My work is in the areas of political theory and the history of human rights, with broader interests in international theory and history, anticolonial political thought, and the relationship between history and politics. My work has appeared in Political Theory and Humanity, and is forthcoming in the Blackwell Companion to Arthur C. Danto (see publications for links). I am currently working on a book manuscript, titled Imperial Promises: Human Rights and the Politics of Hypocrisy and described below. I am also working on several related papers, including two pieces on humanitarianism, international law, and the Algerian revolution, as well as a separate piece on rights declarations and the political charge of hypocrisy.

Imperial Promises: Human Rights and the Politics of Hypocrisy: Overview

My current book project traces the contested legacies of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in mid-twentieth century debates about race and empire. In it, I develop an account of how what I describe as “rights promises” are made and remade over time, and the political possibilities such promises both generate and foreclose. The manuscript focuses in particular on struggles from the 1940s through the 1960s over French imperialism in Algeria and racial justice in the US, while emphasizing the broader international context of both.

Through a consideration of the legacies of Enlightenment rights declarations during decolonization in France and movements for racial equality in the US, the book aims to challenge a narrative in which those foundational declarations are viewed as universal in their aspirations but often contradicted in practice. In doing so, it offers new ways to think about the relationship between human rights, hypocrisy, and racial and imperial domination. Where the problem of rights and imperialism is often presented as a matter of lofty ideals providing ideological cover for conflicting imperial projects, not practicing at home what one preaches abroad, or, in a slightly different vein, human rights’ cultural specificity, the book proposes we focus instead on how rights promises are made, in order to better understand the interconnection between universalist ideals and imperialist practices. I trace how, historically, narratives about gradual universalization and the idea of human rights as a promise to be fulfilled served to justify imperial and racial domination. In contrast, I identify actors who called not for the fulfillment of past promises, but for the making of new, more mutual ones. Demanding a reckoning with history, those actors offered an alternative to progressive narratives of gradual fulfillment – an anti-imperial understanding of the political practice and conceptual history of human rights.