Biography

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster. He currently edits the open access journal Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman and the book series Routledge Studies in Resilience.

Professor Chandler is the author of a number of monographs, including: The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (with Jonathan Pugh) (University of Westminster Press, 2023); Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (with Jonathan Pugh) (University of Westminster Press, 2021); Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (with Julian Reid) (Rowan & Littlefield, 2019) Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (Routledge, 2018); Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997-2017 (Palgrave, 2016); The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (with Julian Reid) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Resilience: The Governance of Complexity (Routledge, 2014); Freedom vs. Necessity in International Relations: Human-Centred Approaches to Security and Development (Zed Books, March 2013); International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (Routledge, 2010); Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and Resistance (Pluto Press, 2009); Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-Building (Pluto Press, 2006); Constructing Global Civil Society: Morality and Power in International Relations (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004, 2005); From Kosovo to Kabul (and Beyond): Human Rights and International Intervention (Pluto Press, 2002, 2006); and Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (Pluto Press, 1999, 2000).

David Chandler has contributed more than one hundred articles to international peer-reviewed journals (in the spheres of international relations, social theory, security, development, democracy, history, geography, political theory, philosophy, ethics and law) including: New Left Review; Radical Philosophy; Current History; Review of International Studies; International Political Sociology; European Journal of Social Theory; European Political Science; Security Dialogue; Political Studies; Millennium: Journal of International Studies; Human Rights Quarterly; Cambridge Review of International Affairs; International Politics; International Relations; British Journal of Politics & International Relations; Journal of International Relations and Development; Politics; Policy and Politics; Democratization; Finnish Yearbook of International Law; Ethics & Global Politics; Globalizations; Global Society; Global Dialogue; Area: Journal of the Royal Geographical Society; The Monist: An International Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry; Development Dialogue; International Journal of Human Rights; Ethnopolitics; International Peacekeeping; Journal of Conflict, Security and Development; Cooperation and Conflict; Critical Studies on Security; Global Change, Peace & Security; Peacebuilding; International Journal of Peace Studies; WeltTrends: Zeitschrift für internationale Politik; Wissenschaft & Frieden; Cahiers Marxistes; Politique Africain; Alternatives Sud; Studia Diplomatica: The Brussels Journal of International Relations; Papeles de Cuestiones Internacionales; Stratejik Öngörü Dergisi and Filozofski Godišnjak.

Follow Professor Chandler on Twitter – @DavidCh27992090

Videos: interview on the Neoliberal Subject here; keynote on the invitation of resilience here (29 minutes in); some Anthropocene Island videos here and here; ‘What is Resilience’ available here; ‘Cybernetics, the Anthropocene and the Ontological Turn’ available here; ‘New Approaches to Peace’ available here; ‘Governmentalities of the Digital’ available here; ‘Algorithmic Governance’ available here, ‘The Future of Peace Studies’ available here; ‘Crimea and Kosovo’, Russia Today available here; ‘Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses’, Taylor and Francis promotional video for the journal, available here; ‘Democracy: From Public Reason to Personal Ethics’, available here; ‘Ensuring Justice Through the ICC: Has the Original Mandate Been Achieved?’, available here; ‘Rethinking the Shift to the Social’, available here; ‘Critiques of Liberal Peace’, presentation at the book launch of A Liberal Peace?, available here; ‘Democratisation lessons from Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya’, available here; ‘Dominion and the Contested Idea of Development’, available here; ‘The Impact of 9/11: Ten Years On’, available here; Channel Four News interview on ‘Humanitarian Intervention’, available here; ‘Resilience: Friend or Foe?’, available here; ‘The EU and Post-Liberal Governance’, available here; interview on ‘The Future of Radical Politics’, available here; ‘National Security, Proscription and Foreign Policy – War on Terror, New World Order’, available here. Podcasts: ‘Peacebuilding after the End of Power’, available here; BBC Radio 4 debate on ‘Whether Democracy is Overated’, available here; BBC Radio 4 debate on ‘Fragile States’, available here; ‘The Problematic of Control in a Global World’, available here; ‘The Ontology of Danger: Recasting the Human Subject in Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience’, available here.

Chandler’s long-term research focus is on new forms of subjectivity, shaped by both a retreat from the human as subject and the world as object, these much more inward looking understandings are manifested in shifts from the public sphere to the social sphere, from material constraints to subjective, cognitive frameworks and from spatial understandings to temporal ones: these shifts are often expressed in the language of complexity, non-linearity, resilience and adaptation. He is also interested in new forms of international intervention and regulation, particularly those projected in the therapeutic language of ethical foreign policy, the rule of law, human security, empowerment, democratization, state capacity-building, human rights, civil society development, anti-corruption and transparency, country ‘ownership’, post-conditionality, and ‘pro-poor’ development.

He has edited or co-edited a number of books, including: The Routledge Handbook of International Statebuilding (with Timothy Sisk) (Routledge, March 2013); A Liberal Peace?: The Problems and Practices of Peacebuilding (with Susanna Campbell and Meera Sabaratnam) (Zed Books, 2011); Critical Perspectives on Human Security: Rethinking Emancipation and Power in International Relations (with Nik Hynek) (Routledge, 2010, 2012); Statebuilding and Intervention: Policies, Practices and Paradigms (Routledge, 2009); Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy: Pitfalls, Paradoxes and Possibilities (with Volker Heins) (Routledge, 2007); Peace without Politics? Ten Years of State-Building in Bosnia (Routledge, 2006, 2007); Global Civil Society: Contested Futures (with Gideon Baker) (Routledge, 2005, 2006) and Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002).

He has also contributed chapters to around eighty edited volumes,  including: Mustapha Pasha (ed.) Globalization, Difference, and Human Security (London: Routledge, 2013); Sandro Mezzadra et al (eds) Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present (New Delhi: Springer, 2013); Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis (eds) Reassembling International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); Eva Erman and Ludvig Beckman (eds) Territories of Citizenship (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Mervyn Frost (ed.) International Ethics (London: Sage, 2011); Phillip Cunliffe (ed.) Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect: Interrogating Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011); Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh (ed.) Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (London: Routledge, 2011); Michael Goodhart (ed.) Human Rights: Politics and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2009); Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner (eds) Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding (Palgrave, 2008); Zaki Laïdi (ed.) EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World: Normative Power and Social Preferences (Routledge, 2008); Christpher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe and Alex Gourevitch (eds) Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (UCL Press, 2007); Giovanna Bono (ed.) The Impact of 9/11 on European Foreign and Security Policy (Brussels University Press, 2006); S. Meckled-Garcia and B. Cali (eds) Legalisation of Human Rights: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2006); P. Burnell and P. Calvert (eds) Civil Society in Democratization (Routledge, 2004); Daniele Archibugi (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics (Verso, 2003); Gary Dempsey (ed.) Exiting the Balkan Thicket? Policy Options for the New Administration (Cato Institute, 2002); Tariq Ali (ed.) Masters of the Universe?: Nato’s Balkan Adventure (Verso, 2000).

David Chandler’s media contributions include: press articles in the Guardian, Spectator, Times Higher and the Daily Mail and Spiked-Online; TV studio interviews/ discussion for BBC Newsnight, BBC News 24, Channel 4 News, Sky News, Al-Jazeera, CNN International, Press TV and the Open University; radio studio interviews/ discussion for BBC Radio 4 programmes including the Today Programme, Analysis, Moral Maze, The World Tonight, Iconoclasts and Women’s Hour and regular contributions to the BBC’s World Service

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Nietzsche’s rules of intellectual engagement: 1) only critique ideas that are intellectually dominant (wait if necessary); 2) only do so if no one else is engaged in this project (take personal responsibility); 3) never make the argument personal (in terms of presentation or motivation). (Ecce Homo).