Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the wake of revelations about secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe and Vice President Cheney's stated support for an exemption for the CIA from legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees, President Bush asserted: "anything we do [in the war on terrorism] is within the law. We do not torture." It was easy to conclude that he was either lying--engaged in Orwellian doublespeak to defend the indefensible--or confused. But I would like to suggest a more troubling possibility: that the jarring combination of these two sentences expresses a fundamental ethos of the administration, which combines a Schmittian projection of sovereignty as the power to suspend law in an emergency with what Max Weber described as an ethics of conviction, the absolutist ethics of a saint, uncoupled from an ethics of responsibility. In this paper I explore, in particular, how the category of necessity is deployed by the Bush administration in order to fuse together the sovereign exception with a "higher law" purpose, transforming torture into something more than a sovereign prerogative: sacred violence.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper is a chapter out of a dissertation on the first generation of the neoconservatives and their teachers. Journalists and scholars have exaggerated the influence of Leo Strauss on the neoconservative political movement, while many of Strauss’s students have written books and articles debunking Strauss’s impact on neoconservatism. What is fact and what is fiction in all of this? This paper examines the writings of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and other neocon writers and compares them with Strauss and some of Strauss’s most influential students (such as Harry Jaffa and Harvey Mansfield) and shows that while the link between Strauss and neoconservatism is largely overstated, there is indeed some Straussian influence, particularly in their fear of political utopianism, particularly in regards to left-leaning radical ideologies, their criticism of modernity, their skepticism about social reforms and their positives views of national patriotism. At the same time, the paper also debunks many of the overstated linkages between Strauss, his students, and neoconservative foreign policy and their readings of ancient political thought, but reasserting Strauss’s influence in a more accurate and precise way.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper argues that, in conjunction with relative power, ideational changes in US nationalism explain long-term variation in American democracy promotion strategy, including its most recent iteration in the Bush administration. The paper concludes by using this perspective to critique the neoconservative approach to extending liberal values and instituions in the international system.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper assesses American neoconservative policy prescriptions for democratising and empowering political Islam and considers the sources of the neoconservative understanding of the Arab world. Their analysis of the Middle East is almost exclusively normative, arguing what U.S. policy toward the region should be. Neoconservative aims are ambitious and inherently controversial. The paper examines what various neo¬conservatives have said and written about Islam and its democratic prospects. The paper concerns itself with the neoconservative conceptualization of Middle East politics – beginning with Dinesh D’Souza’s argument that Islam and ‘virtue’ are incompatible. In so doing, the paper argues that presently only American neoconservatism, despite its variations, and despite some obvious flaws, offers tenable prescriptions for political liberalisation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A lot has been said on the neoconservative movement and in particular on its impact on foreign policy. The comments were not always wise and well-informed, but the core belief that since 9/11, this political vision has had a tremendous impact on American foreign policy toward the Muslim World, and more broadly toward the rest of the world, cannot be dismissed. If they were not the only ones, these neoconservative journalists, analysts and officials, were definitively at the centre of the reflexion on what it meant to live in a post-9/11 world, and what should be done. They had an important impact; they were the key actors on some political actions, with other right-wing thinkers. Their specific vision can partly explain the choices that were made during the first Bush term at least. Besides analysing how they got this importance in foreign policy making and understanding their vision of the world, one can legitimately ask if this importance was just linked to one Presidential Administration and one important time in the U.S. History, or if this is a deeper phenomenon.