THINKING BEYOND THE STATE: REDISTRIBUTION, RESPONSIBILITY, AND RESPONSE-ABILITY
As democratic struggles such as Occupy Wall Street erupt across the
world, citizens are rethinking the scope of communities across state
lines. These movements challenge the ability of states to adequately
respond to problems of distributive justice that are
global in scope. Given their global nature, there is a call for simply
expanding state communities to a larger cooperative framework of states
(e.g. European Union, African Union, NATO). Jürgen Habermas, for
instance, argues that the European project should
realize its democratic potential by evolving from an international into
a cosmopolitan community. On the other hand, worldwide problems do not
necessarily require a mere aggregation of states, since this move would
fail to address problems inherent in statist
models. In this context, a growing interdisciplinary field of research
probes these contemporary issues of global justice. Theoretical
approaches range from nationalism and cosmopolitanism to anarchism and
post-colonialism. We are looking for submissions that
challenge and transgress established statist approaches to global
justice.
St Antony’s International Review (STAIR), a peer-reviewed,
interdisciplinary journal of International Affairs, based at the
University of Oxford, is issuing a special edition to foster critical
debate about issues of global justice by inviting theoretical and
empirical contributions from a range of disciplines, including
Political Philosophy, Political Science, International Relations, Law,
Gender and Postcolonial Studies, and from activist perspectives. STAIR
welcomes insightful submissions focusing on one or
more interrelated dimensions of this topic:
First, redistributive justice in an unjust world encompasses the following questions:
· who is included within systems of distributive justice (humans, nonhumans, states, etc.)?
· who are the rightful recipients of goods and who is obligated to distribute these goods?
· what should the recipients have fair shares of (income, political influence, rights etc.)?
· and finally what is the criterion of distribution (equality, desert, capability etc.)?
Second, how should we re-conceive of responsibility to others beyond national boundaries:
· To what extent does responsibility exist beyond state communities?
· Given assymmetries of power, how ought we conceive of responsibility between privileged and underprivileged people(s)?
Third, how is our responsibility predicated on our ability to respond?
· What role do emotions and passions (e.g. pity, patriotism, fear, envy etc.) play for our ability to respond?
· How are ideas of moral obligations (e.g. fraternity) grounded in such emotions?
STAIR welcomes abstracts up to 500 words in length. STAIR also publishes
book reviews of works related to this theme. Please submit your
abstracts to STAIRbeyondthestate@gmail.com. For more details regarding
the submission procedures please consult www.stair-journal.org.