Research & Curriculum Vitae
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Prometheus’ Blind Spot: Invoking Rules and A Political History of Fire (dissertation)
Human affairs have taken countless unexpected turns because people succeeded in harnessing and responding to fire in pioneering ways. As practices related to firefighting (protecting against conflagration) and fire setting (using incendiary munitions during armed conflict) changed, so too have definitions of appropriate conduct in urban design and planning, public service provision, organization of state bureaucracies, state culpability, and international law. This project studies how invoking legal and normative rules related to fire events gives them context-specific meaning. By invoking rules to justify actions, people have leveraged the authority of rules claims to elicit specific actions and to legitimize behavioral prescriptions. Historically, doing so has also contested presumed-to-be-stable existing legal and normative rules and enabled the formation of innovative configurations of domestic governance, international institutions, and new constellations of conceptions of appropriate conduct. Starting from Wittgenstein’s observation that rules cannot directly govern action, I argue the ways people invoke rules in practice constitute the resources through which the meaning of rules (often wrongly taken to be relatively stable) is produced and negotiated. Rather than delimiting what is allowed or prohibited, rules claims change the meaning of the rules they purport to reference.
This project develops a broad history of fire prevention, firefighting, and fire setting practices ranging from municipal and national governments’ responses to conflagrations, the creation and organization of firefighting services, the (re)construction of spaces touched by fire, the regulation of incendiary material, and the deployment of incendiary munitions in armed conflict. Although technological innovation permitted new forms of action, such change does not suffice to explain why practices evolved in the specific ways they did. The need to systematically adjudicate between competing rules claims resulting from the property damage of the Great Fire of London, for instance, produced new judicial institutions. Competing rules claims created culpability narratives that affected the scope and scale of policy reform after the Great Chicago Fire. A deadly fire at a Romanian nightclub served as focal points for invocations of rules concerning rule of law and corrupt governance. People invoking various legal and normative rules in each situation led to new configurations of the relationship between people and the state. Similarly, the way people invoked rules in order to justify or critique the wartime use of incendiary munitions, was central to crafting the legal and normative international order that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. Aerial incendiary bombardment practices show the plasticity of meanings of international legal and normative rules, and people’s capacity to invoke rules from other substantive domains in order to circumvent them. During WWII, the American doctrine of precision bombing gradually gave way to obliteration bombing, which continued through the Korean and Vietnam wars. Later, in partial response to the atrocities of the previous half century of incendiary warfare, widespread anti-personnel incendiary deployment dramatically decreased. To elicit such change in practices, activists invoked legal rules in conjunction with rules claims coming from other substantive domains, such as rules of military reciprocity and necessity, strategic reasoning and deterrence, in-group belonging, and ethics.
Overall, I endeavor to answer several key questions. First, why did historical meanings around rules concerning fire develop how they did and when they did? This question is a means to an end. Second, and more importantly, are there any prominent patterns (albeit perhaps that get deployed differently given changing contexts) in how meanings around fire develop that shed light on how people invoke rules to navigate their broader environments? More specifically, how do specific instantiations of rules claims come together with other discursive motifs to motivate particular directions in human behavior? Since the targets for ideal conduct are always shifting on account of how people act and use language, the analytical focus is not on identifying what was considered collectively socially ideal behavior and comparing individually practice to it. Instead, it is on how competing conceptions of the ideal interact with one another to create momentary constellations of meanings and how the very act of their deployment can cause dominant patterns of meanings to shift.
This project develops a broad history of fire prevention, firefighting, and fire setting practices ranging from municipal and national governments’ responses to conflagrations, the creation and organization of firefighting services, the (re)construction of spaces touched by fire, the regulation of incendiary material, and the deployment of incendiary munitions in armed conflict. Although technological innovation permitted new forms of action, such change does not suffice to explain why practices evolved in the specific ways they did. The need to systematically adjudicate between competing rules claims resulting from the property damage of the Great Fire of London, for instance, produced new judicial institutions. Competing rules claims created culpability narratives that affected the scope and scale of policy reform after the Great Chicago Fire. A deadly fire at a Romanian nightclub served as focal points for invocations of rules concerning rule of law and corrupt governance. People invoking various legal and normative rules in each situation led to new configurations of the relationship between people and the state. Similarly, the way people invoked rules in order to justify or critique the wartime use of incendiary munitions, was central to crafting the legal and normative international order that dominated the second half of the twentieth century. Aerial incendiary bombardment practices show the plasticity of meanings of international legal and normative rules, and people’s capacity to invoke rules from other substantive domains in order to circumvent them. During WWII, the American doctrine of precision bombing gradually gave way to obliteration bombing, which continued through the Korean and Vietnam wars. Later, in partial response to the atrocities of the previous half century of incendiary warfare, widespread anti-personnel incendiary deployment dramatically decreased. To elicit such change in practices, activists invoked legal rules in conjunction with rules claims coming from other substantive domains, such as rules of military reciprocity and necessity, strategic reasoning and deterrence, in-group belonging, and ethics.
Overall, I endeavor to answer several key questions. First, why did historical meanings around rules concerning fire develop how they did and when they did? This question is a means to an end. Second, and more importantly, are there any prominent patterns (albeit perhaps that get deployed differently given changing contexts) in how meanings around fire develop that shed light on how people invoke rules to navigate their broader environments? More specifically, how do specific instantiations of rules claims come together with other discursive motifs to motivate particular directions in human behavior? Since the targets for ideal conduct are always shifting on account of how people act and use language, the analytical focus is not on identifying what was considered collectively socially ideal behavior and comparing individually practice to it. Instead, it is on how competing conceptions of the ideal interact with one another to create momentary constellations of meanings and how the very act of their deployment can cause dominant patterns of meanings to shift.
Rules Rhetoric and Weapons of War (paper)
Scholars studying weapons of war have recently taken great interest in the relationship among international law, normative prescriptions, and governments’ decisions to produce, stockpile, and deploy certain arms. These works typically debate the degree to which rules effectively govern arms policies. Although these studies insightfully describe strategies and conditions affecting whether people buy into or obey international rules, the assumption that rules govern behavior also produces significant analytical blind spots. This paper considers how actors use rules rhetoric to depict their actions as consistent with what they see as appropriate conduct, arguing that focusing on competing rules rhetorics related to incendiary weapons use dissolves some of the problématiques created by classical rules scholarship, namely how to distinguish among the content of various rules and how rules move across contexts.
To Burn or Not to Burn: Fire and State Obligation (paper)
This paper considers evolutions in how states understand and frame their obligations vis-à-vis domestic and international populations by describing how political elites determine the answer to two questions: when to put out fires (domestic fire prevention and responding to conflagrations) and when to start them (international fire setting via the deployment of incendiary munitions in international armed conflict). Increasing buy-in to the idea that firefighting is an intrinsic function of modern state governance contributed to laying the ideological foundations of an international state responsibility to protect its citizens.
Norming Humanitarian Intervention (paper)
Shifts in U.S. humanitarian intervention practices in the 1990s show the value of a processual approach to theorizing norm evolution. This paper develops a model for how normative systems evolve through complex interactions among practices, discourses, and expectations in response to real-world problems. I assess the analytical leverage gained by my model by applying it to three prominent contributions to IR scholarship: the territorial integrity norm, the nuclear taboo, and the disappearance of military intervention for sovereign debt collection. For each, my model enables scholars to consider factors previously unnoticed by dominant narratives regarding normative outcomes, exposing a vast new analytical space for future research.
