Research

Overview

I specialise in political philosophy, particularly the philosophy of migration and asylum and issues of global justice.

My research thus far can be divided into three topics: (i) migration, asylum, and forced displacement, (ii) special obligations, and (iii) state-centricity in politics and philosophy. A brief summary of my work in each of these areas can be found below, followed by a full publication list. (If you have difficulty accessing any of my papers, feel free to get in touch.)

Migration, Asylum, and Forced Displacement

My earliest published work focused on the rights of refugees and displaced people. Over two papers (here and here) I defended a new legal definition of refugeehood which rejects the alienage condition—the requirement that a person must have left their country of nationality or habitual residence to be eligible for refugee status. Rejecting alienage, I argue, has implications for the widely-criticised persecution condition: it suggests that it should be amended in a political, not humanitarian, direction. I have also argued, as part of a broader account of international protection for internally displaced persons (here), that rejecting alienage could improve IDP protection.

I have also written about refugee rights to family reunion. My paper (here) on this topic argues that refugees should have stronger, broader, less-conditional rights to family reunion than non-refugee immigrants, particularly when they are children. This piece was inspired by some research I co-authored many years ago while interning at Oxfam GB (here). A further introductory chapter on this topic, co-authored with Matt Lister, was recently published here.

Special Obligations

I have a long-standing side-interest in compatriot partiality. My encyclopedia entry on this topic (here) summarises key positions in this literature and cautiously defends relational accounts of compatriot partiality constrained by cosmopolitan principles of justice. Previously—during the COVID-19 pandemic—Kok-Chor Tan, Mike Gadomski, Dylan Manson and I used this approach in a co-authored a paper (here) to develop an account of the extent of permissible compatriot partiality during times of global crisis.

State-Centricity in Politics and Philosophy

Right now, I’m thinking a lot about the fact that we tend to “see” the socio-political world through a state-centric lens. My interest in this topic stems from my early work on the alienage condition for refugeehood, and the (often, in my view, unjustified) difference in international protection available to people displaced across vs within state borders.

My latest paper (here) critically evaluates the influential argument that state-centric “ways of seeing” amount to a problematic “methodological nationalism” which is so bad for normative theory that it ought to be outright rejected. I argue that this line of criticism is unlikely to work, partly because the call for outright rejection (as opposed to mere supplementation) is too strong, and partly because, as a “way of seeing”, methodological nationalism is not the kind of thing that can be decisively rejected.

I’m currently developing a positive account of how we should engage with the socio-political world while avoiding the worst aspects of state-centric ways of seeing. One work-in-progress concerns our duties to attend to global politics. Another concerns the dangers of weak or merely symbolic uses of the term “sanctuary”. A third concerns the significance of sub-state regions for migration and asylum, via the case study of migration and asylum in Scotland.

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Publications

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Professional Reports

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Media & Public Philosophy

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Doctoral Dissertation

The Right to Refuge, and What Happens Next (2020)
Supervised by: Kok-Chor Tan.
Committee members: Brian Berkey and Samuel Freeman.
Defended April 2020. Available here.

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