My dissertation, The Right to the World: American Democracy and Anti-Imperial Strategy, uses a historically-situated approach to investigate how civil rights activists used domestic institutions strategically to challenge American military and economic primacy. Focusing on the period between the U.S.’s entry into World War I in 1917 and the end of the Civil Rights Movement around 1969, I argue that movements and institutions commonly viewed as pillars of a distinctly American liberal quest for political inclusion – the ACLU, the NAACP, the CIO, and the Civil Rights Movement – were actually rich sites of contestation over the future of American empire. Engaging with civil rights thinkers and activists like Crystal Eastman, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jack O’Dell and placing their political thought in social-historical context, I argue that the architectures of civil rights and liberties institutions were developed in conversation with global critiques of imperialism and strategies of labor internationalism.

This research contributes to the contemporary study of politics in at least two ways. First, it challenges the methodological nationalism that has long enthralled the field of American Political Thought. By recovering the American anti-imperial tradition, I show how movements and ideas characterized as quintessentially American acquire a surprisingly critical valence when examined in an international frame. Second, my research contributes to the realist turn in political theory by revealing strategy and tactics as crucial sites of theoretical productivity. Recent political theories of activism and social movements have tended to focus on interpersonal interactions between organizers; my research dramatically expands the scope of these inquiries to examine the strategies of activists who sought to challenge global political structures.