I am an Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of Public and International Affairs and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. I previously completed my Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Toronto and received my M.A. and B.A. from McGill University.
My research agenda addresses pressing global challenges at the intersection of international human rights, international security, and public health. I am especially interested in how societies grapple with rights tradeoffs in real and perceived emergencies and the dynamics of rights advancement and retrenchment.
My book, Plausible Legality: Legal Culture and Political Imperative in the Global War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2018), and related journal articles examine the capacity of international human rights and humanitarian law to constrain controversial state security practices such as torture, indefinite detention, targeted killing, and mass surveillance. Further ongoing research examines the consequences of authoritarian populism for international legal norms as well as uneven state responses to the rapid proliferation of far-right political violence and terrorism.
My next major project is focused on backlash against international women's rights and sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) rights at the United Nations and across comparative national cases. Transnationally coordinated attacks on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and conservative efforts to revive biologically deterministic understandings of gender roles and identities threaten to erode rights protections and reverse efforts to achieve gender equity. My concern for women’s rights also animates my participation in a community-engaged feminist research initiative with the Cities for CEDAW movement, which aims to promote international human rights norms through local politics.
Alongside this work, I have received National Science Foundation funding for a large study of public perceptions of civil rights and public health tradeoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. This project examines similarities and differences between tradeoffs in the post-9/11 counterterrorism context and the current pandemic crisis and analyzes the dynamics of threat construction and blame attribution. Additional research investigates the opportunistic securitization of health and implications for migration and asylum policy around the world.
PUBLICATIONS
Books
Rebecca Sanders. Plausible Legality: Legal Culture and Political Imperative in the Global War on Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Special Journal Issue
Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins, Guest Editors. Special Journal Issue: Contemporary International Anti-Feminism. Global Constitutionalism, November 2022.
Journal Articles
Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins. “Patriarchal Populism: The Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) and the Transnational Politics of Authoritarian Anti-Feminism.” Special Issue on Populist Agendas and Gender Rights: A Global Perspective. The International Spectator (2023), DOI: 10.1080/03932729.2023.2225660
Andrea Birdsall and Rebecca Sanders. “Opportunistic Oppression: U.S. Migration and Public Health Policy During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Special Issue on COVID-19 and Human Rights. The International Journal of Human Rights 27, no. 5 (2023): 809-829.
Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins. “Contemporary International Anti-Feminism.” Global Constitutionalism 11, no. 3 (November 2022): 369-378.
Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins. “Control, Alt, Delete: Patriarchal Populist Attacks on International Women’s Rights.” Global Constitutionalism 11, no. 3 (November 2022): 401-429.
*Winner of Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association’s Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section, 2021
Uttermark, Matthew, Jack Mewhirter, Rebecca Sanders, and Danielle McLaughlin, “Blame Attribution, Partisanship, and Federalism: Evidence from a Panel Study,” APSA Preprints (2022).
Jack Mewhirter, Mustafa Sagir, and Rebecca Sanders. “Towards a Predictive Model of COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy among American Adults.” Vaccine 40, no. 12 (2022): 1783-1789.
Anne Sisson Runyan and Rebecca Sanders. “Prospects for Realizing International Women’s Rights Law Through Local Governance: The Case of Cities for CEDAW.” Human Rights Review 22, No. 3 (September 2021): 303-325.
Danielle McLaughlin, Jack Mewhirter, and Rebecca Sanders. “The Belief That Politics Drive Scientific Research & Its Impact on COVID-19 Risk Assessments.” PLOS ONE 16, No. 4 (April 2021): e0249937.
Andrea Birdsall and Rebecca Sanders. “Trumping International Law?” International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 2020): 275–297.
Rebecca Sanders. “Norm Spoiling: Undermining the International Women’s Rights Agenda.” International Affairs, Vol. 94, No. 2 (March 2018): 271-291.
Rebecca Sanders. “Human Rights Abuses at the Limits of the Law: Legal Instabilities and Vulnerabilities in the ‘Global War on Terror’.” Review of International Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1 (January 2018): 2-23.
Rebecca Sanders. “Norm Proxy War and Resistance Through Outsourcing: The Dynamics of Transnational Human Rights Contestation.” Human Rights Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (June 2016): 165-191.
Rebecca Sanders. “Legal Frontiers: Targeted Killing at the Borders of War.” Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 13, No. 4 (December 2014): 512-536.
Rebecca Sanders. “(Im)plausible Legality: The Rationalisation of Human Rights Abuses in the American ‘Global War on Terror’.” International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 15, No. 4 (May 2011): 605-626.
Symposia, Reviews, and Correspondence
Rebecca Sanders, “Dark Pasts, Dark Futures? Narrative, Constraint, and the Challenge of Ascendant Nationalism,” in book forum on Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Jennifer Dixon, Cornell UP, 2018), Journal of Genocide Research Vol. 23, No. 3 (2021): 436-441.
Rebecca Sanders, Review of Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations (Swati Parashar, J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True, Eds., Oxford UP, 2018), International Affairs, Vol. 96, No. 2 (2020).
Rebecca Sanders, “Rethinking the Politics of Rights,” in book symposium on Rights as Weapons: Instruments of Conflict, Tools of Power (Clifford Bob, Princeton UP, 2019), Ethics and International Affairs (November 2019).
Rebecca Sanders, Critical Dialogue: Plausible Legality: Legal Culture and Political Imperative in the Global War on Terror (Rebecca Sanders, Oxford UP, 2018) and Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Tanisha Fazal, Cornell UP, 2018), Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (June 2019).
Book Chapters
Rebecca Sanders, “Contemporary U.S. Targeted Killing,” in The United States and International Law: Paradoxes of Support across Contemporary Issues edited by Lucrecia García Iommi and Richard W. Maass (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022).
Rebecca Sanders, “Human Rights and Counterterrorism: The American “Global War on Terror”,” in International Human Rights in War edited by Damien Rodgers and Stephen Hoadley (Singapore: Springer Press, 2021).
Rebecca Sanders, “Torture,” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Michael T. Gibbons (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 3719-3721.
Community-Engaged Policy Research
Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins, “Pushback against Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in the USA,” in Power Over Rights: Understanding and Countering the Transnational Anti-Gender Movement, Volume II, Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, 2021.
Rebecca Sanders et al., Gender Equity in the City of Cincinnati - Report of the Gender Equity Research Team (authorized by City Ordinance and part of the Cincinnati Project at the University of Cincinnati and the national Cities for CEDAW initiative), 2020.
Editorials and Blogs
Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins, “Anti-feminists want to control, alter, and delete women’s rights,” The Loop, European Consortium for Political Research, March 6, 2023.
Rebecca Sanders and Jack Mewhirter, “New Survey: Yes, Americans will give up liberties to fight the coronavirus,” Washington Post Monkey Cage, September 28, 2020.
Leila Rodriguez and Rebecca Sanders, “U.S. Must Avoid Mistakes of the Past,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 19, 2017.
Rebecca Sanders, “Columbus Day Celebrates Shameful Past,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 10, 2016.