Political Science Faculty and Staff
Scott G. Nelson
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2002
Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2002
Scott Nelson began teaching in the department in 1998. His research interests include international relations theory and political theory, international law and organization, and international political economy. He teaches in these areas at the undergraduate level and also in the department's MA and OLMA programs. Dr. Nelson is currently working on a book entitled "Sovereignty and the Limits of the Liberal Imagination." The manuscript examines and critiques several of the classical theoretical foundations of domestic and international organization, concentrating on the contestable conceptions of community, order, justice, freedom, responsibility and wealth developed by the major political theorists of the modern epoch. The book is designed to accomplish two main tasks. First, it is a study in the major liberal and enlightenment theories of the modern tradition and is intended to provide students of international relations with a basic grounding in the classic political theories of modernity. Second, it is a critical study that interrogates how political theories are invoked by the traditions of international relations across the modern epoch. The critical thrust of the argument is that the accepted discourses of world politics are constructed by way of particular interpretive negotiations of what sovereign power is and what it must be made to accomplish in domestic and world politics. As theorists have sought to legitimize and rationalize state power - the essence of sovereignty - a practice of concealing these legitimations and rationalizations must also be deployed to accommodate the very groundless basis for securing any claim to 'legitimate' political authority: the tradition of political liberalism is one such practice. More than a 'tradition,' political liberalism is a manner of self-activating strategies of concealing sovereignty's intrinsically paradoxical, broken origins. An article of Dr. Nelson's which elaborates these themes, entitled "Sovereignty, Ethics, Community," was published in the journal Philosophy and Social Criticism (November 2004). Dr. Nelson is also at work on several article-length manuscripts about language and representation. A forthcoming article that touches on these concerns, entitled "Kant, Foucault, and the 'Problem of Globalization,'" will be published in Alternatives (2006).
Email: Scott Nelson