•  1
    Two Essays on Philosophy and Penal Power
    Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University. 2001.
    Part I. 'The Grotian moment: Natural penal rights in early modern British thought.' I begin this historical essay by locating Hugo Grotius's innovative theory of the natural right to punish against the background of Scholastic political thought from Marsilius to Almain and Suarez, I then trace the English reception of his thought from the Civil War to the Glorious Revolution, from Hobbes and Milton to Cumberland, Tyrrell, and Locke. I elucidate the political and legal implications that Grotius's…Read more
  •  8
    The Ethics of Preventive War, Deen K. Chatterjee, ed. , 255 pp., $29.99 paper (review)
    Ethics and International Affairs 29 (3): 345-347. 2015.
  •  23
    Political Philosophy (review)
    Teaching Philosophy 33 (2): 223-227. 2010.
    Review of A. John Simmons' _Political Philosophy_, Oxford University Press Fundamentals of Philosophy series, 2007.
  •  285
    In light of the pragmatic aspirations of ordinary language philosophy, this essay critically examines the competing grammatical strictures that are often set forth within the theoretical discourse of 'power'. It repudiates both categorically appraisive employments of 'power' and the antithetical urge to fully operationalize the concept. It offers an attenuated defense of the thesis that 'power' is an essentially contestable concept, but rejects the notion that this linguistic fact stems from con…Read more
  •  765
    Putting the War Back in Just War Theory: A Critique of Examples
    Ethical Perspectives 24 (1): 123-144. 2017.
    Analytic just war theorists often attempt to construct ideal theories of military justice on the basis of intuitions about imaginary and sometimes outlandish examples, often taken from non-military contexts. This article argues for a sharp curtailment of this method and defends, instead, an empirically and historically informed approach to the ethical scrutiny of armed conflicts. After critically reviewing general philosophical reasons for being sceptical of the moral-theoretic value of imaginar…Read more
  •  116
    The 'Bush Doctrine' as a Hegemonic Discourse Strategy
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. 2009.
    Even if preventive military counter-terrorism may sometimes be ethically justifiable, it remains an open question whether the Bush Doctrine presents a discursively coherent account of the relevant normative conditions. With a view towards answering this question, this article critically examines efforts to ground the morally personifying language of the Bush Doctrine in term of hegemonic stability theory. Particular critical attention is paid to the arguments of leading proponents of this brand …Read more
  •  275
    The senses of terrorism
    Review Journal of Political Philosophy 6 1-36. 2008.
    This articles exposes the methodological errors involved in attempting to operationalize or value-neutralize the concept of 'terrorism.' It defends, instead, an effects-based approach to the taxonomy of 'terrorism' that builds out from a central conceptual connection between the term's negative connotation and a widely shared moral presumption against the killing of innocent non-combatants. Although this approach to the core meaning of 'terrorism' is far from value-neutral, it has a number of vi…Read more
  •  49
    Republicanism and Geopolitical Domination
    Journal of Political Power 4 (2): 279-300. 2011.
    Philip Pettit’s neo-Roman republican theory of non-domination is billed as a more egalitarian alternative to classical liberal theories of non-interference. As a theory of geopolitical affairs, however, his republicanism fails to fulfill this egalitarian promise in ways that closely echo John Rawls’s liberal law of peoples. Pettit’s republican law of peoples is ill equipped to address structural sources of transnational and global domination because it exaggerates the ontological separateness of…Read more
  •  17
    The ‘Bush Doctrine’ as a hegemonic discourse strategy
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12 (3): 377-398. 2009.
    Even if preventive military counter-terrorism may sometimes be ethically justifiable, it remains an open question whether the Bush Doctrine presented a discursively coherent account of the relevant normative conditions. With a view towards answering this question, this article critically examines efforts to ground the morally personifying language of the Bush Doctrine in term of hegemonic stability theory. Particular critical attention is paid to the arguments of leading proponents of this brand…Read more
  •  890
    Jus Ad Bellum after 9/11: A State of the Art Report
    International Political Theory Beacon. 2007.
    An examination of the applicability of conventional and revisionist just war principles to the global war on terror.