Gizem Guney is a Senior Lecturer in Law with Criminology at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (SCCJ).

Gizem is also the Study Abroad Coordinator and the Course Leader of the dual degree, Counter Terrorism, Intelligence and Cybercrime (with Edith Cowan University, Australia).

Before joining the University of Portsmouth in 2020, Gizem taught law and criminology modules at the University of Sussex as a Doctoral Tutor for four years.

Gizem is also a Guest Lecturer at the Riga Graduate School of Law where she coordinates the MSc ‘International Criminal Law’ module.

Gizem completed her PhD at the University of Sussex in 2019, analysing the recent Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention) from a radical feminist perspective, particularly in the light of the dominance theory developed by Catherine A. MacKinnon. She obtained her LLB (2011) at the Eskişehir Anadolu University and LLM (2014) in International Human Rights Law at the Queen Mary University of London with the best student award in the specialisation unit.

Research Interests

Gizem's research focuses on all forms of gender-based domestic violence against women and LGBTQI+ from a human rights perspective. Examining how national criminal justice responses to domestic violence interact with international and regional human rights regulations, her research contributes to the efforts of aligning criminal justice laws and policies (particularly in the UK) with international legal standards. Gizem's perspective is based on feminist theory in a broad range, but she is particularly interested in radical, postmodern, intersectional and queer theories.

• Domestic violence against women and LGBTQI+
• ECHR, ECtHR and the Istanbul Convention
• The judicial interpretation of the right to equality
• Cultural relativism
• Feminist legal theory and feminist criminology
• Queer theory
• Gender and crime
• Comparative criminal justice
• Online/cyber forms of violence against women
• Internet-of-things and domestic violence

As the main editor, Gizem has recently published a book titled ‘Towards Gender Equality in Law: An Analysis of State Failures from a Global Perspective’ with Palgrave Macmillan. The book maps out states’ failures in their legal systems and addresses whether there are any similarities/patterns in how these states define and utilise policies and laws that harm gender equality.

As a country expert, Gizem recently contributed to the study ‘Analysing Legislation of the EU Member States related to Violence against Women and Domestic Violence’ by the European Parliament FEMM Committee.

As an expert, Gizem contributed to the study sponsored by the Secretariat of the Council of Europe, titled ‘Protecting Women and Girls from Violence in the Digital Age: The relevance of the Istanbul Convention and the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime in addressing online and technology-facilitated violence against women’.

PhD Supervision

Gizem welcomes PhD applications on subjects including gender-based violence against women and LGBTQI+, gender and crime, human rights, and feminist and queer criminology theories.