Tarik Kochi | University of Sussex (original) (raw)
Books by Tarik Kochi
Global Justice and Social Conflict: The Foundations of Liberal Order and International Law (Routledge), 2019
Global Justice and Social Conflict offers a ground-breaking historical and theoretical reappraisa... more Global Justice and Social Conflict offers a ground-breaking historical and theoretical reappraisal of the ideas that underpin and sustain the global liberal order, international law and neoliberal rationality.
Across the 20th and 21st centuries, liberalism, and increasingly neoliberalism, have dominated the construction and shape of the global political order, the global economy and international law. For some, this development has been directed by a vision of ‘global justice’. Yet, for many, the world has been marked by a history and continued experience of injustice, inequality, indignity, insecurity, poverty and war – a reality in which attempts to realise an idea of justice cannot be detached from acts of violence and widespread social conflict. In this book Tarik Kochi argues that to think seriously about global justice we need to understand how both liberalism and neoliberalism have pushed aside rival ideas of social and economic justice in the name of private property, individualistic rights, state security and capitalist ‘free’ markets. Ranging from ancient concepts of natural law and republican constitutionalism, to early modern ideas of natural rights and political economy, and to contemporary discourses of human rights, humanitarian war and global constitutionalism, Kochi shows how the key foundational elements of a now globalised political, economic and juridical tradition are constituted and continually beset by struggles over what counts as justice and over how to realise it. Engaging with a wide range of thinkers and reaching provocatively across a breadth of subject areas, Kochi investigates the roots of many globalised struggles over justice, human rights, democracy and equality, and offers an alternative constitutional understanding of the future of emancipatory politics and international law.
Global Justice and Social Conflict will be essential reading for scholars and students with an interest in international law, international relations, international political economy, intellectual history, and critical and political theory.
The Other's War is an intervention into a set of contemporary moral, political and legal debates ... more The Other's War is an intervention into a set of contemporary moral, political and legal debates over the legitimacy of war and terrorism within the context of the so-called global War on Terror. Tarik Kochi considers how, despite the variety of its approaches – just war theory, classical realist, post-Kantian, poststructuralist – contemporary ethical, political and legal philosophy still struggles to produce a convincing account of war. Focusing on the philosophical problem of the rightness of war, The Other's War responds to this lack. Through a discussion of a number of key Western intellectual traditions, Kochi demonstrates how often conflicting and contradictory conceptions of war’s rightness have developed in modernity. He shows how a process of ordering violence around different notions of right has constantly redrawn the boundaries of what constitutes ‘legitimate’ violence. Such a process has consequences for anyone who claims to be fighting a ‘just war’. Building upon this account and drawing upon the philosophical heritage of G.W.F. Hegel and Ernst Bloch, The Other’s War proposes a new understanding of war, not just as a social condition characterised by violent conflict and struggles for power, but as the attempt of individuals and groups to realise their normative claims through violence. Kochi argues that both of these aspects of war are an expression of the metaphysics of human subjectivity. War begins with, and is the radical exaggeration of, a fundamental activity of human subjectivity, in which the subject constitutes its normative and material identity; realising and positing itself through acts that involve negation and violence. By drawing consideration of the problem of war back to the level of a philosophical examination of the metaphysics of human subjectivity, The Other's War develops a novel theory of war that helps us to better understand the nature of contemporary conflict as a process of recognition. From this perspective, judgment, it is concluded, needs to be constantly guided by the effort to recognise the ethics of the other's war.
Papers by Tarik Kochi
Journal of Law and Society, 2025
This article examines the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ and ‘Freemen on the Land’ movements and the operati... more This article examines the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ and ‘Freemen on the Land’ movements and the operation of ‘pseudolaw’. Against a predominant judicial, governmental, and academic approach which portrays Sovereign Citizen beliefs as irrational and nonsensical, I argue that Sovereign Citizen beliefs should be understood in terms of conflicts within the socio-historical production of ‘legitimate’ knowledge across the public sphere and across popular culture. Conspiratorial Sovereign Citizen beliefs articulate, albeit problematically, social concerns and suspicions in relation to transnational economic, political and legal power. Further, conspiratorial Sovereign Citizen beliefs should be understood within the context of the rise to prominence and contemporary normalisation of neoliberal, authoritarian populism and a discourse of inverted oppression. Through this a range anti-egalitarian, ethno-nationalist and racist beliefs are hidden behind and justified via a conspiratorial worldview which uses a supposedly ‘neutral’ pseudolegal rhetoric to defend individual liberty against a perceived social reality constituted by ongoing oppression.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2023
Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents a highly limited approach to ... more Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents a highly limited approach to the issue that is typical of many mainstream approaches within populism studies and liberal-democratic constitutional theory. Through a critique of Müller the article develops an account of the historical emergence of authoritarian populism as a long counter-revolution of the radical right against the values and institutions of the social-democratic welfare state. Focussing on the USA and UK the article shows how rather than being a novel phenomenon emerging from the fringes in the 1980s and 1990s, authoritarian populism emerges from the middle of the 20th century as a highly successful form of hegemonic struggle over the Republican and Conservative parties and over American and British societies. The political success of a highly contradictory ideological framework of the radical right has helped to largely normalise a language, rhetoric and imaginary of authoritarian populism and place it at the centre of contemporary politics and culture. By largely ignoring such a development, and the highly contingent nature of North Atlantic ‘democracy’, theorists and commentators like Müller fail to grasp the depth of the current authoritarian populist threat and offer only liberal-democratic mythology in response to the ranting and chanting of ‘fake news’.
Grotiana, 2021
Nussbaum’s book digs into the cosmopolitan tradition attempting to all at once shine a light on i... more Nussbaum’s book digs into the cosmopolitan tradition attempting to all at once shine a light on its limits, hold onto its enduring importance and influence over our world of globalised human rights, and prise open a space for thinking about material aid within the tradition. The book is a critique of cosmopolitanism from Nussbaum’s own Aristotelian-Rawlsian theory of the ‘capabilities approach’ and an attempted reconciliation and rereading of parts of the tradition. Her account, covering Cicero, the Roman Stoics, Grotius and Adam Smith, attempts to rethink the possibilities and limitations of the cosmopolitan tradition and the extent to which this tradition enunciates transnational moral duties of material aid, economic redistribution and economic and social rights. Nussbaum’s book asks many good questions but is itself flawed in its inability to ask enough of them – particularly in relation to property – and in the way it forces an account of material aid into a tradition through a highly selective reading of particular texts.
Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Law and Earth, 2021
Francis Fukuyama’s work on contemporary problems of identity and recognition portrays national an... more Francis Fukuyama’s work on contemporary problems of identity and recognition portrays national and international liberalism as now under significant threat by the global rise of a reactionary and exclusionary identity politics. For Fukuyama contemporary identity politics, taking place as struggles for recognition and manifestations of resentment, are emerging as dangerous, illiberal forms of right-wing populist nationalism. In critiquing Fukuyama’s position I demonstrate how he appropriates the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ and puts these to use to sustain a version of neoliberal rationality and neoliberal politics. Such an appropriation denies the transformative and radical potential of intersubjective recognition and depoliticises and delegitimises any non-liberal claims and struggles of identity politics that might threaten to disrupt neoliberal political order, security and capitalist accumulation. Further, I argue that Fukuyama’s account of identity is dangerous in the way that it legitimises a right-wing nationalist discourse of blame targeted at the mischaracterisation of minority and left-wing ‘identity’ politics. His account is dangerous also in the manner that he detaches a contemporary extremist and right-wing nationalist discourse from the history of a less extreme, though very similar, neoliberal nationalist discourse which, since the 1980s, has mobilised the language of identity politics as a political strategy and weapon against progressive political movements and against the welfare state.
Critical Legal Thinking, 2020
Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António G... more Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently set out a wide ranging critique of the current global order, characterised by pervasive, institutionalised inequality, and failed, nationalistic responses to the global Coronavirus crisis. In response he has called for the reform and reshaping of global governance structures, for a ‘New Social Contract’ and a ‘Global New Deal’. But what kind of justice is presented in the call for a Global New Deal?
Legal Form, 2020
The limits of liberal constitutionalism open on to a question for Marxist theory. We can ask, whe... more The limits of liberal constitutionalism open on to a question for Marxist theory. We can ask, whether there is any place for an idea of ‘global constitutionalism’ within Marxist thought? Further, what role might a ‘constitutional register’ play in a Marxist understanding of transnational political and legal relations? Such a constitutional question is situated between the critique of the capitalist state, the imperialist operation of international law, and the traditions of democratic socialism and socialist internationalism within Marxist thought.
Critical Legal Thinking, 2020
Across the UK two narratives currently dominate and frame much of the critique of the British gov... more Across the UK two narratives currently dominate and frame much of the critique of the British government's current response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The first is that of incompetence. The story so far unfolding is that of a government which has ignored both the World Health Organisation's advice and the experience of numerous other countries in their approach to limiting the spread of Coronavirus, as well as ignoring earlier recommendations and warnings within UK government commissioned contingency planning. The picture is that of a Prime Minister and Cabinet drastically out of their depth, with little experience of crisis management or detailed planning. It is an image of a government disorganised, acting too slowly, ignoring the pleas of many within the NHS, incapable of rolling-out mass testing, and therefore actively contributing to a death rate which is much higher than neighbouring countries like Germany. A key figure in the narrative of incompetence is the persona of Boris Johnson, the spoilt public schoolboy, the chancer. He is a politician who is a master of grand rhetorical flourishes but who has previously shown (as with the case of Brexit and Northern Ireland) that he possesses little by way of mastery of detail. This picture, commonly presented in liberal-left newspapers like The Guardian, is now even being briefly sketched by the News Corp owned The Sunday Times with an account given of Johnson failing to attend a number of Cobra crisis meetings in January and February as worries over a global pandemic started to grow globally .
Global Society, 2020
Drawing upon the idea of 'constitutional antagonism' this article offers a critique of the libera... more Drawing upon the idea of 'constitutional antagonism' this article offers a critique of the liberal cosmopolitan framing global constitutionalism and its response to the rise of antidemocratic and 'populist' authoritarian politics. Liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global constitutionalism generally pay inadequate attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideology and rationality have come to dominate the fragmented networks and structures of global constitutionalism and the connected emergence of an anti-cosmopolitan and authoritarian discourse of 'nationalist neoliberalism'. Against the limits of liberal cosmopolitanism, and against the twin threats of neoliberal transnational governance and neoliberal nationalist, interstate conflict, it is argued that if an idea of transnational or global constitutionalism is to be held onto and retain any value then it must be based upon socially transformative ideas of egalitarian and ecological social justice and enacted through legal and political strategies and struggles that attempt to actively displace neoliberal ideology and rationality.
This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and d... more This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally.
Within political theory the concept of recognition has been generally drawn upon to develop a par... more Within political theory the concept of recognition has been generally drawn upon to develop a particular form of ethical theory. The concept has been deployed in debates over culture, feminism, multiculturalism, individual and group rights, and as a means of conceptualising colonialism. A less dominant contemporary line of inquiry is the use of the concept of recognition to think through modes of pre-capitalist and capitalist accumulation.
borderlands e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u 1
A number of what might vaguely be called "antagonistic" theories of society and politics have tak... more A number of what might vaguely be called "antagonistic" theories of society and politics have taken on increasing currency within contemporary legal and political theory on the left today. 1 Drawing attention to the role of conflict, struggle and disagreement in the constitution and continuation of political and legal orders, these theories stand in contrast to standard versions of liberal legal and political theory which display a tendency to downplay the role of social, economic and political conflict.
Graffiti. Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Global Justice and Social Conflict: The Foundations of Liberal Order and International Law (Routledge), 2019
Global Justice and Social Conflict offers a ground-breaking historical and theoretical reappraisa... more Global Justice and Social Conflict offers a ground-breaking historical and theoretical reappraisal of the ideas that underpin and sustain the global liberal order, international law and neoliberal rationality.
Across the 20th and 21st centuries, liberalism, and increasingly neoliberalism, have dominated the construction and shape of the global political order, the global economy and international law. For some, this development has been directed by a vision of ‘global justice’. Yet, for many, the world has been marked by a history and continued experience of injustice, inequality, indignity, insecurity, poverty and war – a reality in which attempts to realise an idea of justice cannot be detached from acts of violence and widespread social conflict. In this book Tarik Kochi argues that to think seriously about global justice we need to understand how both liberalism and neoliberalism have pushed aside rival ideas of social and economic justice in the name of private property, individualistic rights, state security and capitalist ‘free’ markets. Ranging from ancient concepts of natural law and republican constitutionalism, to early modern ideas of natural rights and political economy, and to contemporary discourses of human rights, humanitarian war and global constitutionalism, Kochi shows how the key foundational elements of a now globalised political, economic and juridical tradition are constituted and continually beset by struggles over what counts as justice and over how to realise it. Engaging with a wide range of thinkers and reaching provocatively across a breadth of subject areas, Kochi investigates the roots of many globalised struggles over justice, human rights, democracy and equality, and offers an alternative constitutional understanding of the future of emancipatory politics and international law.
Global Justice and Social Conflict will be essential reading for scholars and students with an interest in international law, international relations, international political economy, intellectual history, and critical and political theory.
The Other's War is an intervention into a set of contemporary moral, political and legal debates ... more The Other's War is an intervention into a set of contemporary moral, political and legal debates over the legitimacy of war and terrorism within the context of the so-called global War on Terror. Tarik Kochi considers how, despite the variety of its approaches – just war theory, classical realist, post-Kantian, poststructuralist – contemporary ethical, political and legal philosophy still struggles to produce a convincing account of war. Focusing on the philosophical problem of the rightness of war, The Other's War responds to this lack. Through a discussion of a number of key Western intellectual traditions, Kochi demonstrates how often conflicting and contradictory conceptions of war’s rightness have developed in modernity. He shows how a process of ordering violence around different notions of right has constantly redrawn the boundaries of what constitutes ‘legitimate’ violence. Such a process has consequences for anyone who claims to be fighting a ‘just war’. Building upon this account and drawing upon the philosophical heritage of G.W.F. Hegel and Ernst Bloch, The Other’s War proposes a new understanding of war, not just as a social condition characterised by violent conflict and struggles for power, but as the attempt of individuals and groups to realise their normative claims through violence. Kochi argues that both of these aspects of war are an expression of the metaphysics of human subjectivity. War begins with, and is the radical exaggeration of, a fundamental activity of human subjectivity, in which the subject constitutes its normative and material identity; realising and positing itself through acts that involve negation and violence. By drawing consideration of the problem of war back to the level of a philosophical examination of the metaphysics of human subjectivity, The Other's War develops a novel theory of war that helps us to better understand the nature of contemporary conflict as a process of recognition. From this perspective, judgment, it is concluded, needs to be constantly guided by the effort to recognise the ethics of the other's war.
Journal of Law and Society, 2025
This article examines the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ and ‘Freemen on the Land’ movements and the operati... more This article examines the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ and ‘Freemen on the Land’ movements and the operation of ‘pseudolaw’. Against a predominant judicial, governmental, and academic approach which portrays Sovereign Citizen beliefs as irrational and nonsensical, I argue that Sovereign Citizen beliefs should be understood in terms of conflicts within the socio-historical production of ‘legitimate’ knowledge across the public sphere and across popular culture. Conspiratorial Sovereign Citizen beliefs articulate, albeit problematically, social concerns and suspicions in relation to transnational economic, political and legal power. Further, conspiratorial Sovereign Citizen beliefs should be understood within the context of the rise to prominence and contemporary normalisation of neoliberal, authoritarian populism and a discourse of inverted oppression. Through this a range anti-egalitarian, ethno-nationalist and racist beliefs are hidden behind and justified via a conspiratorial worldview which uses a supposedly ‘neutral’ pseudolegal rhetoric to defend individual liberty against a perceived social reality constituted by ongoing oppression.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2023
Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents a highly limited approach to ... more Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of ‘authoritarian populism’ represents a highly limited approach to the issue that is typical of many mainstream approaches within populism studies and liberal-democratic constitutional theory. Through a critique of Müller the article develops an account of the historical emergence of authoritarian populism as a long counter-revolution of the radical right against the values and institutions of the social-democratic welfare state. Focussing on the USA and UK the article shows how rather than being a novel phenomenon emerging from the fringes in the 1980s and 1990s, authoritarian populism emerges from the middle of the 20th century as a highly successful form of hegemonic struggle over the Republican and Conservative parties and over American and British societies. The political success of a highly contradictory ideological framework of the radical right has helped to largely normalise a language, rhetoric and imaginary of authoritarian populism and place it at the centre of contemporary politics and culture. By largely ignoring such a development, and the highly contingent nature of North Atlantic ‘democracy’, theorists and commentators like Müller fail to grasp the depth of the current authoritarian populist threat and offer only liberal-democratic mythology in response to the ranting and chanting of ‘fake news’.
Grotiana, 2021
Nussbaum’s book digs into the cosmopolitan tradition attempting to all at once shine a light on i... more Nussbaum’s book digs into the cosmopolitan tradition attempting to all at once shine a light on its limits, hold onto its enduring importance and influence over our world of globalised human rights, and prise open a space for thinking about material aid within the tradition. The book is a critique of cosmopolitanism from Nussbaum’s own Aristotelian-Rawlsian theory of the ‘capabilities approach’ and an attempted reconciliation and rereading of parts of the tradition. Her account, covering Cicero, the Roman Stoics, Grotius and Adam Smith, attempts to rethink the possibilities and limitations of the cosmopolitan tradition and the extent to which this tradition enunciates transnational moral duties of material aid, economic redistribution and economic and social rights. Nussbaum’s book asks many good questions but is itself flawed in its inability to ask enough of them – particularly in relation to property – and in the way it forces an account of material aid into a tradition through a highly selective reading of particular texts.
Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Law and Earth, 2021
Francis Fukuyama’s work on contemporary problems of identity and recognition portrays national an... more Francis Fukuyama’s work on contemporary problems of identity and recognition portrays national and international liberalism as now under significant threat by the global rise of a reactionary and exclusionary identity politics. For Fukuyama contemporary identity politics, taking place as struggles for recognition and manifestations of resentment, are emerging as dangerous, illiberal forms of right-wing populist nationalism. In critiquing Fukuyama’s position I demonstrate how he appropriates the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘recognition’ and puts these to use to sustain a version of neoliberal rationality and neoliberal politics. Such an appropriation denies the transformative and radical potential of intersubjective recognition and depoliticises and delegitimises any non-liberal claims and struggles of identity politics that might threaten to disrupt neoliberal political order, security and capitalist accumulation. Further, I argue that Fukuyama’s account of identity is dangerous in the way that it legitimises a right-wing nationalist discourse of blame targeted at the mischaracterisation of minority and left-wing ‘identity’ politics. His account is dangerous also in the manner that he detaches a contemporary extremist and right-wing nationalist discourse from the history of a less extreme, though very similar, neoliberal nationalist discourse which, since the 1980s, has mobilised the language of identity politics as a political strategy and weapon against progressive political movements and against the welfare state.
Critical Legal Thinking, 2020
Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António G... more Delivering the 2020 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres recently set out a wide ranging critique of the current global order, characterised by pervasive, institutionalised inequality, and failed, nationalistic responses to the global Coronavirus crisis. In response he has called for the reform and reshaping of global governance structures, for a ‘New Social Contract’ and a ‘Global New Deal’. But what kind of justice is presented in the call for a Global New Deal?
Legal Form, 2020
The limits of liberal constitutionalism open on to a question for Marxist theory. We can ask, whe... more The limits of liberal constitutionalism open on to a question for Marxist theory. We can ask, whether there is any place for an idea of ‘global constitutionalism’ within Marxist thought? Further, what role might a ‘constitutional register’ play in a Marxist understanding of transnational political and legal relations? Such a constitutional question is situated between the critique of the capitalist state, the imperialist operation of international law, and the traditions of democratic socialism and socialist internationalism within Marxist thought.
Critical Legal Thinking, 2020
Across the UK two narratives currently dominate and frame much of the critique of the British gov... more Across the UK two narratives currently dominate and frame much of the critique of the British government's current response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The first is that of incompetence. The story so far unfolding is that of a government which has ignored both the World Health Organisation's advice and the experience of numerous other countries in their approach to limiting the spread of Coronavirus, as well as ignoring earlier recommendations and warnings within UK government commissioned contingency planning. The picture is that of a Prime Minister and Cabinet drastically out of their depth, with little experience of crisis management or detailed planning. It is an image of a government disorganised, acting too slowly, ignoring the pleas of many within the NHS, incapable of rolling-out mass testing, and therefore actively contributing to a death rate which is much higher than neighbouring countries like Germany. A key figure in the narrative of incompetence is the persona of Boris Johnson, the spoilt public schoolboy, the chancer. He is a politician who is a master of grand rhetorical flourishes but who has previously shown (as with the case of Brexit and Northern Ireland) that he possesses little by way of mastery of detail. This picture, commonly presented in liberal-left newspapers like The Guardian, is now even being briefly sketched by the News Corp owned The Sunday Times with an account given of Johnson failing to attend a number of Cobra crisis meetings in January and February as worries over a global pandemic started to grow globally .
Global Society, 2020
Drawing upon the idea of 'constitutional antagonism' this article offers a critique of the libera... more Drawing upon the idea of 'constitutional antagonism' this article offers a critique of the liberal cosmopolitan framing global constitutionalism and its response to the rise of antidemocratic and 'populist' authoritarian politics. Liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global constitutionalism generally pay inadequate attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideology and rationality have come to dominate the fragmented networks and structures of global constitutionalism and the connected emergence of an anti-cosmopolitan and authoritarian discourse of 'nationalist neoliberalism'. Against the limits of liberal cosmopolitanism, and against the twin threats of neoliberal transnational governance and neoliberal nationalist, interstate conflict, it is argued that if an idea of transnational or global constitutionalism is to be held onto and retain any value then it must be based upon socially transformative ideas of egalitarian and ecological social justice and enacted through legal and political strategies and struggles that attempt to actively displace neoliberal ideology and rationality.
This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and d... more This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally.
Within political theory the concept of recognition has been generally drawn upon to develop a par... more Within political theory the concept of recognition has been generally drawn upon to develop a particular form of ethical theory. The concept has been deployed in debates over culture, feminism, multiculturalism, individual and group rights, and as a means of conceptualising colonialism. A less dominant contemporary line of inquiry is the use of the concept of recognition to think through modes of pre-capitalist and capitalist accumulation.
borderlands e -jo u rn a l w w w .b o rd e rla n d s.n e t.a u 1
A number of what might vaguely be called "antagonistic" theories of society and politics have tak... more A number of what might vaguely be called "antagonistic" theories of society and politics have taken on increasing currency within contemporary legal and political theory on the left today. 1 Drawing attention to the role of conflict, struggle and disagreement in the constitution and continuation of political and legal orders, these theories stand in contrast to standard versions of liberal legal and political theory which display a tendency to downplay the role of social, economic and political conflict.
Graffiti. Belfast, Northern Ireland.