Research 

How do we understand the constitution and effects of power and violence in international politics?

In engaging this question, I take as my point of departure specific situations of armed violence, tracing their constituent discourses and practices to analyze both the formal legal construction of violence and the quotidian embodied experiences of individuals and communities caught up by it. Contributing to the fields of international law, political theory, feminist theory, and international relations, I have offered a range of arguments from the methods and means of waging war to genealogies of international humanitarian law to critiques of the weaponization of sleep in contemporary conflict. Collectively, my research animates what are, in the end, fundamentally ethical reflections about the uses and experiences of violence—from how it is waged to how it may be ameliorated. The result is a body of work and practice whose aim is to produce what Hannah Arendt would call “exercises in thinking”- which, as she evocatively explains, are informed but not wholly determined by “the actuality of political incidents.” And the goal of these exercises is always the same: to illuminate through a critical interpretation the “repository of distinctions, categories, and arguments” that continue to orient us and our actions in the present (Benhabib, 2002).