J. Matthew Hoye is Associate Professor of Global Justice at ISGA and head of the War, Peace, and Justice Research Group. He is also the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant JustRemit, a member of ISGA’s board of examiners, and a teacher.

More information about Matthew Hoye

J. Matthew Hoye is Associate Professor of Global Justice at ISGA and head of the War, Peace, and Justice Research Group. He is also the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Starting Grant JustRemit, a member of ISGA’s board of examiners, and a teacher. 

Research

Matthew’s research interests are diverse, clustering around three themes. One theme is political theory and the history of ideas, with a focus on the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. That research includes studies into war, peace, justice, security, obligation, law, rhetoric, resistance, urban politics, and new foundations. This research has been published in various leading journals. Most recently, Matthew published Sovereignty as a Vocation in Hobbes’s Leviathan: New foundations, statecraft, and virtue (2024) with Amsterdam University Press. 

Matthew is also interested in migration politics and security. Parts of this research look back to pre-liberal ways of thinking about migration found in the republican tradition, particularly Machiavelli, Spinoza, Althusius, the Radical Enlightenment, and the early-modern republican revolutionary period. Matthew also works on contemporary issues in migration politics, including on topics such as sanctuary cities. These various lines of research are the basis for an ongoing research project into the democratic-republican critique of migration, tentatively titled Migration and the Republic from Spinoza to Sanctuary: War, Peace, and Democracy.

Lastly, as the PI of JustRemit, Matthew leads a research group of two PhDs and a Postdoc in the study of remittances and global justice. Remitters send upwards of €1 trillion annually to their families back home. One billion people participate in the global remittance economy as senders and receivers. That money is elementally important for the well-being of receivers. Yet remittances are marginal concerns in the global justice debates. JustRemit begins by considering why existing liberal critiques—from open and aspirational cosmopolitanism to closed and protective statism—generate strikingly shallow analyses of the phenomenon and are normatively inapt. It then aims to set out a new approach to thinking about remittances and justice in a way that is analytically powerful and normatively useful. As such, remittances demand that we rethink notions of agency, institutions, transnational entitlements, duties, and strategy. Please see the JustRemit project webpage for more details.

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