SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, 2008-10

Corneliu Bjola is interested in questions involving ethical dimensions of global governance. His most recent book, Legitimising the Use of Force in International Politics: Kosovo, Iraq and the Ethics of Intervention (Routledge 2009) examines the conditions under which the decision to use force can be reckoned as legitimate in international relations. Drawing on communicative action theory, the book provides a provocative answer to the hotly contested question of how to understand the legitimacy of the use of force in international politics. His next book – co-edited with Dr. Markus Kornprobst- is entitled The Deontology of Global Governance: Agency, Lifeworld and Shared Reasoning (Routledge 2010). The book introduces the concept of argumentative deontology to explain how actors learn to assign functional significance to their interactions and how to identify themselves as global agents. Building on his previous research, Bjola’s postdoctoral research project, The Deontology of Structural Change: Material vs. Symbolic Integration, develops a deontological theory for understanding how particular combinations of systemic properties make legitimate change possible in world politics.

Bjola received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, M.Phil. in International Relations from Central European University and M.A. in European Studies from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He taught at McMaster University and University of Toronto.