Alexander Leveringhaus

Overview

Dr Alex Leveringhaus is a Political Theorist who specialises in armed conflict. Working within analytical political philosophy, his work has a strong interest in theories of rights. The main question driving his research is how contemporary theories of rights affect the ethics of armed conflict, and what the experience of armed conflict reveals about ethics, broadly conceived. In particular, his research is centred on the intersection of ethics, emerging technologies and non-state actors in armed conflict. This research enables Alex to work across disciplines, engaging with engineers (on the ethical design of emerging systems), lawyers (on the legal aspects of new technologies) and with International Relations scholars who work on armed conflict. 

Biography

In September 2016, Alex began a prestigious three-year Leverhulme Early Careers Fellowship (ECF-2016-643) in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester, where he works closely with Professor James Pattison and participates in the MANCEPT research group. Titled ‘The Politics of Rescue Revisited: Non-state actors, drones, and intervention’, the Leverhulme project explores the ethical implications of new technologies (notably drones) and hostile non-state actors (especially Daesh/ISIS) for humanitarian intervention. The project aims to speak not just to Political Theory but to International Relations as a whole, in particular by contributing to normative discussions on R2P.

Prior to his current appointment at Manchester, from 2012 to 2015, Alex was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) within the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, and a James Martin Fellow within the Oxford Martin School. His three year fellowship at Oxford explored the normative implications of remote-controlled and autonomous weapons technologies. This was part of a larger international research grant (NWO 313-99-260) run by TU Delft (NL) and the University of Oxford. Key research outputs from Alex’s research at Oxford include Ethics and Autonomous Weapons, published by Palgrave in 2016 and ‘What’s so bad about killer robots?’ published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, also in 2016. In 2014, he was the lead author of a policy report on robotic weapons for the Oxford Martin Policy Paper Series.  During the last two years of his fellowship at Oxford, Alex was also awarded a British Academy Small Grant (SG 130373) to explore the ethical implications of cyber technologies and bio-enhancement in the military. Prior to Oxford, he was appointed a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Justitia Amplificata’ Goethe University in Frankfurt, from 2011-12.

Alex completed his PhD on a liberal and non-consequentialist perspective on military humanitarian intervention at the London School of Economics and Political Science under the supervision of Professors Cecile Fabre and Paul Kelly. During the last two years of his PhD, Alex was appointed a full-time LSE Teaching Fellow in Political Theory (2008 to 2011) for the Department of Government, during which he won a teaching prize.