Anna Jurkevics (PhD Yale, 2017) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. Her research is in the fields of critical theory, democratic theory, and the history of German political thought. In her work, she investigates themes related to territory, land, and migration. She also specializes in the political thought of Hannah Arendt.

Her first book, “Contested Territory: A Theory of Land and Democracy Beyond Sovereign Bounds” (Oxford University Press, 2025) presents a critical, non-sovereign theory of territorial rights capable of responding to border-defying global crises such as land theft, mass migration, and environmental depredation. Contested Territory reconciles non-sovereign territorial regimes, which involve contested and overlapping rule, with the demands of democracy in the global age.

For more information, visit her personal website here.

Articles

“Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty.” Political Theory, 2021. Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00905917211008591

“Democracy in Contested Territory: On the Legitimacy of Global Legal Pluralism.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2019. Online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13698230.2019.1644584

“Hannah Arendt reads Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth: a dialogue on law and geopolitics from the margins.” European Journal of Political Theory 2017, 16 (13), pp. 345-366. Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1474885115572837

In translation: “Hannah Arendt liest Carl Schmitts Der Nomos der Erde: Ein Dialog über Gesetz und Geopolitik anhand ihrer Marginalien,” HannahArendt.net Zeitschrift für politisches Denken, Ausgabe 1, Band 8 (April 2016). Online at http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/342

Jurkevics, Anna. “Hannah Arendt Encounters Friedrich von Gentz: On Revolution, Preservation, and European Unity.” Modern Intellectual History 19, no. 4 (2022): 1134–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244321000536

Chapters

Anna Jurkevics and Seyla Benhabib, “Critical International Political Theory,” Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory, eds. Chris Brown and Robyn Eckersley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 74-86.

“Seyla Benhabib,” Habermas Lexicon, eds. Amy Allen and Eduardo Mendieta, Cambridge University Press, pp. 492-494.

Reviews and Critical Exchanges

Critical exchange with Annie Stilz, “Crises in Territorial Sovereignty: Critical Exchange on Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration,” Political Theory, forthcoming. Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00905917211000288?journalCode=ptxa.

Review of Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration, by Anna Stilz in Political Theory, forthcoming. Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0090591720943507

Review of Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants, by Ayten Gundogdu in Political Theory 2018 46(2), pp. 303-307. Online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0090591716688267

Books

Contested Territory: A Theory of Land and Democracy Beyond Sovereign Bounds (Oxford University Press, 2025). Online at https://academic.oup.com/book/59797

Co-edited Books

Another Universalism: Seyla Benhabib and the Future of Critical Theory, eds Stefan Eich, Anna Jurkevics, Nishin Nithwani, and Nica Siegel (Columbia University Press, 2023) Online at https://cup.columbia.edu/book/another-universalism/9780231212793/