About My Research:
For those who find this sort of thing important, an initial confession: My work is conventionally hard to “place;” none My falls neatly into one or another of the fields into which academic research now sorts itself. There are times when nonconformity might not suggest disorderliness, or a failure of careful planning. It might also reflect an intuition that traditional disciplinary boundaries themselves may have become a constraining and self absorbed orthodoxy more interested in itself than in the knowledge sorted within in. This orthodoxy has proven valuable, not just for creating efficient markets for prestige among those who labor in these fields, but also for developing the the means for judging labor production. It is in this sense that preservation of order and hierarchy among those dedicated to the production of knowledge based on these disciplinary barriers is both a comfort and a constraint. To some extent, then, these field boundaries have themselves sometimes become irrelevant to the orderly production of knowledge to which I have devoted myself. My path has tended to lead me beyond orthodoxy, and with a strong disinterest in bending knowledge production to mere instrumentalism (personal or otherwise). Perhaps the result will please or serve others for its innate value But you can be the judge!
But this is so abstract. In more concrete terms, I study the relationship between the ordering of behavior through governance frameworks of state and non-state actors. This invokes institutional construction and the ideologies through which power and law are articulated in political, economic, cultural and religious institutions. I engage in the study of power/law frameworks from both its process aspects (the development of a mechanics of rule making, enforcement, interpretation and the like), and its substantive aspects (generally the ideologies that produce and sustain the morals and ethics frameworks inscribed as or in law). This appears to take me in a lot of different directions, but actually keeps me focused on the institutional governance regimes that may produce rule systems. This can include anything from international public and private frameworks of corporate social responsibility to the normative basis of transnational constitutionalism and its limitations on the ability to order their internal law systems. Thus conceived, the field is enormous but well ordered.
One is invited to read more about the way that one can order the overall arc of my research and scholarship here:
(ACCESS HERE).
Most of my manuscripts, including current works, are posted to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
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Some of my draft and working papers, as well as background briefs may be accessed here on the website of the Coalition for Peace & Ethics.
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