Staff Profiles

Modules taught

I currently lead:

U23140 Work-based Learning in Politics and International Relations

U23133 Understanding Europe: History, Culture and Political Economy

U23184 The Ethics of Migration and Immigration

I currently teach on:

P23101: International Relations in Theory and Practice

P23121: Security: Beyond Bullets and Bombs

U23202: Introduction to IR 2: Themes and Issues

Supervision

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 (all at Queen's University Belfast):

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 recent work has concentrated on migration and the practice of international hospitality as an everyday enactment of ethics and power relations which creates irruptive spaces such as refugee camps, global cities, regional organisations and postcolonial states. This led to a particular focus on the EU's role in facilitating and attempting to mitigate the 'refugee crisis' in Europe.

Most recently I am editing 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 will be published by Pluto in the Spring/Summer of 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 group membership

Critical Security Studies

Culture, Identities and Divisions

International Political Theory

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.

Books

• Bulley D, Edkins J, El-Enany N, Ed., After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, Pluto Press (2019)
  ISBN: 9780745339580
  
• Bulley D, Migration, Ethics and Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics, Sage (2017)
  ISBN: 9781473985032 eISBN: 9781473994423
  Website 
• Bulley D, Ethics as Foreign Policy: Britain, the EU and the Other, Routledge (2009)
  ISBN: 0415483611 eISBN: 9780203878859
  Website 

Journal articles

• Bulley D, Johnson HL, 'Ethics at the airport border: flowing, dwelling, atomising'
  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36 (2) (2018) pp.217-235
  ISSN: 0263-7758 eISSN: 1472-3433
  Abstract This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on airports, addressing a current gap between literature that focuses on the cosmopolitical experience of the airport and that which focuses on the potentially dehumanising impacts of a technologized, securitised border by investigating the ethos of the space. We do not present an account of how the airport ought to work; rather, we consider what ethical relations and subjectivities are constructed, encouraged and made (im)possible in the airport space. We argue that the airport border assembles a variety of commercial, security and spatial technologies in areas of both ‘flow’ and ‘dwell’ which generate and privilege a particular type of ethical subject – the temporarily suspended, atomised individual. We begin with an understanding of space as produced through plurality and movement, and analyse how atomisation is produced and sustained before reflecting on the potentially dangerous implications of such processes.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Shame on EU? Europe, RtoP, and the Politics of Refugee Protection'
  Ethics & International Affairs 31 (1) (2017) pp.51-70
  ISSN: 0892-6794 eISSN: 1747-7093
  Abstract The EU's politics of protecting refugees through deals such as that struck with Turkey in 2016 have been vilified by human rights campaigners. This article asks whether a full engagement with the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) could offer the EU a way out of its current ethical and political malaise. It argues against such a proposition for two reasons. First, the EU already proclaims a long list of values that it asserts both contributed to its founding and continues to guide its actions; the addition of RtoP, which contains no obligations to protect refugees in other territories, would add little. Second, when the logic underlying the EU and RtoP's politics of protection are examined, a similarity emerges which would make such supplementation redundant. Both primarily entail a solidarity with, and a bolstering of, the sovereign capacity of the modern state. All that is offered to refugees, and other suffering populations, is a minimalist humanitarian solidarity through the “outsourcing” of protection. Neither the EU's ethos nor RtoP can therefore provide the firm ethical grounds from which to build protection for the figure most clearly failed by modern states—the refugee.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Occupy Differently: Space, Community and Urban Counter-Conducts'
  Global Society 30 (2) (2016) pp.238-257
  Abstract This article demonstrates how the concept of counter-conducts helps us understand Occupy by directing attention to the correlation between the way advanced liberalism works to control urban spaces and the way that control is countered through Occupy's tactics. The first section outlines the term counter-conducts by looking to Foucault's short and undeveloped theorisation. The second examines how advanced liberalism conducts conduct through the use of urban space, concentrating on London which comes to form a space of and for the mobility and circulation of goods, people and ideas. Occupy's tactics directly confront and counter such movement while engaging in its own forms of counter-circulation and (im)mobility. The third section examines how advanced liberal techniques have increasingly come to use a particular, heavily instrumentalised understanding of community in order to divide and control urban populations. Occupy's tactics embody versions of community which confront and oppose such instrumentalisation, ultimately both engaging with that control and partially reproducing it. Through these counter-conducts we can come to a view of Occupy as inevitably succeeding in its failure as a movement and failing in its success, while opening to an (im)possible futurity of occupying urban space differently.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Ethics, power and space : international hospitality beyond Derrida'
  Hospitality and Society 5 (2/3) (2015) pp.185-201
  ISSN: 2042-7913 eISSN: 2042-7921
  Abstract This article argues for the importance of hospitality in discussions of international ethics, suggesting that, while Jacques Derrida’s thought on the concept ought to be central, we also need to go beyond it. In particular, Derrida’s focus on the threshold moment of sovereign decision has the effect of reinforcing International Relations’ focus on the state as the only ethical actor and space. In contrast, this article suggests that we think of hospitality as a spatial relation with affective dimensions and a practice that continues once the guest crosses the threshold of the home. Conceived as such, hospitality reveals a constitutive relation between ethics, power and space, which directs us to the way hospitality produces international spaces and manages them through various tactics seeking to contain the resistant guest. This argument is illustrated through an examination of perhaps the most urgent of contemporary international ethical spaces: the refugee camp.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Inside the Tent: Community and Government in Refugee Camps'
  Security Dialogue 45 (1) (2014) pp.63-80
  ISSN: 0967-0106 eISSN: 1460-3640
  Abstract Refugee camps are increasingly managed through a liberal rationality of government similar to that of many industrialized societies, with security mechanisms being used to optimize the life of particular refugee populations. This governmentality has encompassed programmes introduced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to build and empower communities through the spatial technology of the camp. The present article argues that such attempts to ‘govern through community’ have been too easily dismissed or ignored. It therefore examines how such programmes work to produce, manage and conduct refugees through the use of a highly instrumentalized understanding of community in the spatial and statistical management of displaced people in camps. However, community is always both more and less than what is claimed of it, and therefore undermines attempts to use it as a governing tactic. By shifting to a more ontological understanding of community as unavoidable coexistence, inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy, we can see how the scripting of and government through community in camps is continually exceeded, redirected and resisted. Ethnographies of specific camps in Africa and the Middle East enable us both to see how the necessary sociality of being resists its own instrumentalization and to view the camp as a spatial security technology. Such resistance does not necessarily lead to greater security, but it redirects our attention to how community is used to conduct the behaviour of refugees, while also producing counter-conducts that offer greater agency, meaning and mobility to those displaced in camps.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Foreign Policy as Ethics: Towards a Re-evaluation of Values'
  Foreign Policy Analysis 10 (2) (2014) pp.165-180
  ISSN: 1743-8586 eISSN: 1743-8594
  Abstract This article notes that while ethics is increasingly talked of in foreign policy, it remains a blindspot for foreign policy analysis (FPA). It argues that this must be rectified through a critical approach which conceptualizes foreign policy as ethics. The first section examines how even constructivist approaches, which are highly attuned to the intersubjective sphere, still generally avoid dealing with morality. The second section looks at the possibilities and limits of one piece of constructivist theorizing that explores the translation of morality into foreign policy via “norms.” This demonstrates the problems that a constructivist account, with its tendency toward explanatory description without evaluation, will always face. The final section argues, through an examination of EU foreign policy (from 1999 to 2004) and its innovative use of “hospitality,” that FPA must critically reassess the value of the norms and principles by which foreign policy operates in order to suggest potentially more ethical modes of encounter.Website 
• Bulley D, Sokhi-Bulley B, 'Big Society as Big Government: Cameron’s Governmentality Agenda'
  British Journal of Politics and International Relations 16 (3) (2014) pp.452-470
  ISSN: 1369-1481 eISSN: 1467-856X
  Abstract Cameron's flagship policy of the ‘Big Society’ rests on a society/government dichotomy, diagnosing a ‘broken society’ caused by ‘big government’ having assumed the role communities once played. The remedy is greater social responsibility and the ‘Big Society’. This article argues that the dichotomy is deceptive. We aim to show that the Big Society is big government, as it employs techniques for managing the conduct of individuals and communities such that the mentality of government, far from being removed or reduced, is bettered and made more efficient. To illustrate this, we explore two major initiatives: the National Citizen Service and the Community Resilience programme. These projects demonstrate how practices of informing and guiding the conduct of individuals both produce agents and normalise certain values, resulting in the population being better known and controlled. Thus, far from lessening government and empowering people, the Big Society extends governmentality throughout the social body.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Producing and Governing Community (Through) Resilience'
  Politics 33 (4) (2013) pp.265-275
  ISSN: 0263-3957
  Abstract This article argues that the UK government's Community Resilience Programme is less about responding to disasters and more a matter of producing community and governing its behaviour. The passing over of responsibility to local volunteers and organisations is not only about empowerment, but also about forming identities and relationships that can be more efficiently managed and directed. However, this attempt is hamstrung by its basis in a nostalgic, romantic view of community and the effacement of poverty and inequality as central to the vulnerability/resilience binary. The effect may be a more intense government of communities rather than their empowerment through resilience.Website 
• Bulley D, Lisle D, 'Welcoming the World: Governing Hospitality in London’s 2012 Olympic Bid'
  International Political Sociology 6 (2) (2012) pp.186-204
  ISSN: 1749-5679 eISSN: 1749-5687
  Abstract London's successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games presented a diverse, cosmopolitan city opening its arms and “welcoming the world.” This article explores the apparently benign gesture of hospitality contained in London's official candidature files submitted in 2004 and asks how such a promise of inclusiveness is managed. We argue that London's depiction of itself as hospitable to every kind of visitor relies on subtle techniques of governmentality in which the subject positions of “host” and “guest” are imagined and produced in ways that make them more governable. By this, we are not referring to acts of authority, coercion, or discipline that exclude subjects or render them docile bodies within a rigid panoptical city. Rather, we are referring to the delicate ways in which the official bid document imagines and produces the ideal subject positions of host and guest and in so doing enables, encourages, and incentivizes certain behaviors. This analysis of urban welcoming takes us beyond reductive oppositions of hospitality and hostility, inclusion and exclusion, self and other. It focuses instead on how London's inclusive welcome produces a variety of host and guest positions (for example, the “Olympic Family,” volunteers, guest workers), segregates them within the city, and then “conducts their conduct” in the areas of planning, security, transport, accommodation, education, and training. By analyzing the techniques of governmentality at work in London's 2004 bid document, this article foregrounds the enabling form of power driving the city's inclusive welcome and exposes its inherent micropolitics.Website 
• Bourne M, Bulley D, 'Securing the Human in Critical Security Studies: The Insecurity of a Secure Ethics'
  European Security 20 (3) (2011) pp.453-471
  ISSN: 0966-2839 eISSN: 1746-1545
  Abstract This article argues that Critical Security Studies (CSS), exemplified by Ken Booth's Theory of World Security, has outlined an ethics of security as emancipation of the ‘human’, but also a highly problematic security of ethics. After drawing out how the ethics of CSS operates, we examine the security of this ethics by examining it against a hard case, that of the 1998–99 Kosovo crisis. Confronting this concrete situation, we draw out three possibilities for action used at the time to secure the human: ‘humanitarian containment’, military intervention and hospitality. Assessing each against Booth's requirements for ethical security action, we counter that, in fact, no option was without risks, pitfalls and ambiguities. Ultimately, if any action to promote the security and the emancipation of the human is possible, it must embrace and prioritise the fundamental insecurity of ethics, or else find itself paralysed through a fear of making situations worse.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Home is Where the Human is? Ethics, Intervention and Hospitality in Kosovo'
  Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39 (1) (2010) pp.43-63
  ISSN: 0305-8298 eISSN: 1477-9021
  Abstract The human is frequently made central to the way international ethics is thought and practised. Yet, the human can be used to close down ethical options rather than open them up. This article examines the case of British foreign policy in Kosovo. It argues that the human in this context was placed at the centre of ethical action, but was discursively constructed as a silent, biopolitial mass which could only be saved close to its territorially qualified home. It could not be protected by being brought to the UK. To remain human, the subject of ethical concern, the Kosovan refugee, had to remain near Kosovo. This construction of the human—home relationship meant that military humanitarian intervention became the only ethical policy available; hospitality, a welcoming of the Kosovan refugee into the British home, was ruled out. This article questions such a construction of the human, listening to the voices of Kosovan refugees to open up the relationship between the human and its home. The complexity that results shows that a more nuanced view of the human would not allow itself to be co-opted so easily to a simplistic logic of intervention. Rather, it could enable the possibility of hospitality as another way of practising international ethics.Website 
• Bulley D, 'The Politics of Ethical Foreign Policy: A Responsibility to Protect Whom?'
  European Journal of International Relations 16 (3) (2010) pp.441-461
  ISSN: 1354-0661 eISSN: 1460-3713
  Abstract Ethical foreign policy persists as a problem of international relations, especially regarding humanitarian intervention. However, despite apparent international upheavals, the debate about the ethics of humanitarian intervention has remained fundamentally unchanged. To escape the limits of this debate, this article deconstructs British claims to ethical foreign policy since 1997, reading these claims against themselves and against contemporary humanitarian intervention literature. It finds that Britain’s ethical framework, the ‘doctrine of international community’, which justifies interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, is undone by the anomalous, yet exemplary, invasion of Iraq. This demonstrates the politics of ethical foreign policy: first, that any intervention, no matter how ‘ethical’ or ‘right’, produces suffering and death; and, second, that we cannot know for sure whether we are doing the right thing by intervening. Embracing, rather than effacing, the political nature of ethical foreign policy opens up a more intellectually honest and positive potential future for relating to the foreign in a responsible manner.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Textualising British Politics: Deconstructing the Subject of British Foreign Policy'
  British Politics 4 (3) (2009) pp.291-314
  ISSN: 1746-918X eISSN: 1746-9198
  Abstract British politics has been described as a sub-discipline crying out for methodological and ideational cross-fertilisation. Where other areas of political science have benefited from new ideas, British politics has remained largely atheoretical and underdeveloped. This has changed recently with the rise of interpretivism but the study of British politics would also benefit from more serious engagement with poststructuralism. With this in mind, I examine how the thought of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction could be useful for thinking through the foundations of British politics, re-examining what appears natural or given and revealing the problematic and contradictory status of these foundations. After suggesting the need to ‘textualise’ British politics', I illustrate how deconstruction operates in a specific context, that of British foreign policy since 1997. This exploration reveals how certain decisions (such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003) became possible in the first place, and how their basis in an idea of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, a coherent, autonomous subject separate from its object, is deeply problematic. Such a critical reading of British politics is impossible within the dominant interpretivist framework, and opens up new possibilities for thought which form an important supplement to existing ways of studying the field.Website 
• Bulley D, '“Foreign” Terror? London Bombings, Resistance and the Failing State'
  British Journal of Politics and International Relations 10 (3) (2008) pp.379-394
  ISSN: 1369-1481 eISSN: 1467-856X
  Abstract The British government's response to the London bombings sought to make the terror of that day foreign, even though it appeared largely domestic. This helped construct it as unusual, contingent, part of the uncontrollable ‘otherness’ of the ‘foreign’. However, it also drew the response into the arena of British foreign policy, where the ‘failing state’ has been the dominant conceptualisation of insecurity and terrorism, especially since September 11th. When the bombings are examined through the ‘failing state’ disturbing and important problems are uncovered. Primarily, the ‘failing state’ discourse deconstructs under the influence of the terrorism in London, revealing that Britain itself is a ‘failing state’ by its own description and producing a generalisation of state ‘failure’. It thereby reveals several possible sites for responding to and resisting the government's representation.Website 
• Brassett J, Bulley D, 'Ethics in World Politics: Cosmopolitanism and Beyond?'
  International Politics 44 (1) (2007) pp.1-18
  ISSN: 1384-5748 eISSN: 1740-3898
  Website 
• Bulley D, 'Negotiating Ethics: Campbell, Ontopology and Hospitality'
  Review of International Studies 32 (4) (2006) pp.645-663
  ISSN: 0260-2105
  Abstract David Campbell has been at the forefront of showing how deconstruction, and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, can help us to think international relations differently. Like Derrida himself, Campbell has eschewed the goal of an ethical theory in favour of an ‘ethos of political criticism’ concerned to question and go beyond our assumptions and limits. In order to continue such an ethos of criticism, to push our understanding of ethics in international relations further still, it is surely important to question the assumptions and limits Campbell himself imposes. It is with this in mind that I wish to take a particular political intervention by Derrida in 1993 and read it against Campbell’s Derridean analysis of the Bosnian conflict which began in 1992.Website 

Book chapters

• Bulley D, 'Ethics, critique and space in international politics' in Edkins J (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations, Routledge (2018)
  ISBN: 1138907227
  
• Bulley D, 'The Futures of International Ethics' in Brent J. Steele and Eric A. Heinze (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Ethics and International Relations, Routledge (2018)
  ISBN: 9781138840201 eISBN: 9781315725949
  
• Bulley D, 'Ethics in Foreign Policy' in Cameron Thies (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Politics, Oxford University Press (2017)
  Abstract Ethics and foreign policy have long been considered different arenas, which can only be bridged with great analytical and practical difficulty. However, with the rise of post-positivist approaches to foreign policy, much greater attention has been paid to the way that ethical norms and moral values are embedded within the way states understand their own actions and interests, both enabling and constraining their behavior. Turning to these approaches raises a different question to whether ethics and foreign policy can mix, that of how best to understand, analyze, and critique the role that ethics inevitably play within foreign policy making? What are required are perspectives which, instead of constructing an ethical theory in the abstract and applying it to a concrete situation, start from the ethics of the foreign policy arena itself.
  
  Two ways of looking at ethics are especially useful in this regard: a virtue-ethics approach and a relational-ethics approach. These can be best explored by observing how they work in a particular foreign policy context, such as the highly controversial U.K. decision to join the invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003. This was a policy where ethics came particularly to the fore in both the decision-making process and its justification. The case study can therefore help show the types of questions virtue and relational ethics ask, the way they work as analytical and critical frameworks, and the problems they raise for the role of ethics in foreign policy. They also point toward important future directions for research in the area.Website 
• Bulley D, Lisle D, 'Rethinking Hospitality: How London Welcomed the World at the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games' in Vassil Girginov (ed.), Handbook of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Volume 2, Celebrating the games, Routledge (2014)
  ISBN: 9780415671927 eISBN: 9780203126486
  Abstract The Handbook of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is the first authoritative and comprehensive account of the world’s greatest sporting and cultural event. It tells the complete story of the 2012 Games from inception, through the successful bidding process and the planning and preparation phase, to delivery, the post-Games period and legacy. Written by a world-class team of international Olympic scholars, the book offers critical analysis of the social, cultural, political, historical, economic and sporting context of the Games. From the political, commercial and structural complexities of organising an event on such a scale, to the sporting action that holds the attention of the world, this book illuminates the key aspects of the 2012 Games, helping us to better understand the vital role that sport and culture play in contemporary global society.Website 
• Bulley D, 'Conducting Strangers: Hospitality and Governmentality in the Global City' in Gideon Baker (ed.), Hospitality and World Politics, Routledge (2013)
  ISBN: 9781137289995 eISBN: 9781137290007
  Abstract Hospitality is as much about control as it is about welcome. Offering, granting, receiving, experiencing or refusing hospitality always involves the exercise of power and constraint as well as a potential ethics and freedom. Indeed, the seemingly contradictory elements, which some speak of as ethics and politics, cannot be separated: ‘The apparently incompatible pair are doomed to cohabit, unhappily, chaotically, because that tension is precisely what hospitality is about’.1 This defiance of reason, its incapacity to be conceptualised as simply one thing or the other, has been well observed by contemporary explorations of the concept.2 While Jacques Derrida is right to claim that because it has to do with the ethos ‘that is the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling… the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own and as foreigners, ethics is hospitality’, this is not the end of the story. As he goes on to say, being at home with oneself ‘supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control, and master according to different modalities of violence’.3 Few treat hospitality without an eye to its attendant hostility.4 Yet there has been little sustained analysis of the power relations, the appropriation and control involved in practices of hospitality. What types of power are being exercised in this encounter between a ‘host’ and a ‘guest’?, and how does this work to reconfigure, confuse and disturb the actions and experience of ‘hosting’ and ‘guesting’? How does it affect the material experience of global hospitality?Website 
• Bulley D, '"Let us re-order this world around us”: The problematic subject of British military ethics' in Anna Bergman-Rosamond and Mark Phythian (ed.), War, Ethics and Justice: New Perspectives on a Post-9/11 World, Routledge (2011)
  ISBN: 9780415552349 eISBN: 9780203868522
  Website 
• Bulley D, 'Ethical Assassination? Negotiating the(ir)responsible decision' in Madeleine Fagan (Editor), Ludovic Glorieux (Editor), Indira Hasimbegovic (Editor), Marie Suetsugu (Editor) (ed.), Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy, Edinburgh University Press (2007)
  ISBN: 9780748625475;074862547X eISBN: 9780748631032