Philosophy and Ethics of War

I study war as a moral and existential catastrophe rather than a strategic problem — an event that unmakes worlds and remakes the people caught in it. My current project, “Evil as Embodied Experience,” treats war as the embodiment of evil and sets out to debunk the heroic myth that lends organised violence its glamour.

Rather than beginning from abstract just-war principles, I begin from lived experience and from an ethics of care: what is owed to the wounded, the displaced, and the grieving, and what it means to attend to them well. Hannah Arendt’s notion of world-loss guides part of this work, helping to describe how war strips away the shared, durable world in which a human life becomes intelligible. Other strands address the hospitality and education owed to displaced war children, and argue that no agenda of human flourishing can be credible while it ignores war and political instability. Much of this research is interdisciplinary and collaborative, developed with philosophers of religion, ethicists, and phenomenologists across Europe. My aim is a philosophy of war that keeps faith with the concrete suffering it describes.