My research agenda over the past few years has been organized around three sets of questions, all of which emerge from my first book, Between Samaritans and States.
Urgency Without Emergency? Emergency Politics and Its Alternatives (book project). Emergency politics is the politics surrounding claims that particular large-scale situations (e.g. 9/11, Covid-19, famine in Yemen, migration at the US Southern border) are emergencies. Even as—indeed, especially because—it often seems necessary, emergency politics is also dangerous. It can undermine democratic norms such as deliberation and citizen participation; it can be weaponized to demonize outgroups and corrode justice-based norms such as the rule of law and prohibitions on torture; it can defer attention to issues of distributive fairness and justice toward future generations, and it can exacerbate inequality by portraying those affected by pressing problems as helpless victims, among other things. In short, there is a deep tension between norms of justice, democracy, and equality, on the one hand, and emergency politics, on the other.
Despite these well-known dangers, emergency politics is an extremely prevalent paradigm in and through which people in the contemporary United States and other Anglophone countries identify and respond to large-scale pressing problems. Climate change, gun violence, terrorism, migration, biodiversity loss, Covid-19, threats to democratic institutions and high rates of opioid addiction are just a few issues that have been publicly characterized, and sometimes formally declared, as emergencies in recent years.
The first aim of Urgency Without Emergency is to explain why emergency politics is so compelling, even to entities that value the democratic, egalitarian, and justice-based norms that it threatens. The second aim is to elucidate alternatives to emergency politics that (to at least some extent) avoid these pitfalls. These alternatives fall into two categories: political forms that enjoin urgent action while fully rejecting emergency politics, which I term urgency without emergency and political forms that enjoin urgent action while retaining some aspects of emergency politics but altering it in important ways, which I term reconfigured emergency politics. The overarching aim of the book is to help reduce unnecessary sacrifices of democratic, egalitarian, and justice-based norms at the altar of emergency by demystifying how emergency politics functions and bringing alternative ways of doing urgency that are already happening into clearer view.
Money and Democracy. Because INGOs rely on monetary donations for their funding, researching them also got me thinking about the politics of small-scale monetary donations (there is already lots of good work on large-scale donations). I wrote a review essay about Effective Altruism, a movement that encourages people to do as much good as possible, including with their money. Here is a podcast I did about the topic. While I am critical of the "hidden curriculum" that EA teaches, I admire its attention to the specific attributes of money. But while EAers are interested in how money's attributes can be leveraged to maximize individual human (and non-human) welfare, I am interested in how the specific features of money, especially its fungibility, commensurability, divisibility, and mobility, shape how it functions as a currency of democratic politics. I developed this ideas in an article, "Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics." In another paper about donating to breast cancer charities, I focus on the difficulties that arise when people use donations to "multi-task," enacting love for a friend or family member and addressing a political issue simultanously (in process, email me for a draft). Here is a related blog post.
The Political Legitimacy of Non-State Actors. In BSAS I argue that INGOs engage in governance, albeit to a limited degree. This raises the question of whether the concept of normative political legitimacy, understood as the moral right to rule, which is typically applied to governments, is also relevant to INGOs. I address that question in a chapter in the Nomos volume on Political Legitimacy, "The Political Legitimacy of INGOs." I argue there that asking whether INGOs are normatively politically legitimate treats the subjects of INGO rule (such as aid recipients) as moral and political agents. In contrast, as I argue in "The Virtuous Cycle Argument, Political Judgment and Citizens' Political Resistance," a focus on empirical political legitimacy-- and in particular the postulated mutually supportive relationship among empirical political legitimacy, good government performance, and citizen compliance-- downplays the potentialities of citizen's political resistance. In another book chapter that also focuses on INGOs and democracy (but is not framed in the language of legitimacy) I consider the extent to which the "All Affected Principle" offers useful guidance to INGOs (“From Influence for the Affected to Accountability for Influence: INGOs, the All-Affected Principle, and the Social Justice Organization Alternative” (in press)).
Urgency Without Emergency? Emergency Politics and Its Alternatives (book project). Emergency politics is the politics surrounding claims that particular large-scale situations (e.g. 9/11, Covid-19, famine in Yemen, migration at the US Southern border) are emergencies. Even as—indeed, especially because—it often seems necessary, emergency politics is also dangerous. It can undermine democratic norms such as deliberation and citizen participation; it can be weaponized to demonize outgroups and corrode justice-based norms such as the rule of law and prohibitions on torture; it can defer attention to issues of distributive fairness and justice toward future generations, and it can exacerbate inequality by portraying those affected by pressing problems as helpless victims, among other things. In short, there is a deep tension between norms of justice, democracy, and equality, on the one hand, and emergency politics, on the other.
Despite these well-known dangers, emergency politics is an extremely prevalent paradigm in and through which people in the contemporary United States and other Anglophone countries identify and respond to large-scale pressing problems. Climate change, gun violence, terrorism, migration, biodiversity loss, Covid-19, threats to democratic institutions and high rates of opioid addiction are just a few issues that have been publicly characterized, and sometimes formally declared, as emergencies in recent years.
The first aim of Urgency Without Emergency is to explain why emergency politics is so compelling, even to entities that value the democratic, egalitarian, and justice-based norms that it threatens. The second aim is to elucidate alternatives to emergency politics that (to at least some extent) avoid these pitfalls. These alternatives fall into two categories: political forms that enjoin urgent action while fully rejecting emergency politics, which I term urgency without emergency and political forms that enjoin urgent action while retaining some aspects of emergency politics but altering it in important ways, which I term reconfigured emergency politics. The overarching aim of the book is to help reduce unnecessary sacrifices of democratic, egalitarian, and justice-based norms at the altar of emergency by demystifying how emergency politics functions and bringing alternative ways of doing urgency that are already happening into clearer view.
Money and Democracy. Because INGOs rely on monetary donations for their funding, researching them also got me thinking about the politics of small-scale monetary donations (there is already lots of good work on large-scale donations). I wrote a review essay about Effective Altruism, a movement that encourages people to do as much good as possible, including with their money. Here is a podcast I did about the topic. While I am critical of the "hidden curriculum" that EA teaches, I admire its attention to the specific attributes of money. But while EAers are interested in how money's attributes can be leveraged to maximize individual human (and non-human) welfare, I am interested in how the specific features of money, especially its fungibility, commensurability, divisibility, and mobility, shape how it functions as a currency of democratic politics. I developed this ideas in an article, "Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics." In another paper about donating to breast cancer charities, I focus on the difficulties that arise when people use donations to "multi-task," enacting love for a friend or family member and addressing a political issue simultanously (in process, email me for a draft). Here is a related blog post.
The Political Legitimacy of Non-State Actors. In BSAS I argue that INGOs engage in governance, albeit to a limited degree. This raises the question of whether the concept of normative political legitimacy, understood as the moral right to rule, which is typically applied to governments, is also relevant to INGOs. I address that question in a chapter in the Nomos volume on Political Legitimacy, "The Political Legitimacy of INGOs." I argue there that asking whether INGOs are normatively politically legitimate treats the subjects of INGO rule (such as aid recipients) as moral and political agents. In contrast, as I argue in "The Virtuous Cycle Argument, Political Judgment and Citizens' Political Resistance," a focus on empirical political legitimacy-- and in particular the postulated mutually supportive relationship among empirical political legitimacy, good government performance, and citizen compliance-- downplays the potentialities of citizen's political resistance. In another book chapter that also focuses on INGOs and democracy (but is not framed in the language of legitimacy) I consider the extent to which the "All Affected Principle" offers useful guidance to INGOs (“From Influence for the Affected to Accountability for Influence: INGOs, the All-Affected Principle, and the Social Justice Organization Alternative” (in press)).