PhD Supervision
Professor Chandler is interested in supervising
research in the grey area between IR and political theory, particularly multi-disciplinary approaches happy to engage both with philosophical framings and with current policy developments in international relations. My areas of current interest include: the turn to agency in IR; empowerment, ownership and legitimacy; process-based understandings; post-liberal approaches; capacity- and capability-building; sovereignty as a sociological rather than legal/political concept; discourses of resilience, adaptation and vulnerability; biopolitics, the social/sociological turn and post-intervention; new institutionalism and agent-centered theorising, particularly the work of Amartya Sen, Anthony Giddens and Douglass North; post-conditionality and 'pro-poor' development; liberal peace and its critics; legacies of liberal rights-based 1990s discourses on intervention, ethical foreign policy, the rule of law, human security, democracy promotion, human rights, global civil society, cosmopolitanism etc; critical theory and the critique of liberalism; considerations of IR, human subjectivity, and the retreat from materialism/world especially projects drawing on Nietzsche, Marx, Schmitt, Lenin, Arendt, Althusser, Baudrillard, Foucault etc.
Applications:
For information about how to apply and possible funding opportunities please click here.
Current PhD students:
Jessica Schmidt, working on the changing discourse of democracy promotion. She is a member of the EU iPodS research project on The Substance of EU International Democracy Promotion. More information is available here.
Ana Carballo, working on how discourses of citizen participation and empowerment have been inserted into our understanding of pro-poor development, particularly focusing on Latin America. She is a member of the International Steering Group of the United Network of Young Peacebuilders, more information here.
Her co-authored paper, 'Latin America's Left Turn: Opening up Possibilities for the Radicalization of Democracy' is available here.
Elisa Randazzo, working on tracing discourses of empire through international statebuilding norms and practices, with a particular emphasis on Kosovo. She has published book reviews for Political Studies Review on: Cooley, A. and Spruyt, H. (2009) Contracting States: Sovereign Transfers in International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and Fortna, V.P. (2008) Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents' Choices After Civil War. Woodstock: Princeton University Press.
Pol Pedreny, working on ethnic decentralisation, post-liberal peace, multi-culturalism and discourses of agonism in international practices in post-conflict Kosovo. He co-directed the film '3 Kosovos: Imagining the Future of Kosovo', more information here.
Tallyn Gray, working on narratives of meaning in the Khmer Rouge Tribunal at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodian (ECCC). Supervised jointly with the Westminster Law School.
Kai Koddenbrock, working on discourses of intervention in the Congo. Co-supervised with the University of Bremen. He currently has a visiting scholarship at the University of Columbia. He is also a Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, see his page here. His book, Smart Sanctions against Failed States is available here.
Former PhD students:
Tara McCormack (completion 2008) the thesis engaged with contemporary security discourses from a critical perspective. It argued that rather than being a radical analytical outlook, much critical security theory failed to fulfil its promise to pose a challenge to contemporary power relations. Tara is now a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leicester (her webiste is here) and her thesis has been revised and published as Critique, Security and Power in the Routledge Critical Security Studies series, available here.
James Heartfield (completion 2009) working on the dynamics of European integration, theorised as a process without a subject. He is the author of an number of books, including The Death of the Subject Explained, Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy, Green Capitalism, Let's Build and World War as Class War. More information is available from his website here.
