Professor Dan Bulley

I would be keen to supervise research students in poststructural IR theory, international ethics, international practices of hospitality, power and resistance in international politics, and changing conceptions of international space.

Completed supervisions include:

• Massimo Bardin, 'Pasolini's Cinema and the the Problem of the Renewal of Marxism' (2023) - with Gary Browning and Andrea Bardin.
• Eddie Molloy, ‘Race and Nation in the Young Ireland Movement’ (2017) - with Margaret O'Callaghan
• Stephen Warren, ‘The evolution of an Unconventional Warfare Narrative in the security imaginary of the United States' (2016) - with Andrew Thomson.
• James Millen, ‘Remembering Responsibility: NATO, Memory and Intervention in Libya’ (2016) - with Debbie Lisle.
• Noirin MacNamara, ‘Living with Ambiguity: Political Subjectivity, Responsiveness and Futurity in the work of Judith Butler and Bracha Ettinger’ (2016) - with Susan McManus.
• Laura Mills, ‘Post-9/11 Cultural Diplomacy: the impossibility of cosmopolitanism’ (2014) - with Debbie Lisle.
• Keith Kiely, ‘US Foreign Policy Discourse and the Israel Lobby: the Clinton administration and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process’ (2014) - with Beverley Milton-Edwards.
• Shinhyung (Shine) Choi, ‘How do you solve a problem like North Korea? Interrogating culture(s) and exploring alternatives’ (2012) - with Debbie Lisle.

My research examines the role of ethics and power relations in international politics. I am particularly interested in using poststructuralist, feminist and postcolonial theory to challenge the way our conception of international ethics is limited by the spatial constraints of the sovereign state system.

My most recent work has concentrated on migration and the practice of international hospitality as an everyday enactment of ethics and power relations. I have proposed a relational, feminist approach to immigration ethics in a recent book (OUP, 2023).

Previously, I looked at how practices of hospitality can create irruptive spaces such as refugee camps, global cities, regional organisations and postcolonial states. In a previous book (Sage, 2017), this led to a particular focus on the EU's role in facilitating and attempting to mitigate the 'refugee crisis' in Europe. I have also edited a book, with Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany, that brings together artists, activists and academics through essays, poems and pictures, in response to the Grenfell Tower disaster. The book is called After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response and was published by Pluto in 2019.

In earlier work, I explored the role of ethics in foreign policy, particularly in a British and EU context. I retain an interest in the UN's use of 'Responsibility to Protect' (R2P), which continues to demonstrate the potential and limits of international ethical action as conducted by states.

Research grants and awards

Co-Investigator (with Tom Walker(PI), Debbie Lisle, Bal Sokhi-Bulley, Mike Bourne, Heather Johnson): ‘Treating People as Objects: Ethics, Security and the Governance of Mobility’, RCUK - Ethics and Rights in a Security Context Programme (2014-2016) - ES/L013274/1.