David Miles

BIO

David Miles has a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and an MA (Hons) in German with International Relations – also from St Andrews. His research interests encompass political and legal theory, institutions, and identity. He is particularly interested in how political and legal authority, and liberal values, can be sustained across different sub-state and supra-state identities and communities, one of the areas looked at in my recent book. My interest in political theory and law is centred on issues and questions arising at the intersection between domestic and global politics, and on how political communities fragment and cohere domestically and globally in response to particular ethical, practical, and legal challenges. He has taught in the School of International Relations since 2015 and has also taught in The Open University Law School. He is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.

David’s PhD research was funded by a full Carnegie Scholarship from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. His book Democracy, the Courts, and the Liberal State: A Comparative Analysis of American and German Constitutionalism was published by Routledge in October 2020 under the Routledge Innovations in Political Theory series. He is Editor-in-Chief of Global Politics Magazine.

A further research focus of his book is the role of international institutions in supporting liberal democratic institutions within states after World War Two, and the tensions between constitutional courts such as Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court and the EU’s increasingly powerful institutions. His book also assesses the relationship between the development of constitutionalism after 1945 and developments in international law and international institutions (seen in the work of Hersch Lauterpacht and the various conventions on human rights).

RESEARCH ACTIVITIES & OUTPUTS

University research profile