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Digital Domination: Social Media and Contestatory DemocracyPolitical Studies. 2022.This paper argues that social media companies’ power to regulate communication in the public sphere illustrates a novel type of domination. The idea is that, since social media companies can partially dictate the terms of citizens’ political participation in the public sphere, they can arbitrarily interfere with the choices individuals make qua citizens. I contend that social media companies dominate citizens in two different ways. First, I focus on the cases in which social media companies exer…Read more
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Global Political Legitimacy and the Structural Power of CapitalJournal of Social Philosophy 54 (4): 490-509. 2023.In contemporary democracies, global capitalism exerts a significant influence over how state power is exercised, raising questions about where political power resides in global politics. This question is important, since our specific considerations about justifiability of political power, i.e. political legitimacy, depend on how we characterize political power at the global level. As a partial answer to this question, I argue that our notion of global political legitimacy should be reoriented to…Read more
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Political Realism and Epistemic ConstraintsSocial Theory and Practice 48 (1): 1-27. 2022.This article argues that Bernard Williams’ Critical Theory Principle (CTP) is in tension with his realist commitments, i.e., deriving political norms from practices that are inherent to political life. The Williamsian theory of legitimate state power is based on the central importance of the distinction between political rule and domination. Further, Williams supplements the normative force of his theory with the CTP, i.e., the principle that acceptance of a justification regarding power relatio…Read more
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On the limits of the political: The problem of overly permissive pluralism in Mouffe's agonismConstellations 28 (3): 417-431. 2021.This paper argues that the critique of depoliticization in Mouffe’s agonistic political theory needs to be revised. This is because her account of the political does not succeed in filtering out undesirable forms of politicization such as science denialism and other types of post-truth politics. Mouffe's conception of the common symbolic space does not accomplish the task of limiting extreme pluralism in the absence of certain standards about how to correctly apply the fundamental notions of thi…Read more
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University of AmsterdamRegular Faculty
University of St. Andrews
PhD, 2008
Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |