London School of Economics

Post-Doc, International Relations

LSE Fellow

Thesis Title: Reconstructing Human Rights - a pragmatic pluralist inquiry in global ethics

About

My wider academic interests form at the nexus of political theory, ethics, international relations and, increasingly, social theory. I'm motivated by an intuition that political and social ethics must be understood in a global context, and that ethical theory needs to be more responsive to critical social theory.

I'm currently developing further research on the understanding of moral agency in international criminal law, and the human right to land and housing as an emerging challenge to dominant liberal conceptions of human rights.

My PhD research critically reconstructs human rights as both ethical ideal and a political practice. I critique conventional moral justifications of human rights and the related role they play in legitimating political authority, arguing that the pluralism and political content of human rights cannot be eliminated. I reconstruct the relationship between ethics and politics through an engagement with pragmatist and pluralist moral and political theory.

The resulting view of human rights is situated and agonistic, seeing the claiming of human rights as a political act that makes demands on the social order in the name of a particular ethical ideal. Rather than seeing the political act of claiming rights as undermining human rights as universal moral principles, it becomes essential to ethics as such. The international political context of rights is then examined by looking to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in historical context, and contrasting human rights practice as expressed in international law and popular social movements.

Contact Information