The History and Implications of Secularisation for International Law
Mark Somos studied History (BA) and Political Thought and Intellectual History (MPhil) in Cambridge, Government and Social Policy (AM) and Political Science (PhD) at Harvard, and International Security and Law (LLM) at Sussex. Skeptical of the strict separation of theory from practice, Somos has been lucky to be able to combine political consultancy with academia for over twenty years. He established and ran a Political Risk Forecasting Division in Budapest, and served as Managing Director to a consultancy firm in London. Somos published extensively on international law, secularization, migration, political ethics and civil society, and has taught courses at Harvard and Sussex on subjects ranging from American political thought through the Crusades to the history of democracy and human rights. He has given over 50 academic presentations around the world. Somos's peer-reviewed publications include essays on Augustine, Machiavelli, Grotius, Heinsius, Hobbes, Harrington, Alexander Hamilton and H.G. Wells. His first book, Secularisation and the Leiden Circle, was published by Brill in 2011.
The History and Implications of Secularisation for International Law
During his Rechtskulturen fellowship, he will research aspects of secularization and soft imperialism in seventeenth-century English ideology, especially the preconditions and implications of the geographical and cross-cultural translation of legal and political thoughts. Somos will also prepare and present free-standing conference papers on individualism (Rotterdam), the Machiavellian theory of labor (Rome), citizenship (Athens), Grotius's De veritate (Potsdam), eighteenth-century moral economy (Potsdam), Winstanley and Hobbes (London), and Fénelonian novels (Berlin).
