Burke Hendrix’s research and teaching focus on normative political theory, indigenous politics, global justice, and the history of political thought. He is especially interested in theories of political authority, state territoriality, historical injustice, and the ethics of political action.  Current research evaluates normative questions surrounding the land rights, sovereignty, and political choices of indigenous peoples within the United States, Canada, and other countries.  He is the author of two books, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims (2008) and Strategies of Justice: Aboriginal Peoples, Persistent Injustice, and the Ethics of Political Action (2019), as well as articles on related topics, and is currently completing a book on non-ideal theory and indigenous politics.  He also has interests in just war theory, and has taught courses on this topic along with the Enlightenment, global ethics, liberalism, conservatism, and basic normative methodologies. He has additional teaching interests in comparative political thought, especially that of classical Chinese and Indian thinkers including the legalist philosophies of Han Fei and Kautilya. 

He recently organized conferences on American Indian and First Nations sovereignty in North America (http://blogs.uoregon.edu/alternativesovereignties/) and on the agency of colonized individuals elsewhere in the world (https://blogs.uoregon.edu/colonialism/)

Books:

• Strategies of Justice: Aboriginal Peoples, Persistent Injustice, and the Ethics of Political Action (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims (Penn State University Press, 2008; paperback edition 2012).
• Colonial Exchanges: Political Theory and the Agency of the Colonized, edited with Deborah Baumgold (Manchester University Press, 2017).  If you are considering using this volume in a course, links to many primary sources can be found here.

Selected Articles:

•  “Tocqueville in Jacksonian Context: American Expansionism and Discourses of American Indian Nomadism in Democracy in America," co-authored with Alison McQueen.  Perspectives on Politics 15 (2017).
• “Where Should We Expect Social Change in Nonideal Theory?” Political Theory 41 (1), 2013.
• “Moral Error, Power, and Insult,” Political Theory  35 (5), 2007.
• “Memory in Native American Land Claims,” Political Theory  33 (6), 2005.
• "Political Theorists as Dangerous Social Actors," Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy 15 (2012).
• "Context, Equality, and Aboriginal Compensation Claims," Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 50 (2011).
• "The Political Dangers of Western Philosophical Approaches," in the Oxford Handbook of Indigenous Peoples' Politics, edited by Jose Antonio Lucero, Dale A. Turner, and Donna Lee Van Cott.