About

Alison Brysk is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an accomplished author with eight books on international human rights, reflecting her deep engagement with global issues. Brysk has been recognized with numerous prestigious fellowships, including Fulbright Fellowships at Oxford University in 2022, India in 2011, and Canada in 2007, as well as a Taiwan Fellowship in 2019 and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship from 2013 to 2014. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, underscoring her active role in international policy and academic circles. Brysk's research and teaching have a global reach, having lectured and conducted research in a diverse array of countries including Argentina, Austria, Bhutan, Canada, Czechia, Ecuador, France, Hungary, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Her work is accessible through various academic and public platforms, including her published books and online resources.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Social psychology
• Gender studies
• Political economy
• Philosophy
• Law and economics
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Abortion Rights Backlash

  2025-03-20 · 5 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Reproductive self-determination is a defining human rights issue of our time. Yet reproductive rights are regressing even in developed democracies where women have secured public political participation and rising workplace equity. This book argues that abortion rights backlash represents a patriarchal political struggle for control of the private sphere—not lagging tradition. Gender rights backlash is driven by rising forms of nationalism reacting to unequal globalization, but contested by feminist movements that reclaim democracy. Extending the feminist principle that “the personal is political” to the global level, this study compares divergent outcomes in the parallel cases of Ireland versus Poland, Argentina versus Brazil, and California versus Texas during the critical juncture of 2018–2022. Abortion Rights Backlash shows how the fate of reproductive rights—and the millions of lives that depend on them—is shaped by and reshapes democratic freedoms, representation, and institutions. This rich historical account of reproductive rights struggles on three continents transforms our understanding of human rights, the quest for collective identity, the contradictions of modernization, the changing role of religion, democratic backsliding, and the global dynamics of social movements. This study of the struggle for reproductive rights in a changing world yields important lessons for the quest for gender justice worldwide.

  PublisherDOI

• Abortion Backlash in the United States

  2025-03-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 5 examines the exceptional American experience of rapid rights regression and regional disparity since 2022 in comparative context. After profiling the unique characteristics of “states’ rights” in the United States and their impact on democratic opportunity structures, the chapter develops contrasting case accounts of progress in California and regress in Texas. In parallel with the previous chapters, the U.S. case proceeds to document historic gender regimes, the impact of globalization, the shifting role of religion and nationalism in the quest for identity, and feminist responses. Each of these dimensions is outlined for the United States as a whole and then is briefly contrasted in California versus Texas. Due to distinctive features of the American experience, this chapter offers a treatment of the reproductive rights regime as a multifaceted complex of national and state legal limits, combined with policies such as funding barriers and clinic restrictions, and conditioned by an extraordinary level of harassment and violence that undermine access to legal rights. In the U.S. case, race relations play the same role as nationalism in Europe and Latin America. The chapter profiles feminist movements and democratic struggles both during the 1973–2022 period of contested liberal abortion rights and later in the wake of the Dobbs decision—that produced a checkerboard of disparate states’ rights unequaled since the Civil War. The dynamics of this radical transformation of the American political environment parallel many aspects of the comparative cases of backlash, producing more transnational mobilization, more intersectional appeals, and diversification of political channels.

  PublisherDOI

• Abortion Rights Backlash

  2025-03-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This introductory chapter maps worldwide progress and regress in reproductive rights and poses the puzzle of gender backlash in developed democracies in an era of rising rights and globalization. The chapter first delineates the international norms of reproductive rights as human rights and goes on to analyze the historical pattern of population politics and changing state regulation of reproduction with modernization and the rise of nationalism. This chapter argues that the contradictory trends of 21st-century abortion rights are driven by disparate nationalist responses to globalization—with the ultimate outcome dependent on the strength of feminist movements and democratic systems. The chapter discusses the research design of comparative case studies and provides descriptive statistics to chart the key political, economic, and demographic characteristics that motivate and delimit the comparison. Finally, the plan of the book is presented.

  PublisherDOI

• Abortion across borders: The globalization of rights access and civil resistance

  Journal of Human Rights · 2025-03-15 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Academic networking for human rights: research chairs as social capital

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Contrasting Catholic Cases in Europe

  2025-03-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 3 compares the struggle for abortion rights in Ireland and Poland, contrasting Catholic cases in Europe. The first section profiles the progress and regress of reproductive rights in the critical juncture of 2018–2020 in Ireland, Poland, and the nonstate nationalist case of Northern Ireland. The chapter proceeds to analyze the drivers of the disparate outcomes by considering the historic gender regimes, transformative impact of globalization, and distinctive varieties of nationalist response. We see that cosmopolitan projection combines with democratic deepening and an empowered transnational feminist movement to transform reproductive rights in Ireland. At the same time, Poland has reacted to global disadvantage with a populist revival of patriarchal nationalism rooted in religious resurgence that undermines abortion access—with fatal results. The intermediate patterns of Northern Ireland show how stagnation in devolved governance locks in reactive nationalism, although reproductive rights eventually progress through civil society and transnational ties.

  PublisherDOI

• Abortion Rights in Latin America

  2025-03-20 · 1 citations

  editorial1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Chapter 4 considers contrasting Catholic cases of reproductive rights regulation in Latin America: Argentina and Brazil. The opening section charts Latin America’s 21st century “Green Wave” movements that secured abortion liberalization across the region, peaking with the 2020 legalization of abortion in Argentina. Argentina’s experience contrasts with Brazil’s regression: democratic backsliding and further restriction of severely limited access to abortion throughout the Bolsonaro period. The chapter proceeds to document the historic gender regime baseline of population politics in neighboring Brazil and Argentina, and the contradictory impact of globalization that brought liberal democracy and neoliberal economic adjustment throughout the region. As in Europe, the Catholic neighboring states responded with contrasting strategies: outward-looking nationalism and deepening democracy in Argentina compared with Brazil’s turn to nationalist populism allied with a rising religious force (as in Poland). Deepening the contrast, Argentina’s progress in reproductive rights was fostered by a multilevel feminist movement that assumed regional leadership, while Brazil’s historic women’s movement was sidelined by party politics and a competing transnational countermovement.

  PublisherDOI

• Global Networks and Reproductive Rights Resistance

  2025-01-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  How is the global fight for abortion access reshaping borders, laws, and resistance itself?

  PublisherDOI

• Expanding abortion access strengthens democracy, while abortion bans signal broader repression − worldwide study

  2024-10-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: populism and the politics of human rights

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-05-12 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How do contemporary forms of populism in different locations generate threats to human rights? While populism in theory could enhance human rights by deepening democracy, it simultaneously harbors a logic of illiberal necessity to contain global and national elites as they are perceived to threaten the security of “the people.” As the liberal international order and liberal democracy cannot deliver social and economic citizenship, populist movements attempt to substitute cultural citizenship for the cosmopolitan international regime of legal rights. Populism poses systematic and inherent threats to due process rights, minority rights, gender equity, civil liberties, often ultimately culminating in repression of physical integrity and failures of its signature social rights. We trace the political process that translates nationalist perceptions into abusive regimes and the multiple roles of international influences. We go on to suggest local governance, coalition-building, and normative responses to populist threats.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Aashish Mehta

  5 shared

• Gershon Shafir

  4 shared

• Yuan-li Wu

  Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs

  2 shared

• Thomas U. Berger

  University of International Relations

  2 shared

• Daniel Wehrenfennig

  2 shared

• Jesilyn Faust

  2 shared

• Madeline Baer

  2 shared

• Luth Tweenten Anderson Professor

  Agricultural & Applied Economics Association

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Stanford University

  1990

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Scholar in Human Rights of the International S…
• Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center
• Member of the Council on Foreign Relations