My work addresses three major interrelated themes: the history of international legal and political thought, the history of international law and the laws of war, and the history of the international system.

While all of these themes are present in the book, the journal articles and book chapters I have published have tended to emphasize one of the three. Below I give an overview of these three themes together with relevant selected publications.

Book

My first book, War, States, and International Order: Alberico Gentili and the Foundational Myth of the Laws of War was published in the Cambridge Studies in International Relations series (Cambridge UP) in 2022. It was based on my doctoral dissertation, which won a variety of awards including the University of Oxford’s Winchester Thesis Prize.

The book was awarded the 2023 Francesco Guicciardini Prize by the International Studies Association as the best book of the year in Historical International Relations. It has been reviewed in the Journal of the History of International Law, Political Science Quarterly, Perspective on Politics, and Grotiana. Review fora, in which different scholars will write essays about the book, will also appear in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and in the Texas National Security Review in the coming months.

The book is now available in paperback, with a 20%-off offer valid until March 2025.

I gave an interview about the book to the Völkerrechtsblog, which can be found here.

Journal Articles

History of international legal and political thought

My work in this domain has concentrated on the historicizing of “Great Thinkers” in the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL). I have emphasized the extent to which these texts have been misread and misused by commentators who sought to use them for their own purposes while paying little attention to context of the texts’ production. I am particularly interested in the history of canon formation in IR and IL in the late nineteenth century, the foundational moment for both of these academic disciplines and the germinal moment for many of the flawed structuring assumptions we now take for granted.

In 2022 I co-edited a special issue for the Leiden Journal of International Law entitled “Historicizing the Canon in International Law and International Relations” with Paolo Amorosa.

 

History of international law and the laws of war

I am part of a wave of a scholars doing critical work on the history of the laws of war. This involves questioning long-established narratives about how the laws of war emerged primarily out of humanitarian motivations, and shows instead how their emergence was driven by power politics and imperialist pursuits.

History of the international system

This thread of my work investigates broader themes related to the formation and evolution of modern international orders. I am particularly interested in the often-anachronistic stories we tell about the making of modern forms of political authority, such as the modern state system, and in recovering a more historically-accurate account of these structures.

           

Writing for a General Audience

I think it is important to convey my research in a way that is also accessible to the non-specialist. My essay “Beyond the Nation-State” was Boston Review’s 6th most read article of 2021, and was subsequently republished on the World Government Research Network’s “World Orders Forum” in 2022. A French translation of the piece, titled “Au-delà de l’État-nation,” also appeared in Le Grand Continent in 2021.

More recently, Quentin Bruneau and I co-wrote an essay about Israel, Palestine, and the history of the laws of war for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, available here in PDF. It also appeared in French and in Spanish in Le Grand Continent.