Professor Catherine Lu

McGill University, Montréal, Canada  (25th of May- 10th of August 2014)

Research topic

“Justice and Reconciliation after War”

Project outline

This book project focuses on problems of justice and reconciliation in the context of interstate wars, civil wars, the ‘global war on terror’, and wars of colonialism and empire. The book integrates arguments and findings from moral, legal, and political philosophy, moral psychology, history and empirical social science. It examines questions of justice related to accountability and responsibility in such contexts, for individual and corporate wrongdoing, as well as for individual and corporate contributions to structural injustice and collective harms. The book also examines questions about the relationship between various demands of justice and the search for reconciliation after war. (Catherine Lu)

Scholarly profile

Catherine Lu is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She received her Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Toronto. She is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow (2010-11, renewal 2014).

Main areas of research

International political theory and ethics; cosmopolitanism and its critics; global justice and historical injustice; the ethics of war and humanitarian intervention; reconciliation after violence, oppression and atrocity.

Selected publications:

1. Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006/2011.
2. »Colonialism as Structural Injustice: Historical Responsibility and Contemporary Redress«, in: The Journal of Political Philosophy 19, 3 (September 2011), pp. 261-281.
3. »Shame, Guilt and Reconciliation After War«, in: The European Journal of Social Theory 11, 3 (August 2008), pp. 367-383.