My research interests are located at the intersection of contemporary political theory and international politics. I draw on twentieth-century existentialist philosophy, enriched with feminist and postcolonial perspectives, to conceptualise the complexities and potentials of individual and collective action in conditions of gender, racial, and colonial oppression. Within this focus, I have contributed to the literature on political responsibility, political violence, memory politics, and, most recently, resistance. Empirically, I have been focusing on the contexts of the Global South, including the postcolonial contexts of South Africa, Egypt, and Algeria. I am deeply committed to interdisciplinarity, drawing upon philosophical texts, political, historical, and sociological writings, as well as literature and film.
DISAPPOINTMENT WITHIN THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION
My current research examines the political potential of disappointment within the modern revolutionary tradition of political thought. It explores how an engagement with past disappointments can help us confront the challenges involved in resisting oppression and reanimate resistance in the present era of disillusion. In addition to existential, Marxist and postcolonial theoretical sources, I draw on practical insights from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. For more information about the RESIST project click here.
On the left is street graffiti from the Egyptian Revolution. The king has been toppled in this game of chess.
BEYOND MASCULINIST MYTHS OF RESISTANCE
I am currently also working on a collaborative project with Prof Jennet Kirkpatrick. The project seeks to foreground women’s experiences of resistance that have been neglected in dominant theories of resistance. We seek to contest a masculine imaginary that continues to take shape in a variety of forms of resistance, from armed liberation struggle, to theories of the strike and civil disobedience.
Our first article born of this project is titled “Beauvoir and Lorde Confront the Honorary Man Trope: Toward a Feminist Theory of Political Resistance”. It is part of the special issue on Beyond Masculinist Myths of Resistance that we have co-edited and that is currently forthcoming with Women’s Studies International Forum.
On the picture is street graffiti from the Egyptian Revolution. It depicts a woman fighting off a mass of harassers with a pepper spray. The image became a symbol of women’s resistance against sexual attacks that aimed to take away their right to participate in street action.
THE GREY ZONES OF RESISTANCE
From 2016 to 2020, I worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC-funded project “Illuminating the ‘Grey Zone’: Addressing Complex Complicity in Human Rights Violations.” Within the GREYZONE project, I have been focusing on the grey zones of resistance – the morally ambiguous choices facing organised struggles against state-orchestrated violence. I have addressed:
the difficulty of evaluating the violence committed in the service of freedom and justice;
the political value of ex-resisters’ disappointment for illuminating the ambiguity of creating a new constitution in the wake of historical injustice;
the ethical and political significance of narrative (in literature and cinema) for approaching the difficult issues of resistance;
empirically, I was focusing on the South African anti-apartheid struggle.
ERC Starting Grant “GREYZONE”
RETHINKING POLITICAL JUDGEMENT: ARENDT AND EXISTENTIALISM
Based on my PhD thesis, my book project aims to revive the human capacity for political judgement by drawing on the historically attuned perspective of 20th-century philosophies of existence – in particular the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. Displacing the lingering rationalist temptations, the book engages these thinkers’ aesthetic sensibility to delve into the experiential reality of political judgement and revivify it as a worldly, ambiguous practice. The purpose is to illustrate the prescient political significance of existentialists’ narrative imagination on two contemporary perplexities of political judgement: the problem of dirty hands and the challenge of transitional justice. This engagement reveals the distinctly resistant potential of worldly judgement in its ability to stimulate our capacities of coming to terms with and creatively confronting the tragedies of political action, rather than simply yielding to them as a necessary course of political life.
The book was published in 2019 with Edinburgh University Press. You can order the book here.