A short article I published in Anthropology News in May 2010, looking at some of the contradictions inherent in approaching a political process quantitatively.

A working paper for Small Arms Survey, published in June 2011, looking at the historical roots of the conflict in Abyei, and focusing on the attacks of January-May 2011.

Written in 2008 while at the University of California, Berkeley, this essay examines Weber's classic work Science as a vocation. The reading I give here, however, is far far away from the conventional one.

This is the text of a presentation I gave at the 4S Conference in Washington in 2009. It looks at some of the recent developments in piracy law through the lens of a genealogy of the pirate in political and legal theory.

Yet another proof in the argument that contemporary philosophers should not write dialogues, this essay is a conversation about Wittgenstein, which takes place between two rather sceptical observers watching Kasparov play chess against Deep Blue. Written in Berkeley in 2009.

This is my Masters thesis, written while at the University of Amsterdam, from which I graduated cum laude with an Mres in Cultural Analysis. The thesis looks at the ethics of Islamism, and focuses on a translation of Sayyid Qutb from English into Swahili that took place in Dar es Salaam in 2005.

In theory a review of Archive Fever, an exhibition that occurred at the International Centre of Photography, New York in 2008, in reality this essay --- written in Amsterdam in 2008 --- in an exploration of repetition and memory that fails to do its job, and be a good and obedient review.

Every graduate student in the humanities worthy of the name has written a bad essay on Walter Benjamin. I have written several. This essay, which explores an aphorism of René Char, is the best of a bad bunch. Written in Berkeley in 2009.

An essay from 2009, while I was at Berkeley, on that difficult little word, "state". It is a close reading of Rousseau's essay L'Etat de guerre.

This long essay from 2008 analyses the place of the political party in the thought of Alain Badiou, and uses this development to retrospectively assess the history of the idea of the party in Marxist thought.

A paper given at the Wall Conference at Birbeck College in London, in 2007. It analyses the seemingly contradictory responses to illegal immigration by a state that wants to incorporate illegal immigrants within the economy, and yet expends many breaths emphasizing the extent to which the state wants to expel them.

A 2008 essay from my days in Amsterdam which analyses the place of gesture in the stock market. Or as the essay says..."At the centre of capitalism, there is a flurry of arms. How we understand these gestures is the central problematic of this essay."

An essay from my Berkeley days, written in 2009, which compares the original debate on Enlightenment that occurred in the Berlinische Monatschrift in the 1780s, with a rather more impoverished and defensive debate that ran at perlentaucher.de in 2007.