Research

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. 

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. 

While political theorists have extended the discourse of political obligation from domestic to transnational relationships, they have yet to discuss the obligation a diaspora owes to its homeland. In this article, I theorize this obligation as conditioned by the relational indeterminacies between the diaspora and its homeland. To make these indeterminacies explicit, I draw upon as illustrative cases the Hong Kong and Tibetan diasporas, both being diasporas oriented towards a homeland entangled with the People’s Republic of China. Entanglement, a relationship between mutually constitutive political communities that is difficult to reverse or separate, brings into focus the differentiated and indeterminate nature of a political community, features that compound in the relationship between the homeland and its diaspora. In response to these features, a plausible and realizable framework of diasporic obligation has to be pluralistic, tracking the differentiated relationships connecting each diasporic sub-group and each sub-group in its homeland, and political, entailing processes within the diaspora to determine and distribute obligations among its members.