Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

The ethics of changemaking and peacebuilding may appear straightforward: advance dignity, promote well-being, minimize suffering. Sounds simple, right? Actually acting ethically when it really matters is rarely straightforward. If someone engaged in change-oriented work sets out to do good, how should we prioritize and evaluate whose good counts? And, how ought we act once we have decided whose good counts? Practitioners frequently confront dilemmas where dire situations may demand some form of response, but each of the options may have undesirable consequences of one form or another.Dilemmas are not merely ordinary problems, they are wicked problems: that is to say, they are defined by circumstances that only allow for suboptimal outcomes and are based on profound and sometimes troubling trade-offs. Wicked Problems argues that the field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation needs a stronger and more practical sense of its ethical obligations. For example, it argues against posi

How small-scale drones, satellites, kites, and balloons are used by social movements for the greater good.Drones are famous for doing bad things: weaponized, they implement remote-control war; used fo

Drawing on fifteen years of work in the antislavery movement, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick examines the systematic oppression of men, women, and children in rural India and asks: How do contemporary slaveh

Over the last decade, public, political, and scholarly attention has focused on human trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery. Yet as human rights scholars Alison Brysk and Austin Choi-Fitzpatri