Professor Renée Marlin-Bennett researches global problems involving information and how it flows, borders, bodies, and power.  From these points of departure, she ventures into international theory, pragmatism, international political sociology, and global political economy.  Much of her previous work has explored the evolution of rules that order global practices as well as those that provide the basis for disorder.  She has examined substantive areas such as trade, intellectual property, information, and privacy  to examine how contestation, rhetorical frames, and path dependence contribute to development of global orders.

Her current research on global problems focuses on instances of power and how they can congeal into governance or disruption of governance.  Much of her work now looks to the Internet and global sites within cyberspace as opportunities for complicating our understanding of the practices of global politics in the Information Age.  She also researches the relation between the embodied human and these global practices and the politics of borders, understood broadly.

Marlin-Bennett is the author of Knowledge Power: Intellectual Property, Information, and Privacy (Lynne Rienner Publishers, May 2004) and Food Fights: International Regimes and the Politics of Agricultural Trade Disputes (Gordon & Breach, 1993; reissued by Routledge Revivals), and the editor of Alker and IR: Global Studies in an Interconnected World (Taylor and Francis, 2011).  She has also published several articles and book chapters.  She was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, a refereed publication of Oxford University Press in partnership with the International Studies Association.  OREIS publishes review essays tracing the development of scholarship in the discipline.

From 1987 to 2007, she served on the faculty of International Relations at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, D.C., USA, where she was the director of the Division of International Politics and Foreign Policy. She earned her doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her BA cum laude in international relations from Pomona College.

Her research interests include international theory; international political sociology and global political economy of information; embodiment and global politics; and pragmatic epistemology and global politics.  Specific projects explore theoretical approaches to power and information flows, borders, embodied information, and Internet and website governance.