University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

Graduate Student, School of Political Studies

Other Affiliations: Carleton University, Politial Science
Université Saint-Paul University, Faculty of Human Sciences

Contract Instructor

Carleton University

About

I am a PhD Candidate in the School for Political Studies, University of Ottawa. I received my MA in 2006 from Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan. I received my BA in 2001 from the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. My major field is International Relations Theory, with a specialization in (Critical) Security Studies; while my minor field is Comparative Politics. I am currently working on an interdisciplinary critique of mainstream IR theory; however, Japanese language and culture has enjoyed special significance in my personal and professional life since 1997.

My MA thesis, entitled “Perpetuated Conflicts: A Case Study of the Second Congo War”, was submitted and successfully defended in January 2006. I graduated in April of the same year with honours from Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan. I began my PhD work in earnest in September 2007, however, I was uncertain of the direction my research would take. Self-identifying as an anarchist since 2004, I immediately felt the numerous incompatibilities of my own world view with those expressed in the orthodox political literature on International Relations. This led me to feel a profound dissatisfaction with the current imaginative scope and ethical commitments to social transformation offered by that literature. After encountering Colin Wight’s book Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology, my eyes opened to the blatant holes that exist in the theoretical literature resulting from a failure to ask the most basic question: what is real?

With my attention drawn to this question, I began my patchwork-quilt attempt to examine evidence across a number of fields to help answer that question in a way that differed considerably from the answers previously given. The other important influence for this line of thinking was the philosophy of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. His book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution signified what I consider to be the core of holistic thinking about the human realm. This work covers biology, anthropology, history and sociology to present a powerful view of the importance of cooperation in human life. The interdisciplinary nature of Kropotkin’s work reinforced in me the idea that arguing the case for an anarchistic world view needed to embrace as large a perspective as possible.

Therefore, my current dissertation, tentatively entitled “Kropotkin and International Relations: Challenging Ontological Narratives”, is an interdisciplinary study that has a three-fold objective: 1) to introduce a variety of evidence/perspectives from evolutionary biology, primatology, anthropology and sociology that point to anchoring our understanding of human ontology to a species-wide perspective (a holist biological ontology); 2) to use this species-wide perspective to understand what political/social theory (specifically IR theory) has gotten wrong with reductionist understandings; 3) and, to posit why, if the species is a single whole, it appears divided and combative with itself.

The direction I have taken to answer the requisites of the third objective has been a direct influence on the way I currently live my life. The impending energy crisis that our species faces due to the inevitable decline of conventional crude oil production will present our species with unprecedented circumstances—a net reduction in energy inflow to all members of our species (as opposed to just the poor, rather than the rich) and an unavoidable crisis of transport and mobility. It is my belief that this reduction in energy inflow will correspond with an increasing trend of decentralization, a direct consequence of entropic decay. The social ramifications already seem most apparent with the worldwide protests spurred on by the failures of a variety of political and economic centralized institutions. The upswing of this net reduction of energy inflow is increased autonomy of communities and individuals as realization spreads that the thermodynamic realities of managing centralized political/economic systems are in direct conflict with the methods used to manage such systems—specifically, the practice of usury and the managed divisions of the rich and poor.

I aim to submit and defend my dissertation by the end of 2013.