Owen David Thomas
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3687775 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Owen David Thomas |
| NOMBRES | Owen David |
| APELLIDO | Thomas |
| FIRMA | THOMAS O D |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5470-9013 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 15 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 15 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1962 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Prefiguring truth
Public inquiries operate as privileged instruments of sense‐making, defined by a series of epistemological and methodological commitments. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry was established to uncover the truth of the fire in which seventy‐two people died. This article interrogates the truth‐seeking and truth‐producing practices of the Inquiry. These shape the contours of the account of the fire that it has produced, predisposing it to particular forms o…
Death and denial in the city
In the wake of violent events comes a rush to make sense of what happened. Sensemaking matters because it bounds political possibilities, producing knowledge about what caused the violence, who is accountable, and whether society should change to prevent a recurrence. This paper explores sensemaking through an intertextual discourse analysis of elite, print, and social media responses to two violent events in the global city of London in June 201…
Dynastic International Relations
This paper offers insights into the Crisis of Liberal International Order by combining Ibn Khaldun’s theory of change with scholarship on liberalism and race. We argue that the crisis emerges from the incongruence of two features of liberal order: a binding feature (or ‘assabiyya ) of white supremacy and liberalism’s principles of equality. The crisis is an outcome of a normative political order that can no longer balance a material and discursiv…
Public inquiries into conflict and security
Public inquiries into matters of conflict and security are vitally important yet undertheorised. This article explores the potential of inquiries for the democratic scrutiny of foreign policy, military doctrine, and grand strategy. In recent decades, there have been numerous inquiries into contentious foreign and security policy incidents in Britain, a trend reflected elsewhere in global politics. Inquiries can unveil facts, identify lessons, and…
Mr Rules
Keir Starmer’s moniker of ‘Mr Rules’ captures his deep investment in a rules-based form of politics that seeks to uphold established standards of probity and competency in public office. Rather than a mere tactic of opposition politics, we argue that it is symptomatic of the juridification of politics. By this we mean the ceding of the terrain of politics to the seemingly superior and separate domains of law and administration. Drawing upon and e…
Making sense of state violence
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this record
Military social harm
This article presents a critical framework for understanding the harms produced by military institutions. Assessments of military harms are undertaken across the sociological study of the military, ranging from public-facing military issues to more inwardly directed research conducted by entities with vested state interests. Building upon and advancing the available scholarship, we introduce the concept of 'military social harm', drawing on crimi…
Being Curious with Secrecy
This article contributes to ongoing attempts to broaden out theorizations of secrecy from an intentional and willful act of concealment to a cultural and structural process. We do so by fostering a conversation between secrecy and curiosity. This conversation is enabled through a review of central themes in secrecy studies and curiosity studies, but also through an examination of a collaboration between the science center “We the Curious” and a n…
Ordering disorder
This article offers insights into the character and composition of world order. It does so by focusing on how world order is made and revealed through seemingly disorderly events. We examine how societies struggle to interpret and respond to disorderly events through three modes of treatment: tragedy, crisis, and scandal. These, we argue, are the dominant modes of treatment in world politics, through which an account of disorder is articulated an…
Security in the balance
State secrecy is incompatible with the values of liberal democracy if there is no publicly reasonable justification for the concealment. So how can a liberal democracy continue to keep state secrets amidst suspicion that no such justification exists or that, worse, those secrets contain evidence of wrongdoing? This article maps and critiques the justificatory strategies that were used by the British state to refuse to disclose secret material rel…
Secrets and democracy
Good faith and (dis)honest mistakes? Learning from Britain’s Iraq War Inquiry
The recent ‘Chilcot’ Inquiry judged that British participation in the 2003 Iraq War was neither right nor necessary. When reading the final report of over 2.6 million words, I warn against seeking accountability solely in terms of intent and individual culpability, such as questioning whether the government deceived the public. There also needs to be an examination of the rationalities and power relations that allowed figures such as Tony Blair t…
Secrets and leaks
FoucaultianDispositifsas Methodology
This paper examines the Indian government's Unique Identification (UID) program, the largest digital biometric program in history. UID is intended to provide a new model of security based on a complex interrelation between welfare, identity and rights. The program resembles the kind of liberal governmentality and biopolitical imperative described by Foucault, yet it is also inseparable from the specific socio-historic conditions in India that con…
The influence of social values on public policy determination
ysis of values which influence public policy decision-making at two levels of government-international and metropolitan. The immediate object of the study is to test the applicability of different methods of behavioral analysis to the study of this problem. The ultimate purpose is to develop better understanding of the factors which impede or contribute toward effective cooperation among relatively autonomous governmental units in the solution of…
Security in the balance
State secrecy is incompatible with the values of liberal democracy if there is no publicly reasonable justification for the concealment. So how can a liberal democracy continue to keep state secrets amidst suspicion that no such justification exists or that, worse, those secrets contain evidence of wrongdoing? This article maps and critiques the justificatory strategies that were used by the British state to refuse to disclose secret material rel…
Ordering disorder
This article offers insights into the character and composition of world order. It does so by focusing on how world order is made and revealed through seemingly disorderly events. We examine how societies struggle to interpret and respond to disorderly events through three modes of treatment: tragedy, crisis, and scandal. These, we argue, are the dominant modes of treatment in world politics, through which an account of disorder is articulated an…
Mr Rules
Keir Starmer’s moniker of ‘Mr Rules’ captures his deep investment in a rules-based form of politics that seeks to uphold established standards of probity and competency in public office. Rather than a mere tactic of opposition politics, we argue that it is symptomatic of the juridification of politics. By this we mean the ceding of the terrain of politics to the seemingly superior and separate domains of law and administration. Drawing upon and e…
Good faith and (dis)honest mistakes? Learning from Britain’s Iraq War Inquiry
The recent ‘Chilcot’ Inquiry judged that British participation in the 2003 Iraq War was neither right nor necessary. When reading the final report of over 2.6 million words, I warn against seeking accountability solely in terms of intent and individual culpability, such as questioning whether the government deceived the public. There also needs to be an examination of the rationalities and power relations that allowed figures such as Tony Blair t…
Public inquiries into conflict and security
Public inquiries into matters of conflict and security are vitally important yet undertheorised. This article explores the potential of inquiries for the democratic scrutiny of foreign policy, military doctrine, and grand strategy. In recent decades, there have been numerous inquiries into contentious foreign and security policy incidents in Britain, a trend reflected elsewhere in global politics. Inquiries can unveil facts, identify lessons, and…
FoucaultianDispositifsas Methodology
This paper examines the Indian government's Unique Identification (UID) program, the largest digital biometric program in history. UID is intended to provide a new model of security based on a complex interrelation between welfare, identity and rights. The program resembles the kind of liberal governmentality and biopolitical imperative described by Foucault, yet it is also inseparable from the specific socio-historic conditions in India that con…
Military social harm
This article presents a critical framework for understanding the harms produced by military institutions. Assessments of military harms are undertaken across the sociological study of the military, ranging from public-facing military issues to more inwardly directed research conducted by entities with vested state interests. Building upon and advancing the available scholarship, we introduce the concept of 'military social harm', drawing on crimi…
The influence of social values on public policy determination
ysis of values which influence public policy decision-making at two levels of government-international and metropolitan. The immediate object of the study is to test the applicability of different methods of behavioral analysis to the study of this problem. The ultimate purpose is to develop better understanding of the factors which impede or contribute toward effective cooperation among relatively autonomous governmental units in the solution of…
FoucaultianDispositifsas Methodology
This paper examines the Indian government's Unique Identification (UID) program, the largest digital biometric program in history. UID is intended to provide a new model of security based on a complex interrelation between welfare, identity and rights. The program resembles the kind of liberal governmentality and biopolitical imperative described by Foucault, yet it is also inseparable from the specific socio-historic conditions in India that con…
Secrets and leaks
Secrets and democracy
Good faith and (dis)honest mistakes? Learning from Britain’s Iraq War Inquiry
The recent ‘Chilcot’ Inquiry judged that British participation in the 2003 Iraq War was neither right nor necessary. When reading the final report of over 2.6 million words, I warn against seeking accountability solely in terms of intent and individual culpability, such as questioning whether the government deceived the public. There also needs to be an examination of the rationalities and power relations that allowed figures such as Tony Blair t…
Security in the balance
State secrecy is incompatible with the values of liberal democracy if there is no publicly reasonable justification for the concealment. So how can a liberal democracy continue to keep state secrets amidst suspicion that no such justification exists or that, worse, those secrets contain evidence of wrongdoing? This article maps and critiques the justificatory strategies that were used by the British state to refuse to disclose secret material rel…
Ordering disorder
This article offers insights into the character and composition of world order. It does so by focusing on how world order is made and revealed through seemingly disorderly events. We examine how societies struggle to interpret and respond to disorderly events through three modes of treatment: tragedy, crisis, and scandal. These, we argue, are the dominant modes of treatment in world politics, through which an account of disorder is articulated an…
Being Curious with Secrecy
This article contributes to ongoing attempts to broaden out theorizations of secrecy from an intentional and willful act of concealment to a cultural and structural process. We do so by fostering a conversation between secrecy and curiosity. This conversation is enabled through a review of central themes in secrecy studies and curiosity studies, but also through an examination of a collaboration between the science center “We the Curious” and a n…
Public inquiries into conflict and security
Public inquiries into matters of conflict and security are vitally important yet undertheorised. This article explores the potential of inquiries for the democratic scrutiny of foreign policy, military doctrine, and grand strategy. In recent decades, there have been numerous inquiries into contentious foreign and security policy incidents in Britain, a trend reflected elsewhere in global politics. Inquiries can unveil facts, identify lessons, and…
Mr Rules
Keir Starmer’s moniker of ‘Mr Rules’ captures his deep investment in a rules-based form of politics that seeks to uphold established standards of probity and competency in public office. Rather than a mere tactic of opposition politics, we argue that it is symptomatic of the juridification of politics. By this we mean the ceding of the terrain of politics to the seemingly superior and separate domains of law and administration. Drawing upon and e…
Making sense of state violence
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this record
Military social harm
This article presents a critical framework for understanding the harms produced by military institutions. Assessments of military harms are undertaken across the sociological study of the military, ranging from public-facing military issues to more inwardly directed research conducted by entities with vested state interests. Building upon and advancing the available scholarship, we introduce the concept of 'military social harm', drawing on crimi…
Death and denial in the city
In the wake of violent events comes a rush to make sense of what happened. Sensemaking matters because it bounds political possibilities, producing knowledge about what caused the violence, who is accountable, and whether society should change to prevent a recurrence. This paper explores sensemaking through an intertextual discourse analysis of elite, print, and social media responses to two violent events in the global city of London in June 201…
Dynastic International Relations
This paper offers insights into the Crisis of Liberal International Order by combining Ibn Khaldun’s theory of change with scholarship on liberalism and race. We argue that the crisis emerges from the incongruence of two features of liberal order: a binding feature (or ‘assabiyya ) of white supremacy and liberalism’s principles of equality. The crisis is an outcome of a normative political order that can no longer balance a material and discursiv…
Prefiguring truth
Public inquiries operate as privileged instruments of sense‐making, defined by a series of epistemological and methodological commitments. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry was established to uncover the truth of the fire in which seventy‐two people died. This article interrogates the truth‐seeking and truth‐producing practices of the Inquiry. These shape the contours of the account of the fire that it has produced, predisposing it to particular forms o…
Political science (13 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Sociology (11 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Politics (9 obras) · Epistemology (7 obras) · Philosophy (6 obras) · Computer Science (5 obras) · Global Security and Public Health (5 obras) · Economics (4 obras)