Biography

Naomi Ellis is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in political theory. Prior to entering UCLA, she received her BA in international relations from the University of Tokyo, Japan. Her research interests include democratic theory, performativity, narratives of defeat and failure, antiwar pacifism, and postwar Japanese political thought.

Her article, “Rousseau’s Lawgiver and Nascent Societies: Rethinking ‘Contingency’ in Agonistic Democracy” has been published in Polity (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/736051).

From 2022-2023, she served as an assistant editor for the journal Political Theory.

Dissertation Overview

Her dissertation, Coerced Beginnings: Founding a Democracy After Defeat, explores the problem of defeat in the context of democratic foundings – moments when new political orders, identities, and constitutional principles are declared in the name of “the people.” Since the social contract theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such beginnings have typically been conceived as revolutionary events enacted through a performative identification between law and the people. The fictionality of this identification has often been seen as offering a generative site of post-revolutionary politics: precisely because “the people” remains an ever-contested concept, democracy is thought to sustain its integrity and vigor by continually revisiting its foundations and rearticulating peoplehood.

Her dissertation complicates this view and moves it beyond its exclusively Western framework by shifting attention to the “coerced” beginnings of democracy – more specifically, she analyzes constitutional debates in postwar Japan, where the democratic constitution was drafted under the authority of the American occupation forces after Japan’s defeat in World War II. Highlighting the external pressure defeat places on what is presumed to be an autonomous act of democratic founding, her dissertation asks: wherein does the authenticity of a coerced performance lie? Can “You, the sovereign people” rather than “We, the sovereign people” serve as the key speech act in the declaration of popular sovereignty?

This question matters because – with the exception of a few nations such as France and the United States that emerged from popular revolutions – most of today’s “democratic” nations arose in response to some form of external pressure (military defeat, the threat of colonization, or top-down modernization) that undermined the claim to voluntary origins. By examining how prominent postwar Japanese political theorists, jurists, and literary critics – at times employing Western philosophy and political thought – grappled with the problem of defeat, the dissertation aims to develop an alternative account of democratic founding that goes beyond the revolution model.

Research Interests

Political Theory

Graduate Advisors

Joshua Foa Dienstag