Professor Jonathan Havercroft

IASH-SSPS Research Fellow
Prof. Jonathan Havercroft

Professor Jonathan Havercroft

IASH-SSPS Research Fellow, October 2023 - January 2024

Home Institution: University of Southampton

Jonathan Havercroft is Professor of International Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. He is the author of the books Captives of Sovereignty (CUP, 2011) and Stanley Cavell’s Democratic Perfectionism (CUP, 2023). His essay “Why is there no just riot theory?” won the 2020 Brian Barry prize for best essay in political science. He has held fellowships from the British Academy, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He is the primary investigator (PI) on the 2023 British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Grant: “The Policing Protest Project: An Analysis of Public Assembly Rights and Anti-Riot Technology in the U.K., U.S.A., and Brazil”. His peer reviewed articles have appeared in such journals as the British Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, International Studies Quarterly and Constellations. He is the editor of the interdisciplinary journal Global Constitutionalism.

Project Title: Just and Unjust Riots: A Normative Analysis of Militant Protest

Despite excellent work in political theory on the normativity of violence and a vast literature on the causes and consequences of riots, there is very little scholarship that asks when and under what conditions might rioting be justified? My project addresses this gap by analyzing recent high-profile riots in Europe and North America. Political leaders and media commentators often condemn riots because they are a criminal form of political protest. However, recent riots in Hong Kong in 2019, at the G20 meeting in Germany in 2017, in the U.S. in 2020, and in England in 2011 against perceived social injustices raise the question: can rioting can be a legitimate political tactic? My book investigates how political rioting might be justified under a limited set of conditions: when a politically marginalized group is resisting an unjust form of oppression and means of ending this oppression through ordinary parliamentary means is systematically blocked by a hegemonic elite. To explain what these conditions are, I develop eleven criteria for assessing the legitimacy of political rioting, I then apply these criteria to recent historical examples of rioting in Europe and North America that raise difficult normative dilemmas. The book then considers three common forms of violence withing rioting: property destruction, looting, and interpersonal violence, and considers under what circumstances each of these forms of violence might be permissible.