Hello! I’m a Fellow (Senior Lecturer) in the Department of International Relations, at Australian National University. I hold a PhD in political science (international relations and political theory) from the University of Toronto, and was a 2015-17 postdoc at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. I work on the history of international thought and the history of international order.
Much of my research focuses on the social and cultural aspects of international hierarchies—how they are conceptualized, legitimized, enforced, and resisted. My book, The Counterinsurgent Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2023), is a long-run intellectual history of counterrevolutionary war, from the seventeenth century to the present. It examines military manuals, in their historical context, as political projects for the production of conservative, high modern utopias. Much of my other work, broadly in IR theory, concerns the role of legitimation strategies in shaping international hierarchies, with a historical emphasis on Inner and East Asia. In the history of international thought, I have published on Hegel, Hobbes, and the American IR theorist Kenneth Waltz. My current book project focuses on the history of reactionary international thought, in the West, since the French Revolution.
My work has appeared in International Studies Quarterly (again, again), the Review of International Studies, International Theory, the Journal of Global Security Studies, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Social Science History, and Central Asian Survey, as well as with co-authors in the European Journal of International Relations, the Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, the Review of International Studies, International Theory, International Studies Review, the European Journal of International Security, and elsewhere.
You can download my CV here.
You can find me on Bluesky, Twitter, Google Scholar, and Academia.edu.
You can reach me at joseph.mackay[at]anu[dot]edu[dot]au.