Jessica Whyte is a Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia, with a cross-appointment in the Faculty of Law. Her work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism. She has a particular interest in the political stakes of mobilizing the category of the human, and in the way claims to protect humanity are bound up with rationalizations for abandoning certain lives and for state-sanctioned killing.  She has published widely on human rights, humanitarianism, and neoliberalism, and on contemporary European philosophy (especially Agamben and Foucault.)

She is the author of two published monographs, Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY, 2012), and, most recently, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019). The latter book draws on archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism to uncover the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. It shows that, in the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilization”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects. The book argues that this neoliberal conception of human rights was far more influential for the contemporary politics of human rights than has often been recognized. 

Jessica’s work has been published in a range of fora including Contemporary Political Theory; Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Law and Critique; Political Theory; South Atlantic Quarterly, and Theory and Event. She is an editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development.

Her current research focuses on the development of techniques of economic warfare after the Cold War.  More of her research is available here: https://unsw.academia.edu/JessicaWhyte