Peter Stirk
Associate Professor
School of Government and International Affairs
Durham University
United Kingdom
Biography
Peter is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for the History of Political Thought. He has held appointments at York, Teeside and Sunderland and was Leverhulme Research Fellow at Hull (1986-9). Dr Stirk is currently working on a history of military occupations. This builds on his Politics of Military Occupation and is related to a second project on the state as a community of liability (intended for publication of a co-edited book on the The Concept of the State in International Relations). The history of military occupation will be a multivolume project which seeks to provide a comprehensive, analytically informed history of military occupation from their origins as a conceptually distinct political phenomenon in the eighteenth century through to today's occupations. The project seeks to address such questions as: how is military occupation defined?; when and why did political leaders, military officers and occupied populations come to think of military occupation as a distinctive form with its own rules and laws?; what forms of government have military occupiers developed; what has been the relationship between the armed forces of the occupying power(s) and the civilian agencies which have often formed part of the occupation administration?; do occupied populations have a duty of obedience to occupying forces?; what has happened to justice under military occupation?; does the concept of sovereignty have any meaning under military occupation?; has military occupation changed in any fundamental way?; are cases of 'international territorial administration' in fact disguised military occupations? All of these questions have troubled those involved in military occupation. The project seeks to bring together these question and the implications of the way they have been answered in a historical synthesis of a topic that has been unduly neglected by political scientists.
Research Interest
The Politics of Military Occupation, Political Thought and International Relations, German Political Thought.
Publications
-
Stirk, P.M.R. (2009). ‘Et l’ère de l’État touché sa fin: Carl Schmitt et la conceptualisation du changement d’époque historique en relations internationales’. Études Internationales 40(1): 37-54.
-
Stirk, Peter M.R. (2012). 'The Westphalian model and sovereign equality'. Review of International Studies 38(3): 641-660
-
Stirk, P.M.R. (2015). 'The Concept of Military Occupation in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars'. Comparative Legal History 3(1): 60-84.
