Personal Statement
I'm interested in how certain international legal regimes (socio-economic rights, transitional justice, international criminal law) apply domestically in developing states. These bodies of law and norms are premised on ideas about how states, politics and norms should work that are wildly at odds with how they do work. Stability takes priority over development, neopatrimonial bargaining jostles for precedence with Weberian rationality, the horizons for planning are short, and the levers of the state break in one's hand. The whiggish liberalism of mainstream international law cannot acknowledge these realities. Critical perspectives on international law, with their own calcifying orthodoxies, are more interested in global imbalances than their impact on domestic political economy. I'm interested in how international law is used and not used by governments in the developing world.

I also have a sideline in law and literature, having published work on Julian Barnes, Ariel Dorfman, David Edgar and Shirley Hazzard. I am working very slowly on an article on the 1949 short story 'My Trial as a War Criminal' by the Manhattan Project's Leo Szilard

Find a Supervisor

Pádraig would be happy to hear from potential postgraduate research students about supervising projects in the following areas:

Transitional Justice
Rule of Law
Neopatrimonialism
Socio-economic rights and development