Anne Runyan, Ph.D.
anne.runyan@uc.edu
Professor Emerita
University of Cincinnati
Year of PhD: 1988
Address: Professor Emerita, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati, PO Box 210375
City: Cincinnati, OH, Ohio - 45221-0375
Country: United States
About Me:
Anne Sisson Runyan, PhD in International Relations from The American University, is Professor Emerita in the School of Public and International Affairs and former Head of Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati (UC) where she also directed the Taft Research Center. Among the progenitors of the field of Feminist International Relations and a recipient of the Eminent Scholar Award from the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section (which she helped found and lead) of the International Studies Association (ISA), she has authored, co-authored, or co-edited Global Gender Politics (next edition forthcoming early 2026), Global Gender Issues (4 editions), Gender and Global Restructuring (2 editions, third edition forthcoming Dec. 2024), and Feminist (Im)Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America, and she has published widely on feminist world politics and transnational feminisms in journals and edited volumes. She has served as a Vice President of the ISA and on its Status of Women and Research Workshop Grants Committees, a chair of the Committee on Women in the Academic Professions of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and a recipient of the AAUP Georgina M. Smith Award, and an Associate and Guest Editor and Editorial Board Member of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is currently working on a book on gendered nuclear colonialism arising from initial research conducted as a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in North American Integration at York University, Canada, entailing published work on the subject in the International Feminist Journal of Politics and International Affairs, and further progress on it through a UC Taft Research Center Fellowship. She also co-produced an open access online course on "Decolonizing Nuclear Studies" residing on the Carnegie-supported Highly NRiched website. She has received multiple external and internal awards and grants, taught in the US, Canada, Mexico, Egypt, and The Netherlands, and guest-lectured widely. She created the Feminist Comparative and International Politics doctoral concentration in Political Science at UC and continues to research, present, publish, and serve on doctoral and MA committees at UC while also co-leading a Reimagining Global Politics research group at the UC Taft Research Center.
Research Interests
Gender and Politics
Political Economy
Political Violence
Human Rights
Energy And Climate Policy
Feminist International Relations
Feminist Security Studies
Indigenous Feminism(s)
Globalization
Gender And Politics
Countries of Interest
Canada
United States
Mexico
My Research:
Anne Sisson Runyan has devoted the past forty years to theoretical and empirical work on how gender (in relation to other power relations such as class, race, nation, and sexuality) discursively and materially shape global political economy, security, and governance assumptions, practices, and priorities, and how these shape and (re)produce gender and other inequalities. She has engaged an array of feminist and critical theorizing and in a range of methods, such as participant observation, discursive, NGO and elite interviewing, and survey research, to conduct this work. She has also worked collaboratively with scholars and activists in several parts of the world to develop feminist critiques of and approaches to international politics as well as transnational feminist practices and pedagogies. Her current work is on the impact of the nuclear fuel cycle on indigenous peoples and women and their resistances.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
This article problematizes the concept of “security” within the concept of “citizen security” employed by Mexico, through a feminist security studies critique. Considering feminist security studies critiques that often see security as ultimately tied to militarization, regardless of the security referent, this article shows how this problem surfaces in Mexico's National Action Plan for Women, Peace, and Security and in the claim that Mexico has adopted a feminist foreign policy. Not only do these initiatives largely ignore high rates of femicide and other forms of state and nonstate violence in Mexico, but they are also reproductive of violence, particularly militarized violence, in their attachments to security. The article delves into the literature on how Mexico and other states domestically inimical to feminist movements have instituted national action plans that militarize the women, peace, and security agenda, embraced feminist foreign policies as they have further militarized, or both, often promulgating plans with little or no input from civil society. Mexico is revealed as a Janus‐faced example where seemingly liberal feminist values are promoted abroad but are not implemented at home. Thus, the nation is refashioning itself as a “good global citizen” at the expense of implementing and expanding citizen (and noncitizen) rights and protections within its borders. KEYWORDS femicide; feminist foreign policy; feminist security studie
By focusing attention on the beginning and end of the nuclear fuel chain, which mostly takes place on Indigenous lands, this article examines the gendered effects of uranium mining and nuclear waste dumping on North American Indigenous women and their resistances to these processes. In so doing, the article reveals how mining and dumping are made possible by the denial or deflection not only of Indigenous peoples' sovereignty over their lands, but also of Indigenous women's political and cultural authority and bodily autonomy. The article further shows how Indigenous women's reassertions of their nations' and their own self-determination through resurgent practices, like water-walking in the case of the Anishnaabe women, contribute significantly to the resolve of Indigenous nations to refuse to consent to further nuclear colonialism; an example of this is the case of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation's referendum that stopped the siting of the deep geological repository for nuclear waste on their territory. This case suggests it is incumbent on non-Indigenous feminist IR critics of nuclear politics to engage with Indigenous feminist thought and centre Indigenous women's resistances to the nuclear fuel chain, in order to address the consequences of nuclear waste dumping in anti-colonial, and socially and environmentally just, ways.
How best to realize international human rights law in practice has proved a vexing problem. The challenge is compounded in the USA, which has not ratifed several treaties including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The Cities for CEDAW movement addresses this defcit by encouraging cities to endorse and implement CEDAW norms. In doing so, it seeks to catalyze a local boomerang efect, whereby progressive political momentum at the local level generates internal pressure from below to improve gender equity outcomes across the country and eventually, at the national level. In this article, we trace the difusion of Cities for CEDAW activism with attention to the case of Cincinnati and analyze its implications for advancing women’s rights principles. We argue that while Cities for CEDAW has potential to enhance respect for women’s rights in local jurisdictions, its impact on national policy remains limited.
Nuclear colonialism, or the exploitation of Indigenous lands and peoples to sustain the nuclear fuel cycle from uranium mining and refining to nuclear energy and weapons production and the dumping of the resulting nuclear waste, occurs in many parts of the world and has generated considerable protest. This article focuses on a contemporary and ongoing case of nuclear colonialism in Canada: attempts to site two national deep geological repositories (DGRs) for nuclear waste on traditional First Nations land in Southwestern Ontario near the world’s largest operational nuclear power plant. Through histories of the rise of nuclear power and nuclear waste policy-making and their relationship to settler colonialism in Canada, as well as actions taken by the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) and white settler anti-nuclear waste movements, the article explores how gender is at work in nuclear colonialism and anti-nuclear waste struggles. Gender is explored here in terms of the patriarchal nuclear imperative, the appropriation of Aboriginal land through undermining Aboriginal women’s status and the problematic relationship between First Nations and white settler women-led movements in resistance to nuclear waste burial from a feminist decolonial perspective
The article begins with a question about the value of revitalising the equation between sexual/intimate violence and terrorism in the current neoliberal/post-feminist political and epistemological landscape. We argue that the intensifying international interest in sexual violence, and an accompanying hyper-visual imagery, is implicated in the cauterisation of critical thought about sexual violence. We offer the more mobile and expansive concept of sexed violence to “unthink” dominant narratives that reproduce heteronormativity and white, Western hegemony. Through an analysis of the film Unwatchable, we consider why non-white raced bodies consistently materialise as less “comprehensible” as violatable than white bodies. We further suggest that a move to sexed violence can help to think more critically about both sexual violence and feminism.
In this article we explore questions about feminism and violence to constructively complicate understandings about this relationship. Feminism is conventionally positioned as oppositional to direct and structural violences, importantly so, as this has been seen key to feminism's viability as a constructive knowledge project. Yet there are increasingly persistent concerns about epistemic, juridical and other violences circulating around feminism, which render feminism's role in the production of oppositional knowledge and politics suspect. This is especially the case where western feminist ideas have been problematically taken up in neoliberal global policy making and for militarized human rights interventions. As feminist international relations scholars troubled by such associations, we investigate – via an exploration of three provocative feminist texts – how feminism is perceived to be both violated and violating by its contemporary imbrication in the violences of neoliberalism and global governance. We further suggest that metaphors of feminized corporeality, which infuse representations of feminism in these texts (especially in its western homogenized governance form), inhibit the destabilizing potential of feminism through its harmful associations with the ‘failing’ female body. This bodily shaping of feminism, which we examine by following a ‘trail of blood’, tells us something important about the relationship between feminism and violence, about recurring discursive and theoretical closures around feminism and about the possibilities for reinventions of feminism to unsettle the violent degradations, which feminists insistently reveal and decry.
Books Written:
In the new edition (forthcoming December 2024) of this bestselling text and scholarly reference edited by Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan, new and revised chapters reflect shifts in the gendered, classed, racialized and sexualized nature of ongoing global restructurings. Through fresh intersectional feminist analyses of widening health, climate, care, inequality, democracy and knowledge crises since the Great Financial Crisis and the deepening of many forms of capitalism, this volume stresses the complexities of multiple restructurings which demand new ways to think across sightings, sites and resistances. Chapters highlight different sightings of neoliberalizations and neoauthoritarianizations. They also bring into view different geographic sites across Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe and different non-geographic sites such as productive, reproductive and virtual economies. They further explore different forms of women’s and feminist resistance, such as local and national labor organizing, regional and multipolar organizin, and broadening non-capitalist community and solidarity economies. Many chapters critique problematic constructions of women’s empowerment, and all challenge the machinations of neoliberal capital that undermine most women, marginalized peoples and the planet. Providing contemporary approaches to the gendered global political economy, Gender and Global Restructurings will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE, international relations, economics, development and gender studies.
Accessible and student-friendly, Global Gender Politics analyzes the gendered divisions of power, labor, and resources that contribute to the global crises of representation, violence, and sustainability. The author emphasizes how hard-won attention to gender and other related inequalities in world aff airs is simultaneously being jeopardized by new and old authoritarianisms and depoliticized through reducing gender to a binary and a problem-solving tool in global governance. The author examines gendered insecurities produced by the pursuit of international security and gendered injustices in the global political economy and sees promise in transnational struggles for global justice.
Since the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) tensions concerning immigration trends and policies, which continued to escalate at the turn of the millennium resulted in revised national security policies in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. These tensions have catalyzed the three governments to rethink their political and economic agendas. While national feminist scholarship in and on these respective countries continue to predominate, since NAFTA, there has been increasing feminist inquiry in a North American regional frame. Less has been done to understand challenges of the hegemonies of nation, region, and empire in this context and to adequately understand the meaning of (im)mobility in people's lives as well as the (im)mobilities of social theories and movements like feminism. Drawing from current feminist scholarship on intimacy and political economy and using three main frameworks: Fortressing Writs/Exclusionary Rights, Mobile Bodies/Immobile Citizenships, and Bordered/Borderland Identities, a handpicked group of established and rising feminist scholars methodically examine how the production of feminist knowledge has occurred in this region. The economic, racial, gender and sexual normativities that have emerged and/or been reconstituted in neoliberal and securitized North America further reveal the depth of regional and global restructuring.
Divided into Sightings, Sites and Resistances, this book examines: the disciplining politics of race, sexuality and modernity under securitized globalization, including case studies on domestic workers in Hong Kong heteronormative development policies and responses to the crisis of social reproduction and colonizing responses to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa migration, human rights and citizenship, including studies on remittances, the emergence of neoliberal subjectivities among rural Mexican women, Filipina migrant workers and women’s labor organizing in the Middle East and North Africa feminist resistance, incorporating the latest scholarship on transnational feminism and feminist critical globalization movement activism, including case studies on men’s violence on the Mexico/US border, pan-indigenous women’s movements and cyberfeminism. Providing a coherent and challenging approach to the issues of gender and the processes of globalization in the new millennium, this important text will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE, international relations, economics, development and gender studies.