna­tional field she is known for winning a $745 million verdict for the Bosnian and Croatian rape victims of the Ser­bian genocide.