Biography

The focus of my research is on the history of international law, International Humanitarian Law, and normative international political theory, in particular theories of the legitimate use of armed force. Prior to joining the EUI, I was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. I earned my PhD in political science from Columbia University.
As a Max Weber Fellow, I am completing a book project that examines the ideas of just war and regular war in the history of legal and political thought. The project reconstructs the theory of regular war as a neglected alternative to just war theory and examines its contemporary significance. The legal doctrine of regular war was articulated during the classical period of international law; it attempts to strike a middle path between political realism and the idealism of natural law and just war theory.
Parallel to this historical project, I have worked and published on contemporary questions of conflict and post-conflict justice, specifically on the legitimacy of defensive force used by non-state actors in contexts of state failure; on the interaction between the imperatives of corrective justice, social justice, and economic development in post-conflict settings; and on the effects of the legal imperative of criminal accountability in peace negotiations.