Political Theory

What obligations do the world's wealthy people have to ensure that the world's poor achieve a quality of life that is recognisably human? This is the fundamental question of international distributive justice, and surprisingly a question that has been the subject of serious debate only in the past three decades. This book outlines and evaluates the main competing moral perspectives framing these debates, assessing the relative merits of the utilitarian, human rights, and neo-Kantian perspectives before answering the nationalist, patriotic, relativist, and constitutivist challenges to moral universalism. The book defends a form of cosmopolitanism involving a commitment to basic human rights, and provides both a guide to the state of the art in disputes about global justice, and a distinctive defense of the moral case for change in the international system.

Why should states matter and how do relations between fellow‐citizens affect what is owed to distant strangers? How, if at all, can demanding egalitarian principles inform political action? This book proposes a novel solution through the concept of avant‐garde political agency. Ypi grounds egalitarian principles on claims arising from conflicts over the distribution of global positional goods, and illustrates the role of avant‐garde agents in shaping these conflicts and promoting democratic political transformations. Against statists, she defends the global scope of equality and derives cosmopolitan principles from global responsibilities to relieve absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she shows that associative political relations play an essential role and that blanket condemnation of the state is unnecessary and ill‐directed. Advocating an approach to global justice whereby domestic avant‐garde agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow‐citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, this book offers a fresh and nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the contemporary debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi’s dialectical account illustrates how principles and agency can genuinely interact.

Historical injustice and global inequality are basic problems embedded in territorial rights. We ask questions such as: How can the descendants of colonists claim territory that isn’t really ‘theirs’? Are the immense, exclusive oil claims of Canada or Saudi Arabia justified in the face of severe global poverty? Wouldn’t the world be more just if rights over natural resources were shared with the world’s poorest? These concerns are central to territorial rights theory and at the same time they are relatively unexplored. In fact, while there is a sizeable debate focused on particular territorial disputes, there is little sustained attention given to providing a general standard for territorial entitlement. This widespread omission is disastrous. If we don’t understand why territorial rights are justified in a general, principled form, then how do we know they can be justified in any particular solution to a dispute? As part of an effort to remedy this omission, this book advances a general theory of territorial rights. This book puts forward a theory of territorial rights that starts with the idea that territorial rights affect everybody. Territorial rights, it asserts, must be universally justified. it adapts a theoretical framework from natural law theory to ground all territorial claims. In this framework, particular territorial rights are claimable by the collectives that establish legitimate, minimal conditions for justice within a geographical region. A consequence of this theoretical approach to territorial rights is that exclusive resource entitlements are justified, even if they maintain global inequality.

Unlike many other trans-boundary policy areas, international migration lacks coherent global governance. There is no UN migration organization and states have signed relatively few multilateral treaties on migration. Instead, sovereign states generally decide their own immigration policies. However, given the growing politicization of migration and the recognition that states cannot always address migration in isolation from one another, a debate has emerged about what type of international institutions and cooperation are required to meet the challenges of international migration. Until now, though, that emerging debate on global migration governance has lacked a clear analytical understanding of what global migration governance actually is, the politics underlying it, and the basis on which we can make claims about what ‘better’ migration governance might look like. In order to address this gap, the book brings together a group of the world's leading experts on migration to consider the global governance of different aspects of migration. The chapters offer an accessible introduction to the global governance of low-skilled labour migration, high-skilled labour migration, irregular migration, lifestyle migration, international travel, refugees, internally displaced persons, human trafficking and smuggling, diaspora, remittances, and root causes. Each of the chapters explores the three same broad questions: What, institutionally, is the global governance of migration in that area? Why, politically, does that type of governance exist? How, normatively, can we ground claims about the type of global governance that should exist in that area? Collectively, the chapters enhance our understanding of the international politics of migration and set out a vision for international cooperation on migration.

A pressing question at the forefront of current global political debates is: how can we salvage the democratic project in the context of globalization? In recent years, political activists have mounted high-profile campaigns for the democratization of powerful international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and for greater ‘corporate accountability’. In turn, many of the NGOs linked to these campaigns have themselves faced demands for greater democratic legitimacy. Through reflecting on the democratic dilemmas surrounding the political power of global NGOs, this book challenges the state-centric theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the established democratic theories of both ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘communitarian’ liberals. In particular, it challenges the widespread assumption that ‘sovereign’ power, ‘bounded’ (national or global) societies, and ‘electoral’ processes are essential institutional foundations of a democratic system. The book then re-thinks the democratic project from its conceptual foundations, posing a number of questions. What needs to be controlled? Who ought to control it? How could they do so? In answering these questions, the book develops a theoretical model of representative democracy that is focused on plural (state and non-state) actors rather than on unitary state structures. It elaborates a democratic framework based on the new theoretical concepts of public power, stakeholder communities, and non-electoral representation, and illustrates the practical implications of these proposals for projects of global institutional reform.

What is the role of government in protecting animal welfare? What principles should policy makers draw on as they try to balance animal welfare against human liberty? Much has been written in recent years on our moral duties toward animals, but scholars and activists alike have neglected the important question of how far the state may go to enforce those duties. This book fills that gap by exploring how liberal political principles apply to animal welfare policy. Focusing on animal welfare in the United States, the book argues that some animals (most prominently pets and livestock) may be considered members of the liberal social contract. That conclusion justifies limited state intervention to defend their welfare—even when such intervention may harm human citizens. The book also examines such questions as whether citizens may enjoy property rights in animals, what those rights entail, how animals may be represented in our political and legal institutions, and what strategies for reform are most compatible with liberal principles. More generally, this study asks, what sort of liberalism is suitable for the twenty-first-century United States? It argues that investigating the political morality of our treatment of animals gives us insight into how to design institutions that protect the most vulnerable members of our society, thus making of our shared world a more fitting home for both humans and the nonhumans to which we are so deeply connected.

This book proposes a new framework of political justice based upon the practice of caring. Integrating the insights of earlier care theorists with the concerns of traditional justice theorists, the author forges a new synthesis between care and justice, and further argues that the institutional and policy commitments of care theory must be recognized as central to any adequate theory of justice. The book begins by offering a practice‐based account of caring and a theory of obligation that explains why individuals should care for others. It then systematically demonstrates the implications of this account of caring for domestic politics, economics, international relations, and culture. In each of these areas, it reviews the contributions of earlier care theorists and then extends their arguments to provide a more complete description of the institutions and policies of a caring society. Care ethics is further put in dialogue with diverse cultural and religious traditions and used to address the challenges of multicultural justice, cultural relativism, and international human rights. More fully than other works on care theory, this book provides an overarching account of the institutions and policies of a caring society.