J. Matthew Hoye is Associate Professor of Global Justice at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs and Head of the War, Peace, and Justice Research Group. He was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant JustRemit from 2021-26. Matthew teaches across the War and Peace track and convenes graduate electives, most recently Sanctions and (In)Security in the MSc Crisis and Security Management. Matthew is also a member of the Board of Examiners.

More information about Matthew Hoye

J. Matthew Hoye is Associate Professor of Global Justice at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs and Head of the War, Peace, and Justice Research Group. He was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant JustRemit from 2021-26. Matthew teaches across the War and Peace track and convenes graduate electives, most recently Sanctions and (In)Security in the MSc Crisis and Security Management. Matthew is also a member of the Board of Examiners.

Research

His research clusters around three interrelated themes. The first is political theory and the history of ideas, with a sustained focus on leadership, sovereignty, and crisis in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and the broader early-modern republican tradition—Machiavelli, Spinoza, the Radical Enlightenment. His monograph Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes's Leviathan: New Foundations, Statecraft, and Virtue (Open Access) with Amsterdam University Press (2024) reconstructs Hobbesian sovereignty through the categories of statecraft, leadership, new foundations, virtue, and rhetoric. Related work has appeared in The Review of Politics, Hobbes Studies, and the European Journal of Political Theory, among other venues.

A second strand engages migration politics and security, looking back to pre-liberal ways of thinking about migration in the republican tradition alongside contemporary issues such as sanctuary cities. These lines feed into an ongoing project provisionally titled Migration and the Republic from Spinoza to Sanctuary: War, Peace, and Democracy.

A third strand, anchored in JustRemit, takes up remittances, global justice, and security. Remitters send upwards of one trillion euros annually, and one billion people participate in the global remittance economy as senders and receivers; remittances are nonetheless marginal to mainstream global-justice and security debates. JustRemit sets out a new analytical and normative framework—organised around the RAVEN architecture of Remittance, Agency, Vulnerability, Entitlements, and Non-domination—and develops it across cases ranging from Somali transnationalism to OFAC sanctions and the post-2021 near-famine in Afghanistan. Recent work includes “OFAC, Famine, and the Sanctioning of Afghanistan: A Catastrophic Policy Success” (New Political Science, 2024) and the forthcoming monograph On Remittances: Ethics, Analysis, and Security. Matthew, along with Daniel Robins, is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Remittances (under contract).

Matthew holds a PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research, where his dissertation, supervised by Nancy Fraser, received the Frieda Wunderlich Memorial Award—the university’s highest academic honour. During his PhD studies, he was a visiting researcher at Queen Mary, University of London, where he worked with Quentin Skinner. He has held two Max Weber fellowships at the European University Institute (in History and Civilization, where he worked with Dirk Moses, then in Social and Political Studies, where he worked with Rainer Bauböck) and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). Before starting at Leiden, Matthew taught at Maastricht University and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He supervises doctoral researchers on remittance ethics, transnationalism, and global justice, and welcomes PhD proposals on any of the themes above.

Matthew's Ph.D. and previous work

Matthew’s Ph.D. is from the New School for Social Research (Politics, honors in Political Theory), where he was supervised by Nancy Fraser. His Ph.D. thesis was awarded The Frieda Wunderlich Memorial Award, the university’s highest academic honor. In 2011, he held the Frank Altschul Fellowship at the New School. In 2012-13 and 2013-14, he was a Max Weber fellow in the departments of History and Civilization, then in Social and Political Studies. In 2017-18, he was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. He has worked at Maastricht University (Philosophy) and Vrije University Amsterdam (Law and Political Science). 

Publications