This article examines the recent Council of Europe Convention on violence against women through the lens of postcolonial feminist critiques. The article argues that, while there is certainly cause for optimism, the Convention still falls into some of the traps identified by postcolonial feminists. The Convention largely circumvents the stigmatising risks that arise from framing certain VAW forms primarily as a problem of some ‘cultures’. Yet dangers linger in the Convention’s approach to ‘honour’ as an unacceptable justification for VAW. Inherent (...) risks also remain in the vulnerability frame through which the Convention views migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeker women. Applied uncritically, these approaches risk re-inscribing images of inherently powerless women victimised by their non-European ‘cultures,’ reminiscent of colonial times. (shrink)

With a view to contributing to a more nuanced view on the use of the vulnerability rhetoric in times of crisis, the article addresses the relationship between the “crisification” and “vulnerabilization” of human rights protection. In so doing, it discusses the concepts of crisis and vulnerability, as well as the related human rights obligations incumbent on states. By contemplating upon some of the processes through which the rhetoric of vulnerability both opens doors to protection and closes them, the article deconstructs (...) vulnerabilization as an active legal and societal process in addressing different situations seen as crises. In so doing, it challenges the on-face neutrality of the concept of vulnerability as a tool to target protection in exceptional times and calls for an approach to vulnerability in times of crisis that is more firmly anchored in the normative baseline of international human rights law. (shrink)