State, Security, and Subject Formation

This book offers a unique collection of texts framed as a set of conversations on the topics of state, security and subject formation. These conversations are motivated by a question that defines agendas for both politics and political thought: how to secure the conditions for a civil and peaceful life together? The contributions to this book explore, at time sceptically, the approach of civil philosophy to that question. This approach suggests an education m civility as well as a public sphere that promotes everyday practices of civility. It also posits the right of the subject to enjoy full and inclusive access to the conditions of peaceful co-existence. A secular state that functions as a public authority and uses its sovereignty to establish the rule of law is the primary condition for subjective right.

Senior Canada Research Chair in the Department of Political Science, University of Alberta. Foundation director and professor of the Whitlam Institute Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney. Magdalena Zolkos is Researcher in Political Theory at the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy. She is a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Political Theory Colloquium at the University of Alberta.