Dr Torsten Michel

My research areas cover: the politics and ethics of mass violence, the role and nature of trust in international politics and, more broadly, issues in IR (meta-)theory, particularly the role and nature of ontological reflection.

My PhD thesis set out to critique recent accounts dealing with the notion and role of ontology in IR theorising from Alexander Wendt to more recent contributions by critical realists in IR. The main aim of these treatises on ontology is to provide a new perspective for IR theory that is in line with a more general critique of epistemological foundationalism and strict empiricism. Thereby these accounts rely upon an interpretation of scientific realism as it can be found in the Philosophy of Science.

My thesis showed how these approaches to ontology on the one hand overcome epistemological foundationalism but, on the other hand, reaffirm a form of ontological foundationalism through the apodictic positing of ‘intransitive objects’ that exist outside and independent of the human mind. Such an approach, rather than leading to a new and better conception of ontology, reifies the same biases of Cartesian subjectivity, the designative nature of language, a correspondence theory of truth and the problem-laden concept of freedom as it was conceived in Kant’s third antinomy. In response to these approaches whose general aim at reconceptualising ontology must be welcomed, the thesis develops a new approach that does not recreate the same problems in a different fashion but tries to overcome them through a reconceptualisation of the term ontology itself. The basis for the thesis is to be found in post-Husserlian phenomenology, a body of literature that has so far been widely ignored in IR theorising. By explicating the main tenets in the thought of such eminent philosophers as Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur the thesis reconstructs the notion of ontology on the basis of an enquiry into the meaning of being in general and human being in particular. From this perspective a new approach to the notions of agency, language, truth and freedom becomes possible without recreating the rifts and foundationalisms that characterises many approaches to social and political relations. 

These broader reflections have also contributed to a number of publications in related debates such as the rise of quantum science in IR, the challenge of translation and the competing rhetorical strategies in different forms of inquiry.

More recently I have focussed on the role and nature of trust in international politics. This research engaged with the growing literature on the subject of trust in international politics by pointing out remaining problems and contradictions in recent critiques against the rationalist mainstream. Although these critiques raise important shortcomings in much of the literature on trust, I argue that despite their more nuanced appreciation of trust, this critical scholarship does not quite succeed in either leaving the rationalist conceptions behind or in achieving a more substantial account of the concept of trust. In order to achieve a more thorough and fundamental critique, we must, on the one hand, challenge the remaining methodological framework in which trust scholarship is couched and, on the other hand, acknoweldge the central emotive element in acts of trust. Both of these aims can be brought into focus when trust is approached through a phronetic lens which offers a path to a richer and thicker study of the phenomenon of trust in international politics. 

My current research focusses on the nature, role and function of dehumanisation in instances of mass violence. Two elelemts are of particular concern:

1. Dehumanization is one of the most invoked factors in analyses of mass atrocities with many scholars focussing on its crucial role in enabling perpetrators to inflict violence on their victims. However, while its application is widespread, its relevance is often assumed a priori, with claims regarding its empirical relevance often asserted rather than argued for. Not only does its meaning, nature, and function remain amorphous, current scholarship also lacks a general conceptualization of the basic features that bind the manifold appearances of dehumanization together. To address this paucity of sustained reflection and particularly the lack of conceptual clarity I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to deliver a more thorough-going appraisal of the nature of dehumanization as a fundamental violation of plurality to conceptually consolidate and ground its meaning and bind together its diverse manifestations across cases of mass violence.

2. Within the literature on dehumanization, one of the most long-standing, prominent and widely accepted conceptions sees the loss of moral status as a key constitutive component of processes of dehumanization, suggesting that the victims’ exclusion from the moral universe of obligation breaks down moral barriers, enabling forms of persecution outside the established practices of violence among human communities. At a closer look, however, at the paradigmatic case of the Holocaust (among others such as the genocide of teh Herero and Nama and Rwanda), calls into question this so far unquestioned equation of a loss of moral standing with dehumanization. Given the empirical evidence, what is needed is a much more nuanced differentiation between dehumanization and the moral framework of perpetrators (particularly a more careful treatment of moral universalism vs moral particularism), a clearer and more reflective engegament with normative vs analytical uses of dehumanization, the need for more detailed reflections on its empirical appearances and relevance, and a more critical engagement with its conceptual grounding. This research will help to develop a more coherent understanding of dehumanization, illuminate the notion of 'human' in the normative frameworks perpetrators and address contentions surrounding the need for dehumanziation to occur for mass violence to commence.