Research Programme
Five interrelated research streams examine the structural vulnerabilities of liberal democracy: the forces corroding it from within, the money reshaping who governs, the borders redefining who belongs, the international architectures that operate beyond democratic reach, and the algorithmic infrastructures through which citizenship itself is being rewritten.
Line of Inquiry
Populism & Cognitive Capacity
Liberal democracy demands the cognitive capacity and emotional fortitude to grasp abstract principles, navigate complex governance, and tolerate the ambiguities of political debate. Most citizens struggle, left confused, alienated and resentful: fertile ground for anti-liberal populism. It thrives not because it deceives but because it offers a simpler vision, readily understood and easily embraced. The challenge is for democracy to create the citizenry it needs.
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Money, Power & Democratic Legitimacy
Corruption extends far beyond bribery, into the sale of access, policy capture, and political financing, eroding the legitimacy of the very institutions designed to prevent it. When legal mechanisms become instruments of extraction, the line between governance and corruption disappears. A democracy that cannot recognize the corruption embedded in its own structures has already surrendered the integrity it claims to defend.
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Migration, Belonging & Democratic Identity
When millions cross borders, the question of who belongs (who votes, who is protected, who is recognized) ceases to be abstract. Migration never arrives at term: physical barriers give way to administrative, political, and identity borders that redefine not only the displaced but every society they touch. A democracy that cannot account for the people it excludes has never honestly defined the people it claims to represent.
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Citizens, States & the International Order
The international order is the part of democratic life where citizens are most asked to trust, and least asked to decide. The deployment of armed force, the binding of the state by treaty, the prosecution of mass atrocity, the disposition of development assistance and humanitarian aid: each of these decisions touches lives at scales unmatched by domestic politics, yet each unfolds in fora where the citizen is, at most, a distant ratifier and, more often, an absent party. Foreign policy operates as the residual sphere of the executive: the domain where parliamentary scrutiny thins, judicial review recedes, and public deliberation gives way to the quiet language of statecraft. This line of inquiry examines what becomes of democratic citizenship at that threshold: how the constitutional controls developed for domestic life translate, or fail to translate, to the conduct of war, the architecture of treaties, the binding force of international tribunals, and the politics of aid. It studies the gap between the moral claims democracies make abroad and the procedural inattention with which their own publics follow them. And it takes seriously the possibility that the citizen of the international order is not merely uninformed but structurally insulated; that the silence with which we delegate may itself be a form of consent we have not yet properly understood.
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Algorithms, Platforms & Algorithmic Citizenship
The infrastructure of contemporary citizenship has migrated outside democratic reach. The platforms through which citizens speak, the algorithms through which they are sorted, the biometric systems through which they are recognised, and the predictive models through which they are judged are owned by entities that answer to shareholders, not electorates. Decisions once made by accountable institutions are now made by systems whose logic is proprietary, whose authors are anonymous, and whose effects become visible only after they cannot be reversed. A democracy that cannot govern the technical architectures through which its citizens think, speak, and are seen has surrendered the very conditions under which democratic citizenship is possible.
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