Catherine Powell

Adjunct Senior Fellow for Women and Foreign Policy

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Expert Bio

Catherine Powell is an adjunct senior fellow for women and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She is part of the women and foreign policy and digital and cyberspace policy programs. Having served in both the Obama and Biden White Houses, she is currently a full-time professor at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, civil rights and civil liberties in a digital age, human rights, and feminist theory. Additionally, she is a visiting fellow with the Yale Information Society Project. She served as a senior advisor in the White House Gender Policy Council from January to early July 2024. 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 has also served as a member of the American Journal of International Law board of editors, a vice president of the American Society of International Law, and a co-chair of Blacks in the American Society of International Law. 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 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 “Gender and Power in an Age of Disinformation: a Conversation With Mary Anne Franks,” “Can You Hear Me? Speech and Power in the Global Digital Town Square,” for Women Around the World (2022), “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), and “How Women Could Save the World” in the Nation (2017).

Her recent academic publications include “War on Covid: Warfare and its Discontents,” in UCLA Law Review Discourse (2023), “Color of COVID and Gender of COVID: Essential Workers, Not Disposable People,” in Yale Journal of Law and Feminism (2020), “Race, Gender, and Nation in an Age of Shifting Borders: The Unstable Prisms of Motherhood and Masculinity, in UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs (2019), “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).

affiliations

  • Fordham Law School, professor of law 
  • New York for Harris, student and voter outreach senior advisor, volunteer 
  • Yale Information Society Project, visiting fellow

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At the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore last week, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the United States would be expanding its defense partnership with India. His statement was in line with U.S. policy over the last two decades, which, irrespective of the party in power, has sought to cultivate India as a serious defense partner. The U.S.-India defense partnership has come a long way. Beginning in 2001, the United States and India moved from little defense cooperation or coordination to significant gestures that would lay the foundation of the robust defense partnership that exists today—such as India offering access to its facilities after 9/11 to help the United States launch operations in Afghanistan or the 123 Agreement in 2005 that paved the way for civil nuclear cooperation between the two countries. In the United States, there is bipartisan agreement that a strong defense partnership with India is vital for its Indo-Pacific strategy and containing China. In India, too, there is broad political support for its strategic partnership with the United States given its immense wariness about its fractious border relationship with China. Consequently, the U.S.-India bilateral relationship has heavily emphasized security, with even trade tilting toward defense goods. Despite the massive changes to the relationship in the last few years, and both countries’ desire to develop ever-closer defense ties, differences between the United States and India remain. A significant part of this has to do with the differing norms that underpin the defense interests of each country. The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by defense experts in three countries are part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different areas, and illustrate India’s positions on important defense issues—military operationalization, cooperation in space, and export controls—and how they differ with respect to the United States and its allies. Sameer Lalwani (Washington, DC) argues that the two countries differ in their thinking about deterrence, and that this is evident in three categories crucial to defense: capability, geography, and interoperability. When it comes to increasing material capabilities, for example, India prioritizes domestic economic development, including developing indigenous capabilities (i.e., its domestic defense-industrial sector). With regard to geography, for example, the United States and its Western allies think of crises, such as Ukraine, in terms of global domino effects; India, in contrast, thinks regionally, and confines itself to the effects on its neighborhood and borders (and, as the recent crisis with Pakistan shows, India continues to face threats on its border, widening the geographic divergence with the United States). And India’s commitment to strategic autonomy means the two countries remain far apart on the kind of interoperability required by modern military operations. Yet there is also reason for optimism about the relationship as those differences are largely surmountable. Dimitrios Stroikos (London) argues that India’s space policy has shifted from prioritizing socioeconomic development to pursuing both national security and prestige. While it is party to all five UN space treaties that govern outer space and converges with the United States on many issues in the civil, commercial, and military domains of space, India is careful with regard to some norms. It favors, for example, bilateral initiatives over multilateral, and the inclusion of Global South countries in institutions that it believes to be dominated by the West. Konark Bhandari (New Delhi) argues that India’s stance on export controls is evolving. It has signed three of the four major international export control regimes, but it has to consistently contend with the cost of complying, particularly as the United States is increasingly and unilaterally imposing export control measures both inside and outside of those regimes. When it comes to export controls, India prefers trade agreements with select nations, prizes its strategic autonomy (which includes relations with Russia and China through institutions such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS), and prioritizes its domestic development. Furthermore, given President Donald Trump’s focus on bilateral trade, the two countries’ differences will need to be worked out if future tech cooperation is to be realized.