About the Expert
Expert Bio
Catherine Powell is an adjunct senior fellow in the Women and Foreign Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, civil rights and civil liberties in a digital age, human rights, and comparative constitutional law. Her prior experience includes stints in former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning office and in the White House National Security Council as director for human rights in the Barack Obama administration. Previously, Powell was founding director of the Human Rights Institute and the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she was on the faculty as a clinical professor.
Powell currently sits on the American Journal of International Law (AJIL) board of editors and the American Society of International Law Executive Council. In addition to formerly serving on the Human Rights Watch board, she has been a consultant on national security and human rights matters for the Center for American Progress and the American Constitution Society as well as a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center (between 2012 and 2013) and Columbia Law School (spring 2007 and fall 2016).
She is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, where she was a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal. She has a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. After her graduate work, she was a post-graduate Ford fellow in teaching international law at Harvard Law School and then clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand on the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.
Powell’s recent blogs and op-eds include “Invisible Workers on the Global Assembly Line: Behind the Screen” in Women Around the World and cross-posted in Balkinization and Net Politics (2019), “The United Divided States: San Francisco Sues Donald Trump for Sanctuary Cities Order” in Just Security (2017), “How #MeToo Has Spread Like Wildfire” in Newsweek (2017), “How Women Could Save the World” in the Nation (2017), and “A Missed Opportunity to Lead by Example” in the New York Times (2012).
Her recent academic publications include “We the People: These United Divided States” in Cardozo Law Review (2019), “How Women Could Save the World, If Only We Would Let Them: From Gender Essentialism to Inclusive Security” in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (2017), and “Gender Indicators as Global Governance: Not Your Father's World Bank” in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law (2016). Shorter essays include “Race and Rights in the Digital Age” in AJIL Unbound (2018), “Agora: Reflections on Zivotofsky v. Kerry: Presidential Signing Statements and Dialogic Constitutionalism” in AJIL Unbound (2015), and “Libya: A Multilateral Constitutional Moment?” in the American Journal of International Law (2012).
Affiliations:
- American Journal of International Law, board of editors
- American Society of International Law, member of executive council
- Fordham Law School, professor of law
Featured
Current Projects
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In this piece (which is part of a special Just Security “Racing National Security” symposium), Catherine Powell argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a window into the pandemics of policing, poverty, and racism around the globe. National security observers need to broaden the lens for analysis beyond military security—and what Trump today (and Nixon in the 1970s) opportunistically calls “law and order”—to encompass economic, physical, and human security.
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In what Catherine Powell calls the "color of Covid," the pandemic has highlighted a range of underlying inequalities on race—including on the job front—now exacerbated by the health crisis and the emerging stay-at-home economy.
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The rapid spread of the coronavirus in the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a new reality for most—if not all—Americans, as a growing number of U.S. states have imposed a variety of stay-at-home directives. This grand experiment provides an opportunity for comparative analysis.
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In her newly published book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, Dr. Sarah T. Roberts discusses the world of content moderation, which increasingly plays a major role in keeping social media firms functioning.
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In her new book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, Dr. Sarah T. Roberts reveals the inner workings of the world of content moderation on social media platforms.
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Senior Fellow Catherine Powell reposts two pieces on conflict-related sexual violence.
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Cryptocurrencies have the potential to radically alter the world's financial systems. But could they also upend inequality?
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Adjunct Senior Fellow Catherine Powell presided over a CFR roundtable, “Bringing a Gender Lens to Immigration: Domestic Violence–Based Asylum and Family Separation” with Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Immigrants’ Rights Project, and Sandra Park, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.
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In addressing legal barriers and challenging entrenched gender stereotypes, Japan is pushing for gender equality in the workplace and growing its economy.
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Terrorism and Counterterrorism
A growing body of research has made the case that counter-terrorism and CVE would benefit from a more nuanced gender lens. What remains under-studied—and generally absent from policy discussions—is whether the growing attentiveness to gender might also include a greater focus on masculinities. -
During a recent CFR roundtable, Professor Safiya Noble spoke about digital human rights – an issue on which she is advising the United Nations. Dr. Noble explores the biases against women and people of color that are embedded in search engine results and algorithms.
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Senior Fellow Catherine Powell hosted a roundtable discussion with Muneer Ahmad, a leading voice and scholar on immigrant rights, on strategies for litigating the Trump administration’s family separation policy.
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Eighteen states and the District of Columbia filed an amicus brief in support of a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s new policy that denies asylum to applicants fleeing domestic or gang violence.The policy hits women and children—the most common survivors of domestic abuse—particularly hard.
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This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to Nadia Murad, a survivor—and activist for other survivors—of sex trafficking by the Islamic State group, and Denis Mukwege, a gynecological surgeon from the Congo in recognition of their work “to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.” It is heartening that Mukwege and Murad are receiving the recognition that their work deserves. Let us hope that this publicity will turn into action.
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The Trump administration announced intentions to lower the refugee ceiling in fiscal year 2019, a change that would disproportionately affect women and children, who represented 72 percent of refugees in 2016.
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Just as the mobile phone and solar energy have allowed developing nations to leap-frog into more advanced stages of technology, advances in medical technology can provide easy access to maternal and women’s healthcare in rural areas around the world.
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Kofi Annan—the seventh secretary-general of the UN—passed away last week. He should be remembered not only for his work to fight poverty and promote economic development, but also his efforts to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325.
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Mary Harvey, a former member of the U.S. national women's soccer team, and Minky Worden of Human Rights Watch discuss how sports institutions can be an important tool for expanding human rights abroad.
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While women are still underrepresented in media generally, social media encourages a more level playing field, allowing for the voices of women from a wider array of backgrounds and countries, with or without traditional power, to be heard.
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As blockchain and cryptocurrencies pioneer new frontiers in finance and beyond, we should be worried about the industry's gender disparity.
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Since becoming the World Bank Group General Counsel, Sandie Okoro has supported the World Bank’s initiative to address gender-based violence as part and parcel of economic development.
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Recent allegations of sexual abuse in Syria illuminate the difficulty of holding aid workers accountable for sexual crimes in war zones. As the humanitarian aid sector faces its own #metoo moment, the United Nations should set a standard in the sector.
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The #MeToo campaign has spread across the globe, with women in eighty-five countries and counting using the hashtag to call attention to pervasive sexual harassment and workplace discrimination.
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Women in Tunisia have far more rights than their regional counterparts, but they still are far from true equality. Unequal inheritance laws provide a window into what's really going on in Tunisia.