C.V.
Click here for C.V.
Journal Articles
“Hannah Arendt Encounters Friedrich von Gentz: On Revolution, Preservation, and European Unity,” Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming, onlinefirst at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/abs/hannah-arendt-encounters-friedrich-von-gentz-on-revolution-preservation-and-european-unity/7194BA3533B926C5B7DF9BFE917E2A0A
Chapters
Reviews and Critical Exchanges
Critical exchange with Annie Stilz, “Crises in Territorial Sovereignty: Critical Exchange on Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration,” Political Theory 2021, forthcoming, onlinefirst at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00905917211000288?journalCode=ptxa.
Review of Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, by Anna Stilz in Political Theory 2020, forthcoming, onlinefirst at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0090591720943507.
Book Manuscript in Progress
Contested Territory: A Critical Theory of Land and Democracy Beyond Sovereign Bounds
Contested Territory presents a critical theory of territory capable of responding to border-defying global crises, especially those related to migration, the environment, and land dispossession. Statist theorists have attempted to mitigate the ills of territorial sovereignty, but have not grasped how this crumbling system causes the problems they seek to solve. Others, pitting cosmopolitanism against sovereignty, have abandoned territoriality altogether, thus ignoring the geographical dimensions of freedom. The need for a radical shift in theorizing territory is urgent.
This manuscript embarks on that shift and argues, against the mainstream view, that it is possible to theorize democracy within a framework of territorial non-sovereignty. For too long, democratic theory has been captured by what I call “the sovereign territorial imaginary,” and accordingly assumes sovereignty is a necessary condition of democracy. In an effort to loosen the grip of this paradigm and broaden our territorial imagination, I resuscitate a long-suppressed, alternative tradition in the history of political thought: the tradition of theorizing contested territory. This tradition includes anarchists, critical geographers, indigenous theorists, anti-colonial federationists, cosmopolitans, and many others. The theorists of contested territory do not view the absence of sovereignty over land as a problem, and instead find democratic potential in overlapping rule and alternatives to the state form.
To bring out the possibilities of theorizing contested territory, I explore themes central to this tradition—local land autonomy, legal pluralism, federation, cosmopolitan membership, and critiques of land monopolization and colonialism—and probe their compatibility with democratic politics. The manuscript then charts normative foundations for a cosmopolitan, democratic theory of territory. In particular, I employ the thought of Hannah Arendt—both her phenomenology of “world-building” and her rejection of sovereign mastery—to argue that it is both possible and desirable to decouple democracy and territorial sovereignty. Methodologically, this manuscript draws on critical theory, archival research, historiography, and phenomenology, all toward the end of articulating the hidden tradition of contested territory, and giving it a firm normative footing so that we might better respond to the border-defying crises of our age.