Ann Norris

Senior Fellow for Women and Foreign Policy

Profile picture

Expert Bio

Ann Norris is a senior fellow for women and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Norris has more than two decades of experience working in Congress, for the executive branch, and at the local level on a range of national security issues with a particular emphasis on gender equality. 

During the Barack Obama administration, Norris served at the State Department as senior advisor and counselor to the ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. In that role, she focused on gender-based violence, gender issues in Afghanistan and the Asia-Pacific region, and the empowerment of adolescent girls. Specifically, Norris worked extensively on the development and launch of the U.S. Global Strategy to Empower Adolescent Girls, and spearheaded the State Department’s role in Let Girls Learn, a presidential initiative aimed at improving access to education for adolescent girls. At the end of the Obama administration, she served as principal deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs.

From 2005 to 2014, Norris served as senior foreign policy and defense advisor and legislative assistant to Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA). In that role, Norris handled all issues relating to Senator Boxer’s responsibilities to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served as the lead staff member of the subcommittee on international operations and organizations, human rights, democracy, and global women’s issues. During her time in the Senate, Norris focused extensively on issues involving sexual assault in the U.S. Armed Forces and the Peace Corps, and on gender-based violence and women’s rights globally.

In recent years, Norris has worked as a consultant to the office of the mayor of the city of Los Angeles on the CHANGE Initiative, an international city network focused on achieving gender equality through the pursuit of inclusive city policies and programs. From 2019 to 2020, she worked for National Security Action to develop a strategy for gender equality that could inform an incoming U.S. administration. She also recently authored a CFR report on reforming the international architecture for gender equality.

Norris is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles and holds a master of arts degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College.

Media Inquiries

For media inquiries, please contact [email protected].
Clear All
Regions
Topics
Type

Top Stories on CFR

Trade

President Trump doubled almost all aluminum and steel import tariffs, seeking to curb China’s growing dominance in global trade. These six charts show the tariffs’ potential economic effects.

Ukraine

The Sanctioning Russia Act would impose history’s highest tariffs and tank the global economy. Congress needs a better approach, one that strengthens existing sanctions and adds new measures the current bill ignores.

China Strategy Initiative

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.