Janosch Prinz

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Maastricht University

Raymond Geuss has been viewed as one of the figureheads of the recent debates about realism in political theory. This interpretation, however, depends on a truncated understanding of his work of the past 30 years. I will offer the first sustained engagement with this work (in English and German) which allows understanding his realism as a project f...

This thesis intervenes into the current debates about realism in political theory. Realism is a new challenge to the liberal mainstream in political theory. However, the extent to which realism, in its heterogeneity, actually has the potential to pose such a challenge, has thus far remained largely unexplored. The thesis offers the first differenti...

This paper outlines an account of political realism as a form of ideology critique. Our focus is a defence of the normative edge of this critical-theoretic project against the common charge that there is a problematic trade-off between a theory’s groundedness in facts about the political status quo and its ability to consistently envisage radical d...

Genealogies are an increasingly important part of contemporary political philosophy. However, even recent genealogies differ a great deal in terms of their ends and methods. Strikingly, this has received virtually no discussion in the literature. This article begins to fill that gap. It does so by comparing and contrasting the genealogies of Bernar...

In Western democracies, people harbor feelings of disgust or hatred for politics. Populists and technocrats even seemingly question the value of politics. Populists cry that they are not politicians and that politics is necessarily corrupt. From the opposite side, technocrats view politics as a pointless constraint on enacting the obviously right p...

We argue that a reinvention of the plebeian tribunate should play a key role in addressing the challenges stemming from increasing concentrations of, and inequalities in, social, political, economic, and cultural power in liberal democracies. Addressing these challenges, which negatively affect parliamentary representation, requires a form of insti...

This paper seeks to show that Bernard Williams’ approach to legitimacy falls short of its aspirations in ways that cast doubt on its fitness for guiding the practice of future realist political theory. More precisely, the paper focuses on the shortcomings of Williams’ realism in establishing a connection to (the practices of) politics, and on how t...

To what extent are questions of sovereign debt a matter for political rather than scientific or moral adjudication? We answer that question by defending three claims. We argue that (i) moral and technocratic takes on sovereign debt tend to be ideological in a pejorative sense of the term, and that therefore (ii) sovereign debt should be politicised...

This paper seeks to show that Bernard Williams’ approach to legitimacy falls short of its aspirations in ways that cast doubt on its fitness for guiding the practice of future realist political theory. More precisely, the paper focuses on the shortcomings of Williams’ realism in establishing a connection to (the practices of) politics, and on how t...

To what extent are questions of sovereign debt a matter for political rather than scientific or moral adjudication? We answer that question by defending three claims. We argue that (i) moral and technocratic takes on sovereign debt tend to be ideological in a pejorative sense of the term, and that therefore (ii) sovereign debt should be politicised...

In this paper, we put forward a realist account of the problem of accommodation of conflicting claims over sacred places. Our argument takes its cue from the empirical finding that modern, Western-style states necessarily mould religion into shapes that are compatible with state rule. At least in the context of modern states, there is no pre-politi...

We investigate how processes of spatialisation through military interventions in the War on Terror challenge the theory and practices of humanitarian aid. To elucidate these challenges, we introduce the concept of spatial-moral ordering. We argue that discourses and practices of ordering people and space in the War on Terror and in certain forms of...

The Practical Turn in Political Theory sounds like the monograph political theorists have been waiting for – a monograph that identifies ‘practices’ as a uniting theme that runs through several recently influential debates on non-ideal theory, practice dependence, realism and pragmatist theories of legitimacy and democracy, and then discusses the p...

We argue that the spatialization of violence in the counterterrorism operations of the War on Terror provides insight for understanding how these operations are legitimized and how they pose a challenge to an international order centered on state sovereignty. Against the background of a discussion of the key markers of statehood and recent normativ...

Carl Schmitt’s work on the political is extensively used as an intellectual point of departure in contemporary academic debates about political contestation. More precisely, Carl Schmitt’s friend versus enemy-distinction is invoked as an essential figuration of political contestation. At the same time, the past few years have seen the attention pai...

The sovereignty triangle-The connection between statehood, the monopoly of violence and territory-Has undergone tremendous changes in the past years. The drone attacks carried out by the US military in the FATA of Pakistan are an exemplary case for both the legitimatory discourse and the new forms of violence; both are tied to space. This article t...

The COIN strategy of the US Military was conceived as a response to the lack of strategy in the intervention in Afghanistan. An analysis of the core elements and a presentation of the major political connections of the intervention suggest that on this basis they cannot provide an answer for the internal contradictions and in addition, that the gui...

Die Intervention in Afghanistan steht besonders seit dem spürbaren Wiedererstarken der Taliban im Sommer 2006 im Fokus der internationalen Öffentlichkeit. Nach den schwerwiegenden Versäumnissen und Fehlern zu Beginn der Intervention (seit Oktober 2001), die durch die Kombination von mangelnder Durchdringung des Landes und zu geringer Unterstützung...

Die Zukunft Afghanistans scheint derzeit von der Entwicklung der internatio-nalen Intervention abzuhängen. So wird das Schicksal Afghanistans auf die Frage reduziert, ob das Land eine " Intervention ohne Ende " erleben wird oder aber ab 2014 sich selbst überlassen werden soll. Das Friedensgutachten 2010 legte vor dem Hintergrund der Intensivierung...