Murad Idris

Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He has wide-ranging interests in political theory and the history of political thought, including war and peace, language and politics, empire and postcolonialism, political theology and secularism, comparative political theory, and Arabic and Islamic political thought. Idris’s first book, "War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought" (Oxford University Press, 2018) examines idealizations of “peace” across canonical works of ancient and modern political thought, from Plato to Immanuel Kant and Sayyid Qutb. Idris argues that the dominant, moralized ideal of peace sanitizes violence, reinscribes global hierarchy, and facilitates hostility. He has published articles on Erasmus’s political theology in Theory & Event, Ibn Tufayl’s twelfth-century allegory in European Journal of Political Theory and Journal of Islamic Philosophy, and the politics of comparison in comparative political theory in Political Theory, as well as a number of chapters in edited volumes. Idris is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, with Leigh K. Jenco and Megan C. Thomas.