The work of John R. Emery, Ph.D. (Political Science) broadly examines ethics of war and peace and technological innovation in International Relations. He is the recipient of the 2019-2020 Tobis Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality at the University of California, Irvine. He teaches as a lecturer of National Security (M.A.), Technology and the Ethics of War (M.A.), Vietnam: War, Peace, and Legacy (B.A.) at Chapman University and Theories of International Relations (B.A.) at Pepperdine University. His area of study is at the intersection of International Relations, critical security studies, ethics of war and peace, intellectual history, and technology, law & society. Previous publications have centered on U.S. drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, creating a hybrid ethical framework between the law enforcement and just war paradigms for evaluating targeted killings outside of declared war zones. Additionally, he has focused on the adoption of drone technology by humanitarian organizations like MSF and UN Peacekeeping missions, analyzing and problematizing the emerging category of humanitarian drones. His work on war, drones, ethics, and counter-terrorism has been published in Peace Review and Ethics & International Affairs. His work on collateral damage estimation algorithms, metadata assassinations, and ethics of due care in war is currently forthcoming in the journal Critical Military Studies. Building upon previous research in just war thinking and critical security studies current projects are concerned with the way in which technology is seen as the solution for making war an inherently more ethical space, proffering how the renaissance humanist tradition in political thought can help us to answer the difficult questions of the ethics of war and peace in the era of Big Data, AI, and Machine Learning. Other areas of interest include: constructivist International Relations, U.S. foreign policy, the temporality of the U.S. "War on Terror," international law, morality, terrorism/counter-terrorism, and the preventive use of force short of war.
Contact: jremery@uci.edu
Contact: jremery@uci.edu