Research
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Below you can find my journal articles and book chapters. To view more info about each piece - and to read full .pdfs - please click on the text or cover image.
Some Works-In-Progress
"Victims of Another Kind: The Problem of Perpetrator Character and Blame"
Our ability to deploy certain transitional justice mechanisms (e.g., trials, vetting and lustration, reparations, etc.) relies, at least to some extent, on some commonsense intuitions about who can and should be assigned to each perpetrator, victim, and bystander classes. However, many transitional circumstances involve individuals whose moral circumstances are deeply complicated, and whose class membership is 'non-ideal'. This paper interrogates some of the implicit and explicit classification tools that we use in order to judge one's relationship to a transgressive class of actions, and how those tools might be rendered unfit in some cases.
[Title Redacted - Under Review]
Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy strikes many as hopelessly authoritarian and thus incompatible with a project of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, I propose that Hobbes's Leviathan provides us with some concrete conceptual tools for making sense of the concerns which animate transitional justice projects. Unlike David Dyzenhaus (2012), who has suggested that a non-standard reading of Leviathan can prove useful for understanding transitional justice cases, I utilize a Hobbist interpretation of the text to argue that its most important contribution to transitional justice theorizing is the light it sheds on the proper aims of a post-conflict society.
"No Transitional Justice Without (Transitional) Ethics"
As the field of transitional justice continues to develop and evolve, scholars have had to reckon again and again with changes to its scope and mission. This discourse has been further complicated by the fact that transitional justice interventions no longer seem, in many cases, to be solely or even primarily about justice (as a kind of institutional process concerned with deserved outcomes) but rather about ethics (as a moral framework concerned with the treatment of human persons in general). In this paper, I draw out some distinctions between these two areas of inquiry, and propose that we view 'transitional ethics' as a theoretically separate -- but nevertheless deeply intertwined -- complement to transitional justice.
