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Cosmopolitan Justice and Institutional Design
... For example, in 2002, Ghana applauded the Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee for showcasing a 'shining example of transparency' (UNGA, 2002), and in 2012 the Democratic People's Republic of Korea commended the Council for having undertaken 'notable efforts to enhance the participation of the wider membership in its work.' (UNGA, 2012). Transparency and participation are two key principles in the procedural legitimacy literature (Keohane, 2011;Scherz & Zysset, 2020); others include (but are not limited to) deliberation, accountability, representation, impartiality, expertise, and voluntary consent in decisionmaking (Buchanan & Keohane, 2006;Caney, 2006;Johnstone, 2008;Scherz & Zyssets, 2020). ...
... Hence, transparency can help secure a sense of participation even in the absence of formal voting powers or direct representation in an institution such as the Council (Hurd, 2008). Finally, normative international relations literature also posits that transparency can lead to enhanced deliberation and increased impartiality in debates (Caney, 2006). ...
Can transparency enhance the legitimacy of international institutions? As transparency has become a widely applied procedural standard in international politics, a range of institutions have implemented transparency reforms under the presumption that increased transparency can elicit support among relevant audiences. This article evaluates whether increased transparency in the UN Security Council leads to enhanced legitimacy perceptions among UN member-states. The article first traces the history of Security Council reform since 1990 and draws on interviews with diplomats and observers to describe a transparency reform the Council enacted in 2006. Next, the article uses longitudinal content analysis to empirically probe the legitimation effects of that transparency reform. The empirical analysis is based on an original dataset of 4,303 legitimacy statements made by UN member-states in annual UN General Assembly debates over the periods 1990-2006 and 2006-18. The findings cast doubt over the potential of transparency reform to improve the Council's legitimacy; instead they suggest that increasing the direct participation of the wider UN membership may be a more viable legitimation strategy. This article contributes to existing international legitimacy literature by providing empirical evidence on the relationship between transparency and legitimacy, and by demonstrating which institutional features that affect the perceived legitimacy of the Security Council.
... Arguments for such an approach typically emphasize collective action, assurance and related problems which are endemic to a sovereign states system and pose barriers to the realization of rights aims. The development of democratic global political institutions is prescribed as a means of overcoming the barriers (Pogge, 1992;Ypi, 2013), and also of enabling participation on determining the goods that global institutions should seek to provide (Caney, 2006;Lu, 2018, 234-35). Related are arguments by some 'cosmopolitan democrats' (Held, 1995;see Marchetti, 2008). ...
... 5. Caney also notes here that concerns about domestic cultural imposition give reason to support cosmopolitan suprastate institutions. His proposed institutional scheme (Caney, 2006) would justify global democracy as a means of settling 'reasonable disagreement' among persons, rather than for its instrumental contributions to enabling protection of rights. Thus, his treatment does not give emphasis to legal or other challenge mechanisms for individuals operating alongside majoritarian democratic procedures. ...
One of the potentially most significant objections to a cosmopolitan moral approach charges an essential arrogance: cosmopolitanism disdains particularist moral insights even while – in what is said to be its most coherent form – it seeks to bind all persons within global political institutions. It is argued here that adopting a form of institutional cosmopolitanism actually helps to meet this sort of objection. An appropriately configured such approach will have a conception of equal global citizenship at its core. It will seek to place individuals in relations of political humility, understood not as plain deference to competing moral claims, but as concrete recognition of the equal moral status of others. It will seek to progressively empower as actual citizen equals those whose interests are often ‘arrogantly’ neglected in the current system, and to multiply mechanisms of input and challenge for them over time.
... For instance life expectancy not only reflects medical services, but also other variables like literacy, housing conditions, diet, income, etc. (McGranahan, 1972). Other essential limitations include that the negotiation and constitution of such indicators reflect power asymmetries between nation-states and global injustices in global governance frameworks and international bodies (Moellendorf, 2009;Caney, 2006;Jongen & Scholte, 2022;Reus-Smit & Zarakol, 2023). Our reliance on such indicators, despite their limitations, lies grounded in matters of data availability. ...
Research on fairness in machine learning (ML) has been largely focusing on individual and group fairness. With the adoption of ML-based technologies as assistive technology in complex societal transformations or crisis situations on a global scale these existing definitions fail to account for algorithmic fairness transnationally. We propose to complement existing perspectives on algorithmic fairness with a notion of transnational algorithmic fairness and take first steps towards an analytical framework. We exemplify the relevance of a transnational fairness assessment in a case study on a disaster response system using images from online social media. In the presented case, ML systems are used as a support tool in categorizing and classifying images from social media after a disaster event as an almost instantly available source of information for coordinating disaster response. We present an empirical analysis assessing the transnational fairness of the application’s outputs-based on national socio-demographic development indicators as potentially discriminatory attributes. In doing so, the paper combines interdisciplinary perspectives from data analytics, ML, digital media studies and media sociology in order to address fairness beyond the technical system. The case study investigated reflects an embedded perspective of peoples’ everyday media use and social media platforms as the producers of sociality and processing data-with relevance far beyond the case of algorithmic fairness in disaster scenarios. Especially in light of the concentration of artificial intelligence (AI) development in the Global North and a perceived hegemonic constellation, we argue that transnational fairness offers a perspective on global injustices in relation to AI development and application that has the potential to substantiate discussions by identifying gaps in data and technology. These analyses ultimately will enable researchers and policy makers to derive actionable insights that could alleviate existing problems with fair use of AI technology and mitigate risks associated with future developments.
... It reached great levels of complexity, but, in essence, it was characterised by disagreements about the scope of egalitarian principles of distributive justice and/or the relevance of special obligations to co-nationals or compatriots (see Miller, 2007;Brock, 2013;Moellendorf, 2016). Yet, at the same time, it largely took for granted that whatever the appropriate scope of egalitarianism, or distributive justice more broadly, the core principles of the liberal constitutional tradition would normally have to be respected at the international level (for a classic discussion see Caney, 2006). Now, one might retort that, if our referents are liberal political theorists, the fact that they take liberalism (loosely defined) for granted is largely unsurprising and perhaps even tautological. ...
... First, a cosmopolitan may hold that "to respect one another's status as ultimate units of moral concern" actually requires a certain level of state autonomy. 63 How so? Consider a purely justice-based cosmopolitan theory, that is, one that proposes one theory of global justice to apply to all human beings across the globe. ...
Postprint. Please cite as: Dietsch, Peter and Rixen, Thomas (2014) Tax Competition and Global Background Justice. Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2012.00419.x
... Unlike the DSB which only empowers the state subject to unfair trade practices to issue sanctions, we would need omnilateral, rather than bilateral, enforcement such that all members of the regime would be required to enforce the relevant sanctions. Also, a separate ombudsperson whose objective was to maintain the integrity of the regime and could be empowered to bring cases before the executive would be essential, especially if paired with democratic processes for selecting the members of the office (Caney, 2006). In other words, the kind of robust regime that many imagine for the RAI deployment should also be developed for RAI research. ...
... Innerhalb der (kosmopolitischen) internationalen Ethik werden verschiedene institutionelle Arrangements zur Verbesserung dieser Situation diskutiert, die bis hin zu einem Weltstaat reichen (u. a. Beitz 1994;Brown 2011;Caney 2006;Zürn 2016). Aus der Perspektive des sich humanisierenden Völkerrechts liegt die Lösung des Problems in der Vervollständigung der gleichsam halbierten Rechtspersönlichkeit des Individuums: Gleich dem englischen Rechtssprichwort »no right without a remedy« (ubi actio, ibi ius) dürfe das Individuum nicht nur Träger von Rechten sein, sondern bedürfe der Möglichkeit, diese auch effektiv einzuklagen (Cançado Trindade 2013: 236;Nijman 2004: 473;Peters 2011: 411;2014: 385). ...
[English version below]
Während die universelle Gültigkeit von Individualrechten postuliert wird, verlässt sich der internationale Menschenrechtsschutz für deren Durchsetzung auf den Staat, obwohl dieser die meisten Menschenrechtsverletzungen begeht. Dadurch wird deren Gewährleistung unwahrscheinlich, denn ein Täter wird selten gerecht über sich selbst richten. Als Ausweg aus diesem Dilemma wird von MenschenrechtsaktivistInnen die Einrichtung eines Weltmenschenrechtsgerichtshofs gefordert. Wäre ein überstaatliches Gericht, welches Individualklagen gegen Staaten verhandelt, umsetzbar und wirksam? Der vorliegende Artikel argumentiert, dass eine heterarchische Weltordnung zwar Möglichkeitsräume für eine solche Institution bietet. Allerdings schließt ein Gericht als adversariale Institution den legitimen Deutungskonflikt über Normen und provoziert damit, dass nicht mehr über deren Interpretation gestritten, sondern ihre Gültigkeit infrage gestellt wird. Im Ergebnis kann dies den Austritt eines Staates aus dem Schutzsystem zur Folge haben. Der langjährige Streit Großbritanniens mit dem Europäischen Gerichtshof für Menschenrechte über das Wahlrecht von Häftlingen illustriert diese Dynamik. Ein Weltmenschenrechtsgerichtshof liefe damit entgegen seiner Intention Gefahr, die Menschenrechte zu schwächen. Ein effektiver internationaler Menschenrechtsschutz bedarf inklusiver internationaler Institutionen, die wirksame Wege für Kontestation zur Verfügung stellen.
The state is responsible for most human rights violations. Yet, the international human rights regime also foresees it as the main protector of individual rights. Against this flaw, human rights activists, lawyers and academics have proposed a World Court of Human Rights. The present heterarchic world order has indeed created opportunities for such international institutions. Yet, the article argues that a world court risks to weaken human rights rather than strengthening them: Through its authoritative judgements, a world court forecloses the legitimate contestation of norm applicability, thus forcing reluctant states to radicalize their contestation by attacking the very justification of the norm. This dynamic can be witnessed in the conflict between the United Kingdom and the European Court of Human Rights over prisoners’ right to vote. With a view to institutionalization beyond the state, the article concludes that international institutions need to be inclusive and open to contestation.
... The plurality of bounded political communities is constitutive for justice in the sense of forming a background condition against which questions about justice are raised. 7 I am therefore inclined to think that political 7 Simon Caney makes a similar argument distinguishing a democratic approach to cosmopolitan justice that affirms political borders from a wholly instrumental one that is not so constrained (Caney 2006 boundaries are also part of the circumstances of justice, which means that they have to be assumed as a background not only for non-ideal, but also for ideal theory. Political boundaries structure theories of justice fundamentally by subdividing them into three distinct sets of questions: justice within political communities (domestic), justice between political communities (inter-polity) and justice across political communities (trans-polity and global). ...
... To clarify, this is not to say that proponents of the PIA are not interested in the realworld implications of their theories. Defenders of the PIA do consider, e.g. for the sake of giving advice to public policy makers, what the application of a particular conception of justice would require in practice (see Caney 2006). However, those who follow the PIA do not view these practical conclusions as relevant considerations for potential amendments to the principles based upon which these conclusions were drawn. ...
http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1677-2954.2016v15n1p50
The practice-independent approach to theorizing justice (PIA) holds that the social practices to which a particular conception of justice is meant to apply are of no importance for the justification of such a conception. In this paper I argue that this approach to theorizing justice is incompatible with the method of reflective equilibrium (MRE) because the MRE is antithetical to a clean separation between issues of justification and application. In particular I will be maintaining that this incompatibility renders Simon Caney’s cosmopolitan theory of global justice inconsistent, because Caney claims to endorse both a humanity-centered PIA and the MRE.
... Quite the opposite. In the debate on global justice, the focus on the basic structure of society and on institutionalised schemes of cooperation seems shared among cosmopolitan, liberal and statist theorists (Nagel 2005;Ypi 2008;Pogge 2002;Caney 2006;Moellendorf 2011). They could all subscribe to Sangiovanni's claim that the relationship between institutions and persons are special in the sense that institutions establish certain networks of relationships among people, a set of background conditions that 'alters the way in which participants interact', which, in turn, shapes the reasons people might have for endorsing certain principles of justice (Sangiovanni 2008: 147). ...
... First, a cosmopolitan may hold that "to respect one another's status as ultimate units of moral concern" actually requires a certain level of state autonomy. 63 How so? Consider a purely justice-based cosmopolitan theory, that is, one that proposes one theory of global justice to apply to all human beings across the globe. ...
This chapter first sketches the impact of three different kinds of tax competition (for portfolio capital, so-called paper profits, and foreign direct investment (FDI)) on the de facto sovereignty of states. It shows how tax competition exacerbates social inequalities in order to explain why it is a case of background injustice. The chapter then lays out two principles of international taxation: a membership principle and a constraint on fiscal policy that rules out fiscal arrangements. Next, the chapter proposes the establishment of an International Tax Organization (ITO) and endorses unitary taxation with formulary apportionment (UT+FA) as a reform of corporate taxation. The chapter also discusses the objection that these principles are incompatible with defending a cosmopolitan theory of global justice. Furthermore, it argues that the two principles serve as a normative toolkit to specify to what extent the interdependence of states in fiscal matters calls for normative interdependence.
... This links back again to the liberal cosmopolitan justice argument that tends to prioritise justice over democracy in formulating a ‗good society' approach to cosmopolitan governance (SeeCaney 2006). ...
... First, a cosmopolitan may hold that "to respect one another's status as ultimate units of moral concern" actually requires a certain level of state autonomy. 63 How so? Consider a purely justice-based cosmopolitan theory, that is, one that proposes one theory of global justice to apply to all human beings across the globe. ...
Versions of this article have been presented at the Canadian Political Science Association (Montréal, 2010), the ECPR General Conference (Reykjavik, 2011), the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) as well as at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l'Université de Montréal (CREUM). For comments on previous drafts of this article we thank participants at these events and, in particular, Kim Brooks, Ryoa Chung, Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt, Tim Gemkow, Anja Görnitz, Monika Heupel, Dominic Martin, Mihaela Mihai, Jean-Pierre Vidal, Lora Viola, Daniel Weinstock, David Wiens, Jurgen de Wispelaere, and Michael Zürn. Special thanks are due to Barbara Buckinx, Miriam Ronzoni, and Christian Schemmel for detailed written comments and to Georg Simmerl for his research assistance. We acknowledge financial support from the Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2502519
This chapter discusses a number of concrete potential criteria for the legitimacy of global governance institutions. With regard to criteria relating to policy outputs, it argues that such criteria usually do not hold for every kind of global governance institution. With regard to decision-making, a number of different potential procedures are discussed: independent electoral procedures, the participation of representatives of civil society organisations in informal democratic procedures, and procedures that give states the central role in decision-making. I argue that all of these decision-making procedures suffer from important limitations and shortcomings. Combining different forms of decision-making can sometimes help to compensate for the deficits of each individual form. But still, no combination of criteria related to policy outputs and these different forms of decision-making procedures can be a suitable standard for the legitimacy of every kind of global governance institution. Criteria of legitimacy have to be specific to the institution in question. The concept of legitimacy as the right to function opens up the conceptual space to accommodate this insight. If the right ascribed to an institution by judging it to be legitimate depends on its function, this suggests that legitimacy criteria for institutions with different functions will usually not be the same.
Widespread tax evasion and avoidance have recently led to both significant reforms of international tax governance and increased attention from theorists of global tax justice. Against the background of an analysis of the double challenge of effectiveness and distribution facing the taxation of multinational enterprises, this paper puts forward a taxonomy of recent contributions of the tax justice literature. This taxonomy not only opens up an original angle of interpretation on global tax justice, but also provides a vantage point from which to evaluate recent reforms by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
This article considers the various issues and implications raised by the OECD’s Inclusive Framework and how this affects both OECD member countries and non-member states.
Alleviation of global poverty, especially in the global South has an urgent issue of moral concern for world leadership. Global institutions have laid down various proposals to eradicate poverty across the globe but nothing substantial has changed and still millions of people are living in acute poverty. Global academia especially political theorists/philosophers have tried to address the issue of global poverty and in this paper I will be discussing the cosmopolitan position to address the issue. The proposed paper seeks to explore: what must a globally egalitarianinstitutional design look like that addresses the morally urgent problem of global poverty,especially in the global south?
Stephen Gardiner’s A Perfect Moral Storm offers an in-depth analysis of the ethical facets of climate change. In this paper, I contend that he nonetheless overlooks an important structural layer to climate vulnerabilities and injustices because he analyzes them implicitly interactional. I argue that climate change should rather be understood as a form of structural injustice as outlined by Iris M. Young. In this reading, the unjust socio-economic structural processes that give rise to climate change, the production and consumption of fossil fuel energy, are at their core marked by (i) oppressive and dominating power relations that position agents (ii) intersecting with other structural constraints. Crucially, (iii) these structural processes arose historically, persist over time, and entrench the burden on those suffering in the future. This viewpoint improves our understanding of how the climate crisis unfolds over time in a way that augments Gardiner’s analysis. The structural approach can advance the climate justice debate both theoretically and practically.
Do states or individuals stand under duties of international justice to people who live elsewhere and to other states? How are we to assess the legitimacy of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Security Council? Should we support reforms of international institutions and how should we go about assessing alternative proposals of such reforms? The book brings together leading scholars of public international law, jurisprudence and international relations, political philosophers and political theorists to explore the central notions of international legitimacy and global justice. The essays examine how these notions are related and how understanding the relationships will help us comparatively assess the validity of proposals for the reform of international institutions and public international law.
Do states or individuals stand under duties of international justice to people who live elsewhere and to other states? How are we to assess the legitimacy of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Security Council? Should we support reforms of international institutions and how should we go about assessing alternative proposals of such reforms? The book brings together leading scholars of public international law, jurisprudence and international relations, political philosophers and political theorists to explore the central notions of international legitimacy and global justice. The essays examine how these notions are related and how understanding the relationships will help us comparatively assess the validity of proposals for the reform of international institutions and public international law.
Agenda 2030 sees the SDGs as being realized through a “global partnership for sustainable development”—this itself a “partnership of partnerships” among the widest possible range of stakeholders, within and across sectors and borders. In this chapter, we set out to reflect on three key sets of questions around global partnerships for the SDGs, especially in the context of COVID-19. To address these questions, we draw on evidence from three surveys we undertook with UN DESA in 2019 and 2021. The chapter considers, first, some of the key conceptual issues involved: matters of definition, of how the role of partnerships in the SDGs should be understood, and of the different scopes and scales for partnerships. Second, an initial presentation and discussion of the data from our surveys, with examples, illustrate the diversity of global partnerships and the contributions they are making to the SDGs. We also outline the role of the UN in these partnerships, both as a partner and an orchestrator or curator of SDG partnerships. A third section presents evidence from 2021 on how and where partnerships have developed in response to COVID-19 and how COVID-19 has affected sustainable development partnerships. Drawing on our preceding discussions, a concluding section poses critical questions about what this “ecosystem” of partnerships for the SDGs ought to look like and how the UN should approach the task of curating it.KeywordsGlobal partnershipsGoal 17sustainable development partnershipsSDGs2030 AgendaUnited NationsGlobal governance
The democratic deficit-whether local, national, supranational or global-illustrates the gap between the decision makers and the will and vision of individuals affected by these decisions; and reveals that the current representatively of individuals in institutions is inversely proportional to scope and scale institutional. This gap is all the more worrying as it reveals the disrespect for the human right to equal opportunity to political participation; and this carries with it the growing economic and social inequality between the richest and the poorest people of the world. This article aims to show how the cosmopolitan approach on democratic deficit fight is most appropriate that the proposal of mere democratisation by steps on domestic and international contexts, since it translates into the creation of an overlapping of transnational and regional institutions, within which individuals participate direct or indirectly.
Some scholars have argued that one of the most characteristic aspects of the ‘new’ post-1989 political and legal order has been the emergence—or re-emergence—of a form of international political morality based not on the ‘particularism’ of the modern society of States, but rather on the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the rising global society. Against the traditional State-centric approach to international relations, from the 1990s on there have been more and more positions favouring a real ‘global’ turn of politics, founded on ‘universal principles that challenge the presumed moral supremacy of territorial boundaries and which favor instead the welfare of humanity generally’ (Hayden). The aim of this chapter is to reconstruct the main issues at stake in the philosophical-political debate about the so-called “humanitarian turn” in global politics, in order to discuss their actual meaning in an age of ‘national-populist backlash’.
Purpose
Studies on cosmopolites often focus on expatriates or entrepreneurs. Although intentional cosmopolites do exist, and surely represent an important part of those individuals who define themselves as citizens of the world, the author suggests that a les-explored and darker variant also exists: reluctant cosmopolites.
Design/methodology/approach
The author reviews Olivier Geai’s book “La parole est aux migrants”, which presents first-person narratives of migrants from their childhoods to the point of their intentions of migrating, their journeys and their arrivals in France. Following the established logic of reviews in the society and business review, the author will place this book in tension with the academic literature on cosmopolitanism, mostly through the excellent “The Cosmopolitan Ideal” edited by Sybille de la Rosa and Darren O’Byrne.
Findings
Exploring cosmopolitanism through the perspective of reluctant cosmopolites leads to understanding the phenomenon as a process (cosmopolitanization) rather than a state, and to engage with the idea of cities of refuge.
Originality/value
Developing the notion of cities of refuge, which are not utopias or ideals – but revolutionary – radical inspirations to rethink a world that cannot be constructed tomorrow based on the yesterday’s blueprints.
Cosmopolitans typically argue that the realization of cosmopolitan ideals requires the creation of global political institutions of some kind. While the precise nature of the necessary institutions is widely discussed, the problem of the transition to such an order has received less attention. In this paper, we address what we take to be a crucial aspect of the problem of transition: we argue that it involves a moral coordination problem because there are several morally equivalent paths to reform the existing order, but suitably placed and properly motivated political agents need to converge on a single route for the transition to be successful. It is, however, unclear how such a convergence can take place since the duty to create global institutions does not single out any coordination point. We draw on the so-called theory of hegemonic stability to address this problem and conceptualize what we call the hegemonic transition. From an explanatory point of view, we rely on the theory’s insights to explain how a hegemon may contribute to the creation of a rules-based international order by providing salient coordination points and accordingly, enabling coordination among states. From the normative point of view, we identify necessary conditions for the hegemonic transition to be morally permissible. To the extent that these conditions obtain, other states have pro tanto moral reasons to follow the salient coordination point provided by the leading state.
Anthropogenic climate change is inflicting serious loss and damage on some of the most vulnerable areas of the globe. In the future, a particularly vexing kind of that loss will be territorial. The continuously rising sea level is projected to submerge – or to otherwise make uninhabitable – not only large swaths of the territory of e.g. Bangladesh and the Netherlands, but also all of the island nations of e.g. Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, and the Maldives. Therefore, we must adapt to climate change rather than merely attempt to mitigate it. In particular, territorial losses must be compensated. Noncompliance makes the ideal of territorial compensation elusive and grounds the need for non-ideal theory. Here, I seek to develop such a theory. Specifically, I (i) introduce background considerations, (ii) address challenges to compensatory liability, (iii) situate the paper within non-ideal theory, (iv) offer an ideal of territorial compensation to guide non-ideal theory, (v) discuss previous migration proposals, and (vi) argue for a non-ideal theory of collective climate migration.
This article argues that a state-centered theory of global justice exhibits an epistemic problem of perspective, and that this worry exhibits a gendered character. Within a liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown to be bad for women because it creates a domain for injustice that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. This article argues that state-centered theories of global justice create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice. The article therefore suggests that this way of framing questions of global justice is problematic, and is problematic for women in particular. Just as the public/private distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves cases of injustice outside the vision of the law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere and the international realm of justice leaves cases of injustice invisible to international law. For the question of global justice, the privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention compromises the ability of the theory to achieve its purported goal of universal justice.
An important strand in contemporary political theory argues that democratic methods of political decision making should be extended to the global level. But are people’s fundamental views on public policy issues too diverse across the world for democracy? We examine systematically the empirical basis of two related concerns: that global democratic decision making would leave more people dissatisfied with the outcome of decisions than keeping democratic decision making within national settings and that it would increase the risk of persistent minorities, that is, groups who are systematically outvoted on most policy issues they care about. Using opinion polls covering 86% of the world population, we compare the distribution of policy values within countries to the distribution of policy values in the world as a whole. We find that the amount of dissatisfaction with policy and the risk of persistent minorities would not increase in a global democratic polity compared to individual states. © 2018 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
The global city is a contested site of economic innovation and cultural production, as well as profound inequalities of wealth and life chances. These cities, and large cities that aspire to 'global' status, are often the point of entry for new immigrants. Yet for political theorists (and indeed many scholars of global institutions), these critical sites of global influence and inequality have not been a significant focus of attention. This is curious. Theorists have wrestled with the nature and demands of global justice, but have for the most part supposed that the debate is between statist and cosmopolitan formulations. Questions of redistribution, immigration, humanitarian obligations, coercion at borders, and territorial rights have correspondingly been cast as either the domain of sovereign territorial states, or of the nascent web of supranational institutions that might bind those states and peoples, morally and legally. Examining some of these issues and arguments through the lens of the global city casts them in a new and informative light, and buttresses an associative turn in thinking about global justice.
According to the Democratic Stability Argument, since currently existing democratic states are overwhelmingly likely to play a leading role in the establishment of a just cosmopolitan order, should one ever be established, there are moral reasons to take measures that are necessary to preserve the adequate functioning of these states. If large-scale immigration can undermine their adequate functioning, then immigration restrictions are justified even from a cosmopolitan perspective, under non-ideal conditions. This paper argues that this argument may not succeed in justifying immigration restrictions under current conditions. Properly understood, the problem involves the competing claims of current poor admission-seekers and of the global poorest at some point in the future, i. e. the earliest feasible date of the establishment of the cosmopolitan order. The paper invokes normative arguments suggesting that the claims of the poorest in the distant future do not have lexical priority as a matter of principle. It also argues that available empirical estimates imply that the claims of admission-seekers in the present and near future potentially outcompete the claims of the poorest in the distant future. These considerations point towards a specification of the Democratic Stability Argument rather than to its complete rejection.
Some recent treatments of cosmopolitan democracy have focused on the feasibility of actually achieving global political justice, or a defensibly participatory form of shared rule at the global level. Commentators have explored whether there are decisive reasons to think that binding global democracy would be impossible to achieve, and if it is not impossible, the means by which both global institutions and a global demos might be constructed (List and Koenig-Archibugi 2010; Koenig-Archibugi 2012a). For clues, they have looked to the historical development of domestic liberal democracy (Goodin 2010), as well as to more recent transitions to democracy within states (Koenig-Archibugi 2011), and to potential ‘paths and agents’ to global democracy that are emerging in the current global system (Held and Archibugi 2011). Each of these investigations has offered important insights into which lessons from domestic democratic transitions might be transposed upward, adding an important empirical element to the mostly normative and prescriptive literature on global democracy and global political justice.
In Chapter 3, I offered a pro tanto argument to the conclusion that the intuitions of the global economic association that are permissive of deep inequalities are unjust. The global economic association is a common good association whose rules fail to treat persons as equals, and this failure is not justified by any of the following four reasons: (1) Some persons deserve to have their interests treated less well because of something they have done to harm the interests of others; (2) some persons voluntarily consent to lesser realization of their interests or to taking certain risks of this outcome; (3) differences in morally relevant needs require more resources to those persons who in fact have more or (4) offering incentives that produce differential outcomes benefit everyone in comparison to their condition under equality. The failure cannot then be reasonably accepted by those who are treated unequally under its rules. In order for the inequalities of the global economic association to be just, respect for human dignity requires that they be reasonably accepted because the global economic association is a common good association, which is relatively strong, largely non-voluntary, constitutive of a significant part of the background rules for the various relationships of persons’ public lives and governed by norms that can be subject to human control.
This paper develops a novel
competition criterion
for evaluating institutional schemes. Roughly, this criterion says that one institutional scheme is normatively superior to another to the extent that the former engenders more widespread political competition than the latter. I show that this criterion should be endorsed by both global egalitarians and their statist rivals, as it follows from their common commitment to the moral equality of all persons. I illustrate the normative import of the competition criterion by exploring its potential implications for the scope of egalitarian principles of distributive justice. In particular, I highlight the challenges it raises for global egalitarians’ efforts to justify extending the scope of egalitarian justice beyond the state.
By analysing the mandate and the work of UN-related criminal courts and tribunals in investigating and prosecuting those most responsible for mass atrocity crimes and in supporting related domestic transitional justice efforts, this article aims at assessing whether these efforts are just fleeting mirages of transitional justice or a piecemeal approach towards building a cosmopolitan justice model. To that aim, the article evaluates the role and contribution of key UN-related criminal courts and tribunals towards developing a commonly shared concept and model of cosmopolitan justice which furthers peace and ensures the protection of populations from mass atrocity crimes, namely genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The theoretical approach is based on Focarelli's argument that international law, seen as a social construct, can contribute in some measure to global justice. Ratner's standard of global justice, based on peace and human rights protection, is used as a general benchmark for the assessment of the activity of these international judicial institutions.
A few years ago I visited Nicaragua as part of a program sponsored by my university. We traveled by bus to the coffee country outside of Matagalpa and met with members of the Union of Organized Women of Yasica Sur, in a community center the women had built in a hollow beside the road. The president of the group described how thirty years ago, she and a small group of women organized to improve the supply of drinking water for their children. Over time, the women moved from providing water to providing schools and bridges, and then affordable medical care and medicines. The organization now has about one thousand members and is one of the most effective in the region. Yet the needs are still great.
Many of the women had walked for over an hour in their best clothes to visit with us. As we listened to them, I heard also my aunts and grandmothers, who did not look so very different from these women, who were just as smart, determined and hard-working, and whose lives were not so very different, except their crop was not coffee: it was sugarcane and pineapple. The sense of connection was shortlived, however. There was a question-and-answer period, and the president asked us what we did at home. One of my colleagues shared she was an environmental engineer, who specialized in lakes. The president smiled and said, “We could use you here.” Then I told her I taught international law. The president listened for the translation, regarded me and said, “I am not educated. Your work is too high for me.” So much for my solidarity with the Union of Organized Women of Yasica Sur.
There is much in Thomas Hobbes's political theory that contemporary political philosophy cannot readily accept – including Hobbes's egoism, his unconditional right of self–defense, and his insistence that peace is possible only under absolute sovereign rule. Nevertheless, we can and should embrace one of Hobbes's central insights: that problems of assurance are of fundamental importance for questions of social justice, even, or especially, justice questions of global scale. In general, agents face normatively significant problems of assurance because they have imperfect knowledge about the conduct of others and must therefore weigh consequent risks of action. The basic human device for their resolution, practically speaking, is for agents to form “agreements” – promises, conventions, social practices, or institutions – that reduce uncertainty and thus “assure” the parties involved. None of this necessarily bears on basic principles of morality or justice, at least not without further argument. Hobbes's dramatic assurance problem – the state of nature – makes this further step. It shows vividly how agreement–making may be not simply a useful device but a condition for the applicability of basic principles. In the absence of an agreed upon common power to assure compliance, Hobbes explains, basic principles of conduct – including considerations of justice and injustice – are simply out of place. The resulting uncertainty about what others will do in the name of self–preservation gives us sweeping liberty to defend ourselves.
Recently much has been written about the ethical issues surrounding global politics. There has, for example, been a considerable literature on global ideals of distributive justice. However, amongst all this, very little has been written by political theorists on some of the most significant international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Many discussions of global distributive justice tend to regard states as the central duty-bearers and assume that the pursuit of global justice requires, for example, an increase in states' overseas development budgets. There has, of course, been a considerable literature on some international institutions. Writers such as Daniele Archibugi and David Held have defended what they term a ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ where this calls for the democratisation of global political institutions. However, the focus of this perspective tends to be on reforming the United Nations. My aim in this chapter is to provide a provisional and tentative analysis of the normative nature of international economic institutions, such as the IMF, World Bank and the WTO. I shall make particular reference to these three institutions, in part, because they play an important role and, in part, to simplify the analysis. However, it is not assumed that these are the only international economic institutions of import nor is it assumed that the analyses that follow cannot be applied to other institutions. To this we should also add that the chapter is exploratory in nature.
While the concept of global citizenship has a pedigree dating back more than two-thousand years, as well as many current advocates and interpreters, scholarly critics tend to dismiss it as simply incoherent. How, they ask, can it be possible to practice global citizenship in the absence of some global state? This chapter argues that, although the full formal trappings of citizenship are not likely to emerge anytime soon at the global level, individuals can make important contributions toward realizing its substance there. In assuming duties to promote comprehensive rights protections for others who do not share their state citizenship, and promoting the sort of suprastate institutional transformation that could more reliably secure such protections, they can enact some key aspects of global citizenship. Further, such an institutionally developmental approach to global citizenship is shown to be less distinct than claimed from many domestic conceptions, which define citizenship partly in terms of ideals and practices that are acknowledged to need further development.
A globalized world, some argue, needs a global democracy. But there is considerable disagreement about whether global democracy is an ideal worth pursuing. One of the main grounds for scepticism is captured by the slogan: "No global demos, no global democracy." The fact that a key precondition of democracy-a demos-is absent at the global level, some argue, speaks against the pursuit of global democracy. I discuss four interpretations of the skeptical slogan-each based on a specific account of the notion of "the demos"-and conclude that none of them establishes that the global democratic ideal must be abandoned. In so doing, I systematize different types of objections against global democracy, thus bringing some clarity to an otherwise intricate debate, and offer a robust but qualified defense of the global democratic ideal.
Many recent arguments for trans-state and global democracy would offer broad leeway on constitutionalized right standards to states, and few formal mechanisms for individuals to challenge domestic rights rejections beyond the state. Such a stance, it is shown here, tends to be rooted in implicit presumptions of domestic consensus. Challenges are offered to this and related presumptions in accounts of cosmopolitan democracy, as well as global variants of liberal nationalism and political liberalism. An alternative, primarily instrumental approach to trans-state and global democracy is detailed. It would give emphasis to ways in which formal suprastate participation, complemented by challenge mechanisms for individuals, could play a crucial role in helping to strengthen individual rights protections within states. The case for adopting such an approach is reinforced through attention to the efforts of a persistent domestic democratic minority - Dalits in India - to reach out to the global human rights regime for help in pressuring their own state to better protect rights against exclusion and subjugation.
This article addresses an underexplored area of investigation within the global justice debate: To what extent does globalisation structurally undermine the freedom of states? And if it does, what type of injustice does this constitute? It is argued here that a republican theory of freedom as non-domination is better equipped than existing cosmopolitan and social liberal accounts to explain the systemic connections between domestic, international and global injustice. The forms of unchecked power that globalisation sets off create new opportunities for the domination of states – by other states as well as by non-states actors. And when citizens live in dominated states, they are themselves exposed to domination. The upshot is a normative analysis of the global arena that attributes a central role to states, yet is deeply critical of the status quo.
The literature on international political theory is replete with proposals to make world politics a more just and democratic place. This article explores how the cosmopolitan design project can be made more tractable in a world composed of sovereign nation states. Specifically, it argues that flexibility mechanisms – tools common in international cooperation – enhance the feasibility of design. The article draws upon the recent work on political feasibility and argues that economic, institutional and cultural constraints can be overcome by using flexibility mechanisms. In order to gain traction on the argument, prescriptions made in the field of intellectual property rights are analysed. Thomas Pogge and Allen Buchanan, Tony Cole and Robert Keohane have separately advanced institutional proposals to reform the global essential medicine system. The article details how feasibility can be enhanced through flexibility in light of these proposals, and makes a suggestion about their comparative feasibility and desirability.
The article considers the gap that exists between between normative and empirical theories of democracy. Empirical theories usually stop in their aspirations where normative theories get off the ground, that is, they take the model of liberal democracy as their normative horizon. This is a confusing situation especially with regard to the possibilities of enhancing the quality of existing liberal democracies. We argue that a simple recalibration of democracy indexes, so as to include normatively more demanding considerations, is impossible, due to certain recurring features of normative models. We conclude that if we want to be serious about bridging the gap, concessions should be made on both sides.
Which standards should we employ to evaluate the global order? Should they be standards of justice or standards of legitimacy? In this article, I argue that liberal political theorists need not face this dilemma, because liberal justice and legitimacy are not distinct values. Rather, they indicate what the same value, i.e. equal respect for persons, demands of institutions under different sets of circumstances. I suggest that under real-world circumstances – characterized by conflicts and disagreements – equal respect demands basic-rights protection and democratic participation, which I here call ‘political justice’. I conclude the article by considering three possible configurations of the global order – the ‘democratic world-state’, ‘independent democratic states’, and ‘mixed’ models – and argue that a commitment to political justice speaks in favour of the latter.
Este artículo presenta una reconstrucción de la concepción de la justicia global de Pogge y propone algunos comentarios constructivos en relación a su futuro desarrollo. Utilizando la noción de "programa de investigación" de Imre Lakatos, el artículo identifica afirmaciones pertencientes al "núcleo duro" y al "cinturón protector" del programa poggeano, con atención particular al alcance de los principios de justicia fundamentales, el objeto y la estructura de los deberes de justicia global, la explicación de la pobreza mundial, y las reformas del orden global existente. El artículo recomienda algunas enmiendas al programa poggeano en cada una de las cuatro dimensiones.This paper presents a reconstruction of and some constructive comments on Thomas Pogge's conception of global justice. Using Imre Lakatos's notion of a research program, the paper identifies Pogge's "hard core" and "protective belt" claims regarding the scope of fundamental principles of justice, the object and structure of duties of global justice, the explanation of world poverty, and the appropriate reforms to the existing global order. The paper recommends some amendments to Pogge's program in each of the fourth areas.
Existing research on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council is conceptual or theoretical, for the most part, as scholars tend to make legitimacy assessments with reference to objective standards. Whether UN member states perceive the Security Council as legitimate or illegitimate has yet to be investigated systematically; nor do we know whether states care primarily about the Council's compliance with its legal mandate, its procedures, or its effectiveness. To address this gap, our article analyzes evaluative statements made by states in UN General Assembly debates on the Security Council, for the period 1991–2009. In making such statements, states confer legitimacy on the Council or withhold legitimacy from it. We conclude the following: First, the Security Council suffers from a legitimacy deficit because negative evaluations of the Council by UN member states far outweigh positive ones. Nevertheless, the Council does not find itself in an intractable legitimacy crisis because it still enjoys a rudimentary degree of legitimacy. Second, the Council's legitimacy deficit results primarily from states' concerns regarding the body's procedural shortcomings. Misgivings as regards shortcomings in performance rank second. Whether or not the Council complies with its legal mandate has failed to attract much attention at all.
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