糖心原创

Congratulations to the School of Politics and International Relation's doctoral researcher Charlie Bradley on recently passing his viva. 

His thesis, ‘Property and War as Constitutional Strategies in the Political Thought of Hugo Grotius’, reconstructs Grotius’s theory of constitutional government by focusing on the concepts of property and war. On property, he argues that the supreme power becomes a piece of property given Grotius’s employment of the Roman law concept of usufruct, which initiates a constitutional relationship between the supreme powers’ two subjects, the common and proper, or the state and the ruler. On war, he suggests that Grotius develops a theory of war instead of resistance because it follows the legal relationship set out in the property matrix, in short, war rests on solid legal grounds whereas resistance is ‘promiscuous’ for Grotius.

Charlie’s thesis was examined by Dr Sean Fleming and . His PhD was supervised by Dr Ben Holland and Dr Adam Lindsay.