Alex Zakaras, associate professor of political science, has won the prestigious 2016 Sanders Prize for Political Philosophy for his paper “Complicity and Coercion: Towards an Ethics of Political Participation.”

Zakaras, whose essay was selected over 45 other entrants, will present the award-winning paper at the 4th Annual Workshop for Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy in Barcelona, Spain in June of 2016. His paper will also be published in the journal Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, which publishes the best contemporary works in political philosophy and closely related subfields such as jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments and war theory.

Zakaras’ essay contains three parts, starting with the development of a causal account of individual complicity in collective injustice. Secondly, based on that account, he argues that citizens are often complicit in their government’s injustices, even when they do nothing more than obey the law, pay taxes, and lead ordinary, private lives.

“Though this claim has become relatively commonplace in the recent theoretical literature on global justice, it is seldom justified adequately,” explains Zakaras. “I maintain that citizens can be complicit despite the fact that their participation in collective injustice is typically coerced, and I consider the conditions under which state coercion might exonerate them.”

Thirdly, Zakaras suggests that citizens’ complicity gives rise -- especially in democratic polities -- to an obligation to participate responsibly in politics.