Ana Tanasoca

Dr. Ana Tanasoca is an analytic, normative political theorist. Her research focuses largely (but not exclusively) on international political theory and democracy theory, broadly construed. She most recently became interested in the ethics and politics of heritage. 

Ana took her PhD for a thesis on the Ethics of Multiple Citizenship, subsequently published by Cambridge University Press (2018). She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance, at the University of Canberra. There she worked with John S. Dryzek on a project examining the decision process leading up to UN’s Sustainable Development Goals from the joint perspective of global justice and deliberative democracy. Dryzek and Tanasoca coauthored a book growing out of this project entitled Democratizing Global Justice (CUP, 2021). Ana’s interest in democratic theory also led to a separate, independent research project on scaling up deliberative democracy, culminating in the publication of Deliberation Naturalized: Improving Real Existing Deliberative Democracy (OUP, 2020). She held research positions in the Philosophy Department at Macquarie University in Sydney, as a Macquarie Research Fellow and subsequently an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Awardee. Ana’s articles have been published in venues ranging from Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Philosophy, International Theory, Ethics & International Affairs to Perspectives on Politics, Human Rights Review, and the European Journal of Sociology. 

She is currently working on a book project on the concept of common heritage of mankind, a principle with broad (but so far shallow) application in international law. That principle supposedly governs the status and management of Antarctica, the high seas and deep seabed, the outer space, moon and other celestial bodies, and (to a lesser extent) natural and cultural patrimony. But the principle still awaits proper philosophical foundations. During her stay at the Nobel Institute, Ana’s research will focus on how to implement moral duties to preserve the common heritage of mankind (as justified and elaborated in my work-in-progress) in international and domestic law and global governance.