Prof
Tarik KochiProfile page
Professor of Legal and Political Theory (Law)
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BIO
I am a legal and political theorist working within the traditions of critical theory and the history of political thought.
My current research project is The Law of Inverted Oppression: Conspiracy, Populism, Fascism. The project examines how perceptions of victimhood, resentment and conspiratorial theories of oppression come to shape contemporary understandings of political identity in the context of globalised, neoliberal capitalism. Inverted oppression is mobilised as a political strategy by agitators of the authoritarian populist right and comes to operate as a widespread but highly limited form of self-understanding in the face of political and constitutional crisis.
My previous work has focussed upon ethical questions in relation to conflict, war and violence and upon issues of global justice, property and capital accumulation and global constitutionalism.
In The Other's War: Recognition and the Violence of Ethics (Birkbeck Law Press/Routledge, 2009), I present a critical revision of the Western intellectual tradition's understanding of the ethics of war and terrorism. In this I propose the idea of 'recognising the ethics of the others war' as key normative challenge of contemporary legal and political orders. The book was awarded the 2010 International Studies Association, International Ethics Book Prize.
In Global Justice and Social Conflict: The Foundations of Liberal Order and International Law (Routledge, 2019), I develop a historical and theoretical reappraisal of the ideas and conceptual frameworks that underpin and sustain the global liberal order, international law and neoliberal rationality. I argue that any account of global justice must by definition be an account of social conflict and I show the extent to which contemporary global relations are constituted by struggles over property, capitalist accumulation, equality and dignity. I argue that the only viable future for modern international law resides in the creation of an egalitarian and democratic global constitutional order.
Generally I am happy to supervise PhD students in legal and political theory, critical international legal theory, and social and political thought.