Introduction: Family – an international affair

This collection of articles arises from a conference held in Tel Aviv in 2009 at the Concord Research Centre for the Integration of International Law in Israel, School of Law, College of Management Academic Studies. Delegates to the conference came from a variety of professions and areas of expertise and included academics and legal and welfare practitioners. What was common among us, however, was our interest in the international dimensions of both understandings of the family and of the normative systems that define and regulate it. We all believed that understandings of family are situated in and across cultural and economic manifestations of reproduction, dependency and care relations in a global context and that they are regulated in international and regional as much as in domestic law.