Christopher J Finlay
Biographic Data
| ID | 1203189 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher J Finlay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher J |
| FAMILY NAME | Finlay |
| SIGNATURE | FINLAY C J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2308-2793 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Rearticulating the strongman
In the 2024 US election, vice-presidential candidates Tim Walz (Democrat) and J.D. Vance (Republican) made masculinity a central feature of their campaigns. Both sought to connect with disaffected male voters in the American Midwest by deploying sports-infused rhetoric and personal narratives rooted in military service, regional identity, and class. This article uses critical discourse analysis to examine how each candidate employed ‘sports dirt’…
Political Violence
This paper argues that the reason why political leadership often involves dirty hands is because of its relationship with violence. To make the case, it maintains that violent means create and assert a form of dominating power that is in tension with the proper ends of political action. This power casts a wide shadow, frequently dominating large numbers of non-targets and empowering unscrupulous agents. On the other side of the balance, character…
Assisting Rebels Abroad
In this article, I analyse the theory and practice of interventions in foreign civil wars to assist rebels fighting against violently oppressive government. I argue that the indirect nature of this kind of intervention gives rise to political complications that are either absent from or less obvious in humanitarian interventions aimed chiefly at defending human rights from imminent threats. An adequate theory must therefore accommodate three addi…
Ethics, Force, and Power
Benbaji and Statman’s contractarian ethics of war offers a powerful new philosophical defence of orthodox conclusions against revisionist criticism. I present a two-pronged argument in reply. First, contractarianism yields what I call ‘decent war theory,’ a theory in which war between decent states is paradigmatic. I argue, by contrast, that states should treat wars against indecent states as paradigmatic, resulting in a Rawlsian alternative that…
On canons and question marks
Deconstructing Nonviolence and the War-Machine
Proponents of nonviolent tactics often highlight the extent to which they rival arms as effective means of resistance. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, for instance, compare civil resistance favorably to armed insurrection as means of bringing about progressive political change. In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine , Ned Dobos cites their work in support of the claim that similar methods—organized according to Gene Sharp's idea of “civilian…
How and Why to Do Just War Theory
The alternatives to war
The Responsibility to Protect is premised on the assumption that, as James Pattison writes, ‘standing by in the face of mass atrocities is reprehensible’ (p. 1). For this reason, its proponents frequently argue that those states in a position to do so ought to resort to military intervention in cases where innocent people are threatened by crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. But committing to the use of armed force is often deeply p…
Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence
Recent debate on the relationship between cyber threats, on the one hand, and both strategy and ethics on the other focus on the extent to which ‘cyber war’ is possible, both as a conceptual question and an empirical one. Whether it can is an important question for just war theorists. From this perspective, it is necessary to evaluate cyber measures both as a means of responding to threats and as a possible just cause for using armed kinetic forc…
The Right to Profitable Speech
Social media has given athletes unprecedented voice and direct access to audiences. To analyze the influence of athletes in the production of mediasport narratives, the focus on mediasport interpellation theory is applied to athletes as both readers and producers of consumerist mediasport hails and is then explored in two case studies. During the 2012 Olympics, a band of athletes launched the #WeDemandChange campaign against Rule 40 of the Olympi…
The concept of violence in international theory
The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of h…
Response to Dustin Ells Howes' review of Terrorism and the Right to Resist
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Perspective of the Rebel
If people have a right to rebel against domestic tyranny, wrongful foreign occupation, or colonial rule, then the normative principles commonly invoked to deal with civil conflicts present a problem. While rebels in some cases might justifiably try to secure human rights by resort to violence, the three normative pillars dealing with armed force provide at best only a partial reflection of the ethics of armed revolt. This article argues that (fir…
Bastards, brothers, and unjust warriors
How do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films …
National Proxy 2.0
The affordances of social media technologies increasingly allow Olympians to directly communicate with global audiences. Olympians can thus become more powerful autonomous discursive actors, threatening traditional Olympic power dynamics that have protected lucrative Olympic media streams. And yet, Olympians have yet to use social media technology to fully exercise their autonomy. This article adopts a social construction of technology lens withi…
Fighting hurt
Fighting hurt: rule and exception in torture and war. By Henry Shue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 528 pp. £50.00. ISBN 978 0 19876 762 6. Henry Shue's Fighting hurt brings together 22 essays, all but one published since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’. Their common concern is with the ethics of war and the use of violence—particularly torture—by states and those acting on their behalf. One of Shue's central preoccupations, and a th…
Insurrection and intervention
Ned Dobos Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN10 0521761131, ISBN13 9780521761130 (hbk), 244 pp Whereas the subject of humanitarian intervention has generated a large a
Fairness and Liability in the Just War
Critics of non-uniformed ‘irregular’ warfare argue that it is unfair both to non-combatants and to enemy ‘regulars’. I dispute this view by outlining the ‘problem of in bello justice’, which concerns how the leaders of a people forced to fight a just war should distribute risks within their own population. In so far as all are the victims of aggression or unjust occupation, I argue, no citizens on the just side are morally liable to attack. But t…
A Space for Mothers
In this article we conduct a textual analysis of memorial websites created by mothers who have experienced a loss due to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Using an online Internet ethnographic approach, we reviewed a series of 20 sites in an attempt to analyze the motivations of the site creators as manifested in their online projects. We spent time on the sites, moving through all facets of them, following links, and experiencing them the way…
Dirty hands and the romance of the ticking bomb terrorist
On Michael Walzer’s influential account, ‘dirty hands’ characterizes the political leader’s choice between absolutist moral demands (to abstain from torture) and consequentialist political reasoning (to do what is necessary to prevent the loss of innocent lives). The impulse to torture a ‘ticking bomb terrorist’ is therefore at least partly pragmatic, straining against morality, while the desire to uphold a ban on torture is purely and properly a…
Terrorism, Resistance, and the Idea of “Unlawful Combatancy”
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Public diplomacy games
The Olympic Games are global communication events that offer host-nations the unique opportunity to promote a soft power agenda by allowing them to construct global messages about their cultural identities and work towards public diplomacy goals that may be more difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. At the same time, however, the Olympics accentuate nationalist and patriotic sentiment, especially in host-nations. Nationalist conviction…
Shocked and awed
Naming violence
Public diplomacy games
The Olympic Games are global communication events that offer host-nations the unique opportunity to promote a soft power agenda by allowing them to construct global messages about their cultural identities and work towards public diplomacy goals that may be more difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. At the same time, however, the Olympics accentuate nationalist and patriotic sentiment, especially in host-nations. Nationalist conviction…
The alternatives to war
The Responsibility to Protect is premised on the assumption that, as James Pattison writes, ‘standing by in the face of mass atrocities is reprehensible’ (p. 1). For this reason, its proponents frequently argue that those states in a position to do so ought to resort to military intervention in cases where innocent people are threatened by crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. But committing to the use of armed force is often deeply p…
Legitimacy and Non-State Political Violence
Hannah Arendt's Critique of Violence
This article critiques the idea of instrumental justification for violent means seen in Hannah Arendt's writings. A central element in Arendt's argument against theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon in On Violence is the distinction between instrumental justifications and approaches emphasizing the `legitimacy' of violence or its intrinsic value. This doesn't really do the work Arendt needs it to in relation to rival theories. The true di…
Violence and Revolutionary Subjectivity
The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between revolution and violence in Marxism and in a series of texts drawing on Marxian theory. Part 1 outlines the basic normative frameworks which determine the outer limits of permissible violence in Marxism. Part 2 presents a critical analysis of a series of later discussions - by Sorel, Fanon and Žižek - which transformed the terms in which violence was discussed by developing one par…
On canons and question marks
The concept of violence in international theory
The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of h…
Fairness and Liability in the Just War
Critics of non-uniformed ‘irregular’ warfare argue that it is unfair both to non-combatants and to enemy ‘regulars’. I dispute this view by outlining the ‘problem of in bello justice’, which concerns how the leaders of a people forced to fight a just war should distribute risks within their own population. In so far as all are the victims of aggression or unjust occupation, I argue, no citizens on the just side are morally liable to attack. But t…
Hume’s Theory of Civil Society
This article interprets David Hume’s social and political thought as a ‘theory of civil society’, arguing that as such it constituted an important challenge to the civic humanism of much early 18th-century British political argument. Since republican theorists invoke the historical traditions of civic thought in current debates, Hume’s theory of civil society therefore is of especial interest in relation to the foundations of contemporary neo-rep…
Deconstructing Nonviolence and the War-Machine
Proponents of nonviolent tactics often highlight the extent to which they rival arms as effective means of resistance. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, for instance, compare civil resistance favorably to armed insurrection as means of bringing about progressive political change. In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine , Ned Dobos cites their work in support of the claim that similar methods—organized according to Gene Sharp's idea of “civilian…
How and Why to Do Just War Theory
Insurrection and intervention
Ned Dobos Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN10 0521761131, ISBN13 9780521761130 (hbk), 244 pp Whereas the subject of humanitarian intervention has generated a large a
How to do things with the word ‘terrorist’
Recently, some commentators have argued that the word ‘terrorist’ should be abandoned as it has become overloaded with undesirable ‘rhetorical’ connotations. This view is premised on the assumption that an adequate distinction may be drawn between principled, ‘logical’ usages and merely ‘rhetorical’ ones. This article argues that the use of the word ‘terrorist’ normally has a ‘rhetorical’ aspect and that theorists must therefore find ways to dist…
Naming violence
The Perspective of the Rebel
If people have a right to rebel against domestic tyranny, wrongful foreign occupation, or colonial rule, then the normative principles commonly invoked to deal with civil conflicts present a problem. While rebels in some cases might justifiably try to secure human rights by resort to violence, the three normative pillars dealing with armed force provide at best only a partial reflection of the ethics of armed revolt. This article argues that (fir…
Dirty hands and the romance of the ticking bomb terrorist
On Michael Walzer’s influential account, ‘dirty hands’ characterizes the political leader’s choice between absolutist moral demands (to abstain from torture) and consequentialist political reasoning (to do what is necessary to prevent the loss of innocent lives). The impulse to torture a ‘ticking bomb terrorist’ is therefore at least partly pragmatic, straining against morality, while the desire to uphold a ban on torture is purely and properly a…
Reform Intervention and Democratic Revolution
Can interventions be used to assist oppressed peoples in overthrowing their governments? According to the influential non-interventionist arguments of J.S. Mill and Michael Walzer, reform interventions are incompatible with a principle of national self-determination. This article challenges Mill and Walzer, arguing that, in limited cases, interventions could in principle support revolutionary movements in such a way as to facilitate democratic tr…
Hume’s Theory of Civil Society
This article interprets David Hume’s social and political thought as a ‘theory of civil society’, arguing that as such it constituted an important challenge to the civic humanism of much early 18th-century British political argument. Since republican theorists invoke the historical traditions of civic thought in current debates, Hume’s theory of civil society therefore is of especial interest in relation to the foundations of contemporary neo-rep…
Violence and Revolutionary Subjectivity
The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between revolution and violence in Marxism and in a series of texts drawing on Marxian theory. Part 1 outlines the basic normative frameworks which determine the outer limits of permissible violence in Marxism. Part 2 presents a critical analysis of a series of later discussions - by Sorel, Fanon and Žižek - which transformed the terms in which violence was discussed by developing one par…
Hume's Social Philosophy
1. Introduction 2. Hume's Social Contexts 3. Philosophy and Common Life 4. Volition, Causation and Rationality 5. Pride and Esteem 6. Sociability in Commercial Civil Society 7. Social Foundations: Justice, Government and Morality 8. Hume's Politics
Reform Intervention and Democratic Revolution
Can interventions be used to assist oppressed peoples in overthrowing their governments? According to the influential non-interventionist arguments of J.S. Mill and Michael Walzer, reform interventions are incompatible with a principle of national self-determination. This article challenges Mill and Walzer, arguing that, in limited cases, interventions could in principle support revolutionary movements in such a way as to facilitate democratic tr…
Legitimacy and Non-State Political Violence
How to do things with the word ‘terrorist’
Recently, some commentators have argued that the word ‘terrorist’ should be abandoned as it has become overloaded with undesirable ‘rhetorical’ connotations. This view is premised on the assumption that an adequate distinction may be drawn between principled, ‘logical’ usages and merely ‘rhetorical’ ones. This article argues that the use of the word ‘terrorist’ normally has a ‘rhetorical’ aspect and that theorists must therefore find ways to dist…
Hannah Arendt's Critique of Violence
This article critiques the idea of instrumental justification for violent means seen in Hannah Arendt's writings. A central element in Arendt's argument against theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon in On Violence is the distinction between instrumental justifications and approaches emphasizing the `legitimacy' of violence or its intrinsic value. This doesn't really do the work Arendt needs it to in relation to rival theories. The true di…
Dirty hands and the romance of the ticking bomb terrorist
On Michael Walzer’s influential account, ‘dirty hands’ characterizes the political leader’s choice between absolutist moral demands (to abstain from torture) and consequentialist political reasoning (to do what is necessary to prevent the loss of innocent lives). The impulse to torture a ‘ticking bomb terrorist’ is therefore at least partly pragmatic, straining against morality, while the desire to uphold a ban on torture is purely and properly a…
Terrorism, Resistance, and the Idea of “Unlawful Combatancy”
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Public diplomacy games
The Olympic Games are global communication events that offer host-nations the unique opportunity to promote a soft power agenda by allowing them to construct global messages about their cultural identities and work towards public diplomacy goals that may be more difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. At the same time, however, the Olympics accentuate nationalist and patriotic sentiment, especially in host-nations. Nationalist conviction…
A Space for Mothers
In this article we conduct a textual analysis of memorial websites created by mothers who have experienced a loss due to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Using an online Internet ethnographic approach, we reviewed a series of 20 sites in an attempt to analyze the motivations of the site creators as manifested in their online projects. We spent time on the sites, moving through all facets of them, following links, and experiencing them the way…
Insurrection and intervention
Ned Dobos Cambridge, United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN10 0521761131, ISBN13 9780521761130 (hbk), 244 pp Whereas the subject of humanitarian intervention has generated a large a
Fairness and Liability in the Just War
Critics of non-uniformed ‘irregular’ warfare argue that it is unfair both to non-combatants and to enemy ‘regulars’. I dispute this view by outlining the ‘problem of in bello justice’, which concerns how the leaders of a people forced to fight a just war should distribute risks within their own population. In so far as all are the victims of aggression or unjust occupation, I argue, no citizens on the just side are morally liable to attack. But t…
National Proxy 2.0
The affordances of social media technologies increasingly allow Olympians to directly communicate with global audiences. Olympians can thus become more powerful autonomous discursive actors, threatening traditional Olympic power dynamics that have protected lucrative Olympic media streams. And yet, Olympians have yet to use social media technology to fully exercise their autonomy. This article adopts a social construction of technology lens withi…
Fighting hurt
Fighting hurt: rule and exception in torture and war. By Henry Shue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 528 pp. £50.00. ISBN 978 0 19876 762 6. Henry Shue's Fighting hurt brings together 22 essays, all but one published since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’. Their common concern is with the ethics of war and the use of violence—particularly torture—by states and those acting on their behalf. One of Shue's central preoccupations, and a th…
The Right to Profitable Speech
Social media has given athletes unprecedented voice and direct access to audiences. To analyze the influence of athletes in the production of mediasport narratives, the focus on mediasport interpellation theory is applied to athletes as both readers and producers of consumerist mediasport hails and is then explored in two case studies. During the 2012 Olympics, a band of athletes launched the #WeDemandChange campaign against Rule 40 of the Olympi…
The concept of violence in international theory
The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of h…
Response to Dustin Ells Howes' review of Terrorism and the Right to Resist
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Perspective of the Rebel
If people have a right to rebel against domestic tyranny, wrongful foreign occupation, or colonial rule, then the normative principles commonly invoked to deal with civil conflicts present a problem. While rebels in some cases might justifiably try to secure human rights by resort to violence, the three normative pillars dealing with armed force provide at best only a partial reflection of the ethics of armed revolt. This article argues that (fir…
Bastards, brothers, and unjust warriors
How do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films …
Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence
Recent debate on the relationship between cyber threats, on the one hand, and both strategy and ethics on the other focus on the extent to which ‘cyber war’ is possible, both as a conceptual question and an empirical one. Whether it can is an important question for just war theorists. From this perspective, it is necessary to evaluate cyber measures both as a means of responding to threats and as a possible just cause for using armed kinetic forc…
The alternatives to war
The Responsibility to Protect is premised on the assumption that, as James Pattison writes, ‘standing by in the face of mass atrocities is reprehensible’ (p. 1). For this reason, its proponents frequently argue that those states in a position to do so ought to resort to military intervention in cases where innocent people are threatened by crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. But committing to the use of armed force is often deeply p…
Deconstructing Nonviolence and the War-Machine
Proponents of nonviolent tactics often highlight the extent to which they rival arms as effective means of resistance. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, for instance, compare civil resistance favorably to armed insurrection as means of bringing about progressive political change. In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine , Ned Dobos cites their work in support of the claim that similar methods—organized according to Gene Sharp's idea of “civilian…
How and Why to Do Just War Theory
Political science (30 works) · Law (29 works) · Sociology (29 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (21 works) · War, Ethics, and Justification (16 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (12 works) · Law and economics (11 works)