Books by Joe Hoover
Politics is all around us. Global Politics: Myths and Mysteries teaches students that their under... more Politics is all around us. Global Politics: Myths and Mysteries teaches students that their understanding of the political world is already theoretical, and equips them with the tools to become critical and independent thinkers. Unlike other textbooks on the market, students are invited to actively engage with the questions that shape international politics, such as 'what power relations are you taking part in?'; 'which actors besides the state are important at the global level?' and 'what power do you have to bring about change in global politics?'.
This innovative pedagogical approach unveils a series of entrenched myths and mysteries in global politics in an accessible and engaging way. The text is structured into eleven chapters that cover key issues or 'myths' relating to global politics; students are invited to think critically and theoretically about each of these, whilst drawing on their existing knowledge of politics.
It is often assumed that democracy is both desirable and possible in global politics. Interrogati... more It is often assumed that democracy is both desirable and possible in global politics. Interrogating Democracy in World Politics provides an important counter-argument to this assumption by questioning the history, meaning and concepts of democracy in contemporary international and global politics.
Combining viewpoints from the fields of international relations, political theory and history, the book includes:
Critical examinations of the concept of democracy as a political order and ethical ideal
Assessment of the role and function of democracy in how contemporary political events are understood and evaluated
Analysis of the relationship of democracy to international stability, liberalism and the emergence of capitalist economies
The book focuses on the move from the concept of ‘international politics’ to ‘world politics’, recognising the equal importance of understanding democratic interaction both within and between states. It reviews current scholarly thinking in the field before providing a complex theoretical re-engagement with the meaning of democracy in contemporary world politics.
Interrogating Democracy in World Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, democratization studies and globalization.
Papers by Joe Hoover
Discussion of gentrification is ubiquitous in cities around the world. And while criticism of it ... more Discussion of gentrification is ubiquitous in cities around the world. And while criticism of it is common, there is still considerable contestation over whether gentrification is unjust. Political theorists have recently turned their attention to the normative evaluation of gentrification, especially the displacement of long-term residents from neighbourhoods experiencing redevelopment and reinvestment. Two important limitations in this recent work are, first, a narrow focus on the link between gentrification and displacement, and second, the injustice of gentrification has been evaluated in light of abstract ideals of justice divorced from the lived experience of its harms. While the emerging literature usefully identifies some of the harms of gentrification, it fails to recognise the full extent of the injustice of gentrification. To address these limitations, I argue the normative evaluation of gentrification should start with a conceptualisation of the problem grounded in the experience of its negative effects. Further, employing a more comprehensive conceptualisation of gentrification's negative effects reveals it to be a distinctive and encompassing urban injustice better understood by examining how gentrification is defined by harmful inequalities of political power, leading to exploitation, dispossession, displacement, marginalisation, and violence.
Journal of International Political Theory, 2020
Global Society, 2019
Conventional global justice theory expresses a concern for the suffering of individuals around th... more Conventional global justice theory expresses a concern for the suffering of individuals around the world, yet very often the experience of those individuals plays little role in the work of theorising global justice. In this paper I argue that global justice has tended to take an architectonic approach in which the theorist orders the world by offering idealised principles of justice that serve as guides to necessary global reforms. This approach draws on a flawed geography of injustice, in which the world is divided into just and order regions that must save unjust and disordered regions, while also misunderstanding the causes of injustice. In place of this architectonic approach, I offer a consummatory approach that conceives of justice as a quality of social relationships and which draws on the experience of individuals suffering injustice, using the Grenfell Tower fire as an example. This consummatory approach is then further developed by outlining a situationist just theory drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey.
Contemporary Pragmatism, 2019
Recent critiques of rights have enabled alternative understandings of the role of rights in conte... more Recent critiques of rights have enabled alternative understandings of the role of rights in contemporary politics. In this article, I focus on the emergence of a performative understanding of rights, which conceptualises rights claims as reiterative acts that remake the protections and privileges marked out by rights. This promising reconstruction of rights requires a rethinking of the ethical justification of rights claims. If rights claims are creative political acts, rather than especially important duties, a justification focused on certainty and constraint will not do. Yet, we must still ask: what is a good rights claim? I argue, first, that a performative account of rights requires an ethical justification that embraces contingency while still providing an account of good political creativity, and, second, that focusing on the use of normative claims to address specific problems, which I term a situationist ethics—drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, provides better grounding for performative rights claims.
Third World Quarterly, 2015
Critics of human rights are hesitant to reject them outright for fear of undermining the work the... more Critics of human rights are hesitant to reject them outright for fear of undermining the work they may do in resisting oppression. This pragmatic justification is central to celebrations of human rights as well, but is it more than a failure to move beyond liberal hegemony? I argue human rights have radical potential because the act of claiming such rights uses the ambiguous but universal identity of “humanity” to make claims on the established terms of legitimate authority. The potential of human rights to fight for social change is examined by looking to the movement for a human right to housing in the United States. I explore how homeless individuals, public housing tenants and low-income urban residents realise their human right to housing through eviction defences, the occupation of “people-less” homes, and attempts to remake the structure of home ownership through community land trusts.
Law and Contemporary Problems
Who has the authority to assign responsibility for international crimes? There is a simple answer... more Who has the authority to assign responsibility for international crimes? There is a simple answer: international tribunals, in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet this obvious response obscures further questions regarding where the political authority to create international tribunals comes from, as well as the vital moral question regarding how courts are constituted as actors with the capacity to assign blame. In modern international politics authority has traditionally rested with states, meaning that rightful legal institutions were created and justified by the consent of states. The ICC is granted authority in this way, as it was created through a treaty negotiated and signed by states. Such a procedural response, however, obscures as much as it reveals about the politics and morality of assigning responsibility for international crimes. Asking how a new international authority is constituted and justified as an actor with the political power to try state officials and other international criminals, and to embody and defend supposedly emergent norms of global justice, is a more contentious and difficult question that takes us beyond questions of positive law.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2013
Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This susp... more Human rights are a suspect project – this seems the only sensible starting point today. This suspicion, however, is not absolute and the desire to preserve and reform human rights persists for many of us. The most important contemporary critiques of human rights focus on the problematic consequences of the desire for universal rights. These criticisms are pursued with varying intensities, as some defenders of human rights are willing to accept elements of this critique in their reformulations, while staunch opponents remain wary of the desire to think and act in language of human rights because of the deep pathologies of rights-thinking as a political ethics. Yet, we hesitate to abandon human rights. In this paper, I look at the political critique of human rights in greater detail. I argue that an agonistic account drawing on the work of William Connolly and Bonnie Honig offers the best response to the most important contemporary critiques of human rights, and a clearer account of what it means to claim that human rights do valuable work. The key developments of this agonistic view of human rights are its focus on the ambiguity of “humanity” as a political identity, and the challenge to legitimate authority and membership that new rights claims make. In the end, human rights are defended as a universal political ethos focused on the pluralization and democratization of global politics.
In this paper I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis co... more In this paper I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterise the development of the UN human rights regime. The central argument is intended to demonstrate that within the founding text of the contemporary human rights movement there is an ambiguous account of rights, which exceeds easy categorisation of international rights as universal moral principles or merely an ideological imposition by liberal powers. Acknowledging this ambiguous history, I argue, opens the way to an understanding of human rights as an ongoing politics, a contestation over the terms of legitimate political authority and the meaning of “humanity” as a political identity.
Assigning responsibility is increasingly common in world politics, from the United Nation’s asser... more Assigning responsibility is increasingly common in world politics, from the United Nation’s assertion that sovereignty entails a “responsibility to protect” to the International Criminal Court’s attempts to hold individuals responsible for international crimes. This development is welcome but problematic as the model of moral agency that our contemporary practices of responsibility are based on leads to a number of problematic consequences that impede efforts to make world politics more just. In particular, our contemporary practices of responsibility are excessively focused on the obligations of individual and collective actors, at the expense of enabling conditions, and on holding specific perpetrators accountable, neglecting the need for wider social transformations in response to mass violence and suffering. Alternative understandings of moral agency, which better serve international/global practices of responsibility, are possible and here I defend an understanding of moral agency based on the philosophy of John Dewey. The critical insights and practical possibilities of this alternative understanding of moral agency are explored with reference to international interventions in Sierra Leone and Uganda.
Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical faili... more Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an attempt to understand and theorize human rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Attempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice—taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism, there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy.
Book Chapters by Joe Hoover
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Human Rights, 2024
Pragmatism's best-known contribution to the philosophy of human rights remains Richard Rorty's in... more Pragmatism's best-known contribution to the philosophy of human rights remains Richard Rorty's influential defense of a liberal human rights culture opposed to cruelty, and advanced by sentimental appeals encouraging sympathy for the suffering of distant "others". In this chapter, I examine Rorty's challenge to rationalist human rights thinking, before turning to the new challenges opened up by his innovative account. Rorty defends the ethnocentrism of liberal human rights, seeking to undercut persistent debate about philosophical foundations, but his claim that human rights do good work in the world faces profound challenges from critics, who highlight how human rights remain dependent on state authority and have been complicit in harmful and violent exclusions based on gender and race. I argue Rorty's account of human rights cannot fully respond to these criticisms, but pragmatist philosophy has distinctive resources for rethinking human rights beyond his account. To respond to these challenges, I show how pragmatism can respond to key criticisms of human rights by exploring the further resources to be found in two less well-known pragmatists: Jane Addams and Bhimrao Ambedkar.
Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges, edited by Anthony Tirado Chase, Pardis Mahdavi, Sofia Gruskin, and Hussein Banai, 2023
Critical Perspectives on Human Rights Edited by Birgit Schippers
Moral Agency and the Politics of Responsibility Edited by Cornelia Ulbert, Peter Finkenbusch, Elena Sondermann, Tobias Debiel
Book Reviews by Joe Hoover
Theoria, 2010
Contribution to Book Roundtable on Chin, C. 2018. The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Con... more Contribution to Book Roundtable on Chin, C. 2018. The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Books by Joe Hoover
This innovative pedagogical approach unveils a series of entrenched myths and mysteries in global politics in an accessible and engaging way. The text is structured into eleven chapters that cover key issues or 'myths' relating to global politics; students are invited to think critically and theoretically about each of these, whilst drawing on their existing knowledge of politics.
Combining viewpoints from the fields of international relations, political theory and history, the book includes:
Critical examinations of the concept of democracy as a political order and ethical ideal
Assessment of the role and function of democracy in how contemporary political events are understood and evaluated
Analysis of the relationship of democracy to international stability, liberalism and the emergence of capitalist economies
The book focuses on the move from the concept of ‘international politics’ to ‘world politics’, recognising the equal importance of understanding democratic interaction both within and between states. It reviews current scholarly thinking in the field before providing a complex theoretical re-engagement with the meaning of democracy in contemporary world politics.
Interrogating Democracy in World Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, democratization studies and globalization.
Papers by Joe Hoover
Book Chapters by Joe Hoover
Book Reviews by Joe Hoover
This innovative pedagogical approach unveils a series of entrenched myths and mysteries in global politics in an accessible and engaging way. The text is structured into eleven chapters that cover key issues or 'myths' relating to global politics; students are invited to think critically and theoretically about each of these, whilst drawing on their existing knowledge of politics.
Combining viewpoints from the fields of international relations, political theory and history, the book includes:
Critical examinations of the concept of democracy as a political order and ethical ideal
Assessment of the role and function of democracy in how contemporary political events are understood and evaluated
Analysis of the relationship of democracy to international stability, liberalism and the emergence of capitalist economies
The book focuses on the move from the concept of ‘international politics’ to ‘world politics’, recognising the equal importance of understanding democratic interaction both within and between states. It reviews current scholarly thinking in the field before providing a complex theoretical re-engagement with the meaning of democracy in contemporary world politics.
Interrogating Democracy in World Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations, democratization studies and globalization.