Dr Guy Aitchison

PhD (University College London)

  • Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies
Publications
Google Scholar
  • Personal website

    • Guy grew up in Bristol and did his undergraduate studies in History at Queens’ College, Cambridge where he first became interested in political thought. He then completed an MA in Legal and Political Theory at University College London (UCL) before working as a researcher and campaigner for various NGO’s in the UK advocating for constitutional reform, including the Joseph Rowntree Trust’s Power 2010 and openDemocracy. Guy then returned to UCL to do a PhD in Political Philosophy (completed in 2015) under the supervision of Cécile Laborde and Richard Bellamy.

    Guy spent a year as a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (2015-2016) and two years at University College Dublin, Ireland (2016-2018) thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Government of Ireland. He then taught for one year in the Philosophy department at King’s College, London before arriving at Loughborough University as a Lecturer in 2019, becoming Senior Lecturer in 2023. 

    Guy has research interests in theories of human rights, social justice, the ethics of resistance and migration. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, convenor of Loughborough’s Ethics in Public Life research group and has served as Undergraduate Programme Lead and Ethics Lead in IRPH. He has written for various media, such as the Conversation, openDemocracy and the Guardian, as well as on policy, such as a report on Covid-19 and authoritarianism for LSE’s Civil Society Research Unit co-authored with Luke Cooper.

    Guy is a political theorist with interests in political resistance, human rights, social justice and migration. He is particularly interested in the ethical issues that arise when politics is conducted outside formal institutions. This interest unites a number of diverse topics he has published on, ranging from civil disobedience to online public shaming to ethical issues around suicide in the context of injustice. 

    Guy works within the normative analytical tradition. He has a particular interest in empirically engaged or ‘grounded’ methods and has used interviews in his work work on resistance and immigration detention (discussed in a chapter for Why Political Theory Needs Social Science, eds. Alice Baderin and David Miller, 2026)

    From July 2026, he is Principal Investigator for the three-year project ‘The Right to Liveability: An Ethical Assessment’ funded by the Leverhulme Trust (£222,648). This project seeks to investigate the issues of social and democratic justice raised by the unequal distribution of mental distress and suicide between social groups. It considers arguments for a ‘right to liveability’ - a moral right to be protected from social conditions that elevate mental distress and suicide – and explains how this can shape policy-making.

    Prior to this, Guy was PI for ‘Starving for Dignity: Re-framing the Ethics of Hunger Strikes’, a two year project funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust (£10,000). The project used grounded political theory to examine the moral issues surrounding hunger strikes, self-immolation and other forms of ‘sacrificial resistance’. You can find out more about the project here.

    Guy’s initial strand of work (arising from the PhD) was on the politics of rights. This work sets out a distinctive political account of rights based on the role the concept plays in political argument. Other published writings challenge the narrow focus within liberal political theory on civil disobedience, developing new conceptual categories, justifications and norms of engagement. A particular focus here has been the political mobilisation of irregular migrants and refugees. 

    As a researcher and educator, he is keen to develop research proposals, co-organised conferences, discussions and other collaborative work that engages these issues.