Political Philosophy

My political philosophy takes its bearings from Hannah Arendt and centres on a single, uncomfortable question: when does a state forfeit its claim on us? In work such as “Hannah Arendt: When the State is Unjustified,” I examine the conditions under which political authority loses its legitimacy, and what remains of our obligations once it does.

This means thinking carefully about justice, about the fragile “world” that political institutions are meant to hold open, and about what becomes of that world when order unravels into instability, violence, or war. I am especially drawn to the places where political philosophy and the ethics of war meet — where questions about a state’s legitimacy become questions about who may be harmed, protected, or abandoned. Arendt’s insistence that politics rests on plurality and on a common world runs through all of it, as does a suspicion of theories that treat the state as an end in itself. My contributions appear in edited volumes on the state and on global progress, in dialogue with political theorists working on legitimacy, war, and the prospects for human flourishing under conditions of contemporary crisis.