Violence against Women and Regimes of Exception

RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity Term 2026
Series convened by Associate Professor Catherine Briddick and Dr Uttara Shahani

This talk is co-hosted with the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and the Feminist Jurisprudence Discussion Group

About this talk

The monograph Violence against Women and Regimes of Exception: Undoing Discrimination in Migration Law (OUP, September 2025) brings together a series of distinct responses to violence experienced in the context of migration control and offers a new framework for their evaluation. To do so, it integrates doctrinal, empirical, and theoretical material to understand the difference that migration status makes to an experience of violence and to establish how the resulting compounded disadvantage should be remedied. The book’s analysis starts in the UK and with the European Convention on Human Rights, broadening to connect with European Union law and the Council of Europe’s Trafficking and Istanbul Conventions. Consonant with the feminist jurisprudence and approaches to international law with which it engages, the book is structured around the legal challenges that migrant women have brought to the rules that determine their status.

Catherine Briddick will introduce the work and explain the insights it offers into the role and ability of national courts, the ECtHR, and the CJEU to scrutinise different forms of discrimination. She will also situate the arguments made in relation to refugee protection and the broader backlash against migrants occurring in and across the Council of Europe.

Discussants Vladislava Stoyanova and Lourdes Peroni will provide a critique of the book and its main arguments. In so doing, they will draw on and introduce their own research on discrimination and positive obligations.

About the speakers

Catherine Briddick

Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.

 Catherine is a scholar of human rights and refugee law who draws on feminist approaches to international law to analyse protection, discrimination, and the relationships between them. Her work, published in leading academic journals including ICLQ, the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law and the International Journal of Refugee Law, cuts across subjects and regimes, including UK immigration and public law, non-discrimination and equality law, European Union law, and public international law.

Vladislava Stoyanova

Associate Professor of Public International Law at the Faculty of Law, Lund University (Sweden).

Vladislava is the holder of the Wallenberg Academy Fellowship (2021-2026) awarded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. As a Wallenberg Fellow, she leads the project ‘The Borders within: the Multifaceted Legal Landscape of Migrant Integration in Europe.’ Vladislava won the 2023 Henrik Enderlein Prize for research excellence. 

Lourdes Peroni

Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw

Lourdes is a constitutional law and international human rights law scholar whose areas of research include equality and non-discrimination, gender-based violence, reproductive justice and vulnerability, particularly within the contexts of the United Nations, Organization of American States and Council of Europe. She has published on these themes in the European Law Journal, Human Rights Law Review, Feminist Legal Studies and International Journal of Constitutional Law, among other journals. Before joining the University of Warsaw, she worked at other universities, including Yale (US), Ghent (Belgium) and Sheffield Hallam (UK). Lourdes was a fellow at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and was involved in various submissions and third-party interventions before the CEDAW Committee and the European Court of Human Rights. 

The seminar will be followed by drinks in the Hall. 

Registration not required. 

All enquiries should be directed to rsc-outreach@qeh.ox.ac.uk