Hannah Arendt is one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work continues to attract widespread attention today. She is best known for challenging the conventional view of politics as domination and for envisioning politics instead as a form of freedom created when people act together. Yet despite the enormous interest in her thought, relatively little attention has been paid to what she can teach us about peace. Existing scholarship has focused largely on her account of political action and on how it can help us question peace when it becomes a source of domination.

Arendtian Peace argues that Arendt offers a distinctive and surprisingly rich way of thinking about peace. At its center is her idea of “worldliness,” which she considers a crucial attitude for citizens confronting the demands of both change and continuity in free politics. Drawing on this idea, I show how Arendt helps us understand peace neither as the mere absence of conflict nor as a never-ending moment of resistance. Rather, peace should be a world-building activity through which people create and sustain common institutions that allow them to contest each other, introduce new ideas, and participate in public life. My book offers a full-scale analysis of Arendt’s thinking about peace, addressing the vision and means of peace, the relationship between the global and the local in peacebuilding, the legacies of colonialism, and the limits of secularism in peace theory and practice.

By revealing the richness, nuance, and complexity that Arendt brings to the study of peace, Arendtian Peace develops a vision that helps us engage with an imperfect world while remaining alert to the dangers of both presumptuous and nihilistic approaches to peace.

My next book project, provisionally titled Friends and Enemies under God, engages with contested issues in political theology by comparing the ideas of legal theorist Schmitt, anti-Nazi theologian Bonhoeffer, and political theorist Arendt. Inspired by Arendt’s discussion of three ways of dealing with otherness––namely, being-against-others, being-for-others, and being-with-others––the study considers Schmitt’s ambiguous reliance on theology in constructing a limited or political form of enmity, Bonhoeffer’s reformulation of the ideas of divine grace and the human will to engage in neighborly love and forgiveness, and Arendt’s “pagan” value of worldliness. Through the analysis, this project aims to articulate a sensible form of political subjectivity informed by the dangers and benefits that religion brings to democracy and peacebuilding. Part of this research appeared in the Journal of Religious Ethics, in which I analyzed Arendt’s and Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on forgiveness. I have also developed a paper from this project that highlights religion’s dual role in an era of misinformation, investigating a way for religion to be a conscientious voice in politics yet eschew becoming a tyrannical force itself. This work has been published in The Review of Politics.

I have also been developing three articles on the implications of Arendt’s thought for East Asian politics. One project analyzes the contrasting perspectives of Arendt and Schmitt on Mao and his nationalism, which I plan to expand into a broader analysis of politics, resistance, freedom, and decolonization. Another paper explores the reception of Arendt’s thought in Japan and Korea and its implications for postwar reconciliation and regional relations. A third project traces the historical development of Arendt’s influence among Korean scholars and practitioners, with particular attention to the shifting image of Korea in global politics. Based on these projects—and in collaboration with Arendt scholars interested in Asian politics—I plan to prepare an edited volume provisionally titled Arendt in Asia.