Research

Article available here.

The empirical turn in the study of deliberative democracy raises a problem: deliberative democracy's conceptual premises are in tension with those of the social scientific approaches often used to study it. If deliberation is to function as a source of political legitimacy, we must treat citizens as intentional agents capable of reasoning. In contrast, modernist social science characteristically employs forms of explanation that bypass intentionality. Deliberative democrats thus risk theoretical inconsistency when they attempt to study deliberation using the techniques of modernist social science. The danger is that when deliberative democrats rely on modernist social science, they at least implicitly reinforce a fallacious belief in expertise at the expense of a more dialogic and democratic ethos. The concepts and the practical aims of deliberative democracy seem, therefore, to require a more interpretive social science.  

doi: 10.1177/00323217221107288 

Article available here.

Deliberative systems theorists have not explained what a deliberative system is. There are two problems here for deliberative systems theory: an empirical problem of boundaries (how to delineate the content of a deliberative system) and a normative problem of evaluation (how to evaluate the deliberation within a deliberative system). We argue that an adequate response to these problems requires a clear ontology. The existing literature suggests two coherent but mutually exclusive ontologies. A functionalist ontology postulates self-sustaining deliberative systems with their own functional goals and logics independent of human intentionality. In contrast, an interpretive ontology conceives of deliberative systems as the products of the beliefs and actions of the actors in the relevant practices – deliberative systems derive from human intentionality. We conclude by showing how these conflicting ontologies lead to different empirical and normative agendas.

doi: 10.1177/14748851211034106 

The phrase "Hong Kong people (香港人)" is an ambivalent one, invoked with different meanings across time, space, and groups in public and academic discourses. Legal interpretations of the Hong Kong people focused on whether they met the technical standards of peoplehood under international law, and if so, what legal status, rights, and obligations Hong Kong people had in the international community. Cultural narratives attended to the substance (or lack thereof) of the identities of Hong Kong people, posing questions to the (in-)coherence, hybridity, and subjectivity of these identities. Political writings often related Hong Kong people to the statist logics of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the corresponding rise of localism in Hong Kong, highlighting especially acts of resistance by the people. This chapter aims to bring the relevant parts of these three conversations to disclose and engage with questions about the Hong Kong people, and in that process, also situate this research in academic debates about peoplehood beyond Hong Kong studies. 

Diasporas remain understudied in political theory. To ground a robust engagement with diasporas and their normative challenges, in this article, we offer a non-statist framework of political community. This framework is needed as diasporas are transnational groups that share overlapping webs of narratives and practices but lack institutional and ideological unity. Tracking these features, we posit that individuals constitute a diasporic community by sharing a joint meta-commitment, which is expressed through practices and narratives. Through these expressions, diasporic members commit to act as part of the same community without any necessary or further substantial agreements. This meta-commitment grounds an obligation of answerability: diasporic members owe to each other an answer as to how their choices relate to the future of the diaspora. We conclude by illustrating how answerability offers resources for us to engage with questions of diasporic organization, representation, and power relations. 

Are diasporic members obligated to their diasporic, home, and host communities? And if so, what obligations do they have to the three respective communities? And how should they navigate the potential tensions that might arise between these three sets of obligations? These questions remain understudied in political theory. Focusing on the obligations diasporic members have to their host and home communities, I make use of a host of diasporic writings by Tibetans and Hong Kongers, and through interpreting these writers, I contend that a sense of temporal uncertainty penetrates diasporic relationships and hence obligations. More specifically,  I put forward three major claims: (a) obligation is a relational matter, such that the determination of any obligation presupposes first a determination of the kind of relationship that is in place between the relevant parties; (b) the relations that diasporic members have with their host and host communities are defined by a temporally extended uncertainty; (c) the uncertainty within these diasporic relations entails a fundamental indeterminacy within the political obligations diasporic members hold towards their home and host communities.

One influential defense of immigration control stems from the idea of self-determination: the people’s right to determine what their collective is entails the state’s authority to decide whom to admit to the collective. This defense reflects and relies on an illusion of the self that conflates between the people and the state: it assumes, on the one hand, that when citizens of a state come together to make admissions decisions they do so as one people, and on the other hand, that when individuals migrate into a state they also thereby become part of the same people. These assumptions fail to account for the transnational dynamics of immigration politics. Drawing upon the literature on migration systems and a comparative reading of the changing immigration policies regarding Hong Kongers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, I illustrate how immigration flows and practices are embedded within the relations between the sending, receiving, and diasporic communities, such that the question of immigration control cannot be isolated from the question regarding the relationship between these communities. A transnational understanding of immigration implies (a) that immigration control is not a self-concerning matter but rather concerns the relations between the relevant states and peoples, and (b) that the principle of self-determination entails that these relevant communities share a say in deciding immigration control policies.