Melissa Johnston

Melissa Johnston is a Lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland where she works in the areas of political economy and security. Melissa was awarded a Discovery Early Career Research Award (2022-2025) for her project on Brideprice, Conflict and Violence Against Women in Southeast Asia.

Melissa has two main research areas. The first area examines the pivotal role of misogyny and violence against women in the political economy of violent extremism, populism and Islamist and right wing politics,looking at the empirical and analytical links between violence against women and violent extremism in Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Libya. Findings show that support for violence against women and misogyny is the best predictor of an individual's support for violent extremism - a finding cited several times by the UN Secretary General in 2019 and 2020. This empirical work has been extended theoretically in the 2024 piece analysing the centrality of patriarchy to international order in the article "Morbid symptoms: a feminist dialectics of global patriarchy in crisis", co-authered with Sara Meger (University of Melbourne).

The second area is the political economy of post-conflict rebuilding. Her doctoral dissertation (winner of the 2019 Australian Political Studies Association thesis prize) and OUP monograph "Rebuilding Patriarchy" (winner of the 2024 BISA IPEG book prize), applies a feminist political economy approach to account for the uneven outcomes gender programming by international development agencies. It argues the outcomes of international interventions on gender responsive budgeting, laws against domestic violence and microfinance are shaped by power relations between men and women in a setting of elite dominance. In the Timor-Leste case specifically, the political economy of kinship—as manifested in brideprice or traditional dispute resolution—has been as crucial to class formation as it has in perpetuating gender injustices. A journal article from this work "Frontier Finance" was the winner of the 2021 Australian International Political Economy Network best journal article prize.

Previously, Melissa has worked for the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) on Asia-Pacific development, and for Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) on European Union programs to protect women from severe intimate partner violence.