Research

Overview

I specialise in political philosophy, particularly 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 novel account of who should be entitled to refugee status under international law. Specifically, the definition of refugeehood I defend 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, suggests that the widely-criticised persecution condition should be amended in a political, rather than humanitarian, direction. I have also argued, as part of a broader discussion of just international protection for internally displaced persons (here), that rejecting alienage could improve IDP protection.

My second research stream in this area concerns 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.

I’ve also written some short response pieces in this area (here and here). One argues that long-settled undocumented immigrants should be entitled to regularisation and protections against removal, even in more “controversial” cases of irregular entry or violations of criminal law (which are unusual). The other argues that in refugee contexts, “”rich” protection is importantly conceptually distinct from “robust” protection.

Special Obligations

I have a long-standing side-interest in questions concerning special obligations to compatriots. My encyclopedia entry on this topic (here) summarises key positions in this literature and suggests that the most plausible accounts are relational in nature and recognise that permissible partiality among compatriots is constrained by cosmopolitan principles of justice. 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 articulate the circumstances under which it is (un)acceptable to prioritise the interests of fellow-citizens during times of global crisis.

State-Centricity in Politics and Philosophy

Currently, 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 requirement for refugeehood, and the (often, in my view, unjustified) difference in international protection options available to people displaced across vs within state borders.

My latest paper (here) critically evaluates one recent prominent analysis of state-centricity, according to which 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.

(Relatedly, in a recent book review (here), I critique Luke Ulaş’s interesting and provocative claim that adopting a “cosmopolitical” imaginary – that is, imagining that at least some political issues “pertain” to a global public – would require giving up on the self-determination of peoples.)

Right now, I’m in the process of developing a positive account of the problems with, and proper responses to, state-centric thinking that doesn’t overshoot. One work-in-progress concerns our duties to attend to global politics, and the issues with the dominant statist framing of political attention. Another concerns the dangers of weak or merely symbolic uses of the term “sanctuary”, and the ways in which sanctuary movements can embody the vices of globalism as well as the virtues of localism.

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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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