Research & Curriculum Vitae
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Prometheus’ Blind Spot: Invoking Rules and Political Histories of Fire (dissertation)
This study is a response to the observation that people articulate meanings of rules in flexible and context-specific ways, but that literature on international legal, norm-based, strategic-logical, and ethical/moral rules typically treats them as pre-given, stable objects. By examining people’s evolving justifications of practices related to firefighting (protecting against and rebuilding after conflagration) and fire setting (debating the appropriate use of incendiary munitions during armed conflict), the project demonstrates that the meaning of rules is flexibly constructed as they are applied in action. People make sense of the social world and construct meanings of rules by rhetorically invoking rules concepts to elicit particular behavior from others. This project examines how such invocations of rules, related to specific fire events, gives context-specific meaning to general criteria for judging appropriate action.
I explore rhetorical rule-meaning-making through the empirical lens of responses to fire events partly because human affairs have taken countless unexpected turns on account of people succeeded in harnessing, responding to, and making sense of fire in pioneering ways and partly because fire events touch human life beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries and levels of analysis. These political histories of fire demonstrate that shifts in dominant notions of appropriate conduct in urban design and planning, public service provision, organization of state bureaucracies, state culpability, and international law draw on and tap into rules concepts from a diverse array of areas of life.
By invoking rules to justify actions, people leverage the authority and claimed universality of rules concepts to elicit specific actions and to legitimize behavioral prescriptions. Historically, doing so has also contested presumed-to-be-stable existing rules (including international norms and law) 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 and drawing on recent scholarship on rhetorical adaptations of international norms, 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 merely delimiting what is allowed or prohibited, rhetorical invocations of rules concepts change the meaning of the rules they purport to reference. A rhetorical approach to international politics—which demands scholars rethink assumptions about the internal coherence of rules, global processes of normative change, and the relationship among rhetorics from a number of areas of life and across levels of analysis—uncovers social processes through which rules meanings are generated and which are under-explored by dominant scholarship on international norms and law
I explore rhetorical rule-meaning-making through the empirical lens of responses to fire events partly because human affairs have taken countless unexpected turns on account of people succeeded in harnessing, responding to, and making sense of fire in pioneering ways and partly because fire events touch human life beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries and levels of analysis. These political histories of fire demonstrate that shifts in dominant notions of appropriate conduct in urban design and planning, public service provision, organization of state bureaucracies, state culpability, and international law draw on and tap into rules concepts from a diverse array of areas of life.
By invoking rules to justify actions, people leverage the authority and claimed universality of rules concepts to elicit specific actions and to legitimize behavioral prescriptions. Historically, doing so has also contested presumed-to-be-stable existing rules (including international norms and law) 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 and drawing on recent scholarship on rhetorical adaptations of international norms, 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 merely delimiting what is allowed or prohibited, rhetorical invocations of rules concepts change the meaning of the rules they purport to reference. A rhetorical approach to international politics—which demands scholars rethink assumptions about the internal coherence of rules, global processes of normative change, and the relationship among rhetorics from a number of areas of life and across levels of analysis—uncovers social processes through which rules meanings are generated and which are under-explored by dominant scholarship on international norms and law
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.
