Lucia M. Rafanelli

The global political arena is diverse and dynamic, alive with multitudes of state and non-state actors striving to influence each other with every tool at their disposal. We need a political theory of global politics to help us navigate this arena in all its complexity. And this requires moving beyond the field’s traditional focus on states engaging in global politics by waging wars or employing other conventional tools of coercive foreign policy. Professor Rafanelli’s book, Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention (Oxford University Press, 2021), takes on this task. It addresses topics such as toleration, legitimacy, collective self-determination, and the perils of activism in a non-ideal world to develop an ethics of foreign political influence well-suited to our geopolitical moment.

Professor Rafanelli is currently working on a second book project about the ethics of resistance, focusing on transnational resistance movements. This project explores the proper role of resistance in democracy while challenging the common assumption that democratic politics must occur within the nation-state. It also examines the ethics of resistance among communities who are routinely subject to the power of the state system but routinely excluded from exercising power within that system–e.g., Indigenous, undocumented, and stateless people–and leverages that examination to investigate the (il)legitimacy of the state system.

PSC 2991 - Obligation, Obedience, and Power

PSC 2991 - Global Justice

IAFF 6118 - The Ethics of Foreign Aid

IAFF6118 - Global Justice

Books

• Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• “The Spectre of Statelessness,” International Theory 17, 2 (2025): 238-67, doi: 10.1017/S175297192500003X
• “Not Just War by Other Means: Cross-Border Engagement as Political Struggle,” Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 31, 4 (2024): 661-77, doi: 10.1111/1467-8675.12719
• “Justice, Injustice, and Artificial Intelligence: Lessons from Political Theory and Philosophy (Commentary),” Big Data and Society 9, 1 (2022): 1-5, doi: 10.1177/20539517221080676
• “Promoting Justice Across Borders,” Political Studies 69, 2 (2021): 237-56, doi: 10.1177/0032321719875402
• “A Defense of Individualism in the Age of Corporate Rights,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 25, 3 (2017): 281-302, doi: 10.1111/jopp.12112

Invited Contributions & Book Reviews

• “Political Obligations Toward NGOs,” forthcoming in George Klosko ed., The Oxford Handbook of Political Obligation
• “Moral Judgment, Self-Determination, and Toleration: Reflecting on Reform Intervention at the Outer Limits,” European Journal of Political Theory 24, 3 (2025): 471-80, doi: 10.1177/14748851241282856 
• Review of Josh Simons, Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), Critical AI 2, 1 (2024), doi: 10.1215/2834703X-11205259 
• “Political Craft as Moral Innovation,” Philosophy and Global Affairs 4, 1 (2024): 189-94, doi: 10.5840/pga2024416 
• “Citizen Responsibility and Group Agency,” European Journal of Political Theory 23, 2 (2024): 267-76, doi: 10.1177/14748851221105946 
• “Reflections on Reform Intervention: A Reply to Critics,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (2023), doi: 10.1080/13698230.2023.2295760 
• “Toleration and Political Change,” in Mitja Sardoč ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Toleration (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021): 173-87, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-03227-2_57-1 
• “Toward an Individualist Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48, 3 (2020): 360-71, doi: 10.1177/0305829820935520 
• Review of C.A.J. Coady, Ned Dobos, and Sagar Sanyal eds., Challenges for Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical Demand & Political Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Journal of Moral Philosophy 17, 2 (2020): 229-32, doi: 10.1163/17455243-01702005

Ph.D., Princeton University, 2018

M.A., Princeton University, 2015

B.A., Cornell University, 2013

CV (PDF)