Can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this work, Brooke A. Ackerly argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice. Ultimately, 'Just Responsibility' offers a theory of global injustice and political responsibility that can guide action
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From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements.
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This piece introduces a symposium on Luis Cabrera's The Humble Cosmopolitan (Oxford University Press, 2020), which is a comparative political theory text in three senses. First, it expands conventional conversation partners to include authors who are engaged in constructing their nation out of a colonial context, principally, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar is a scholar, politician, Chairman of the Constitutional Drafting Committee for the newly independent India, and Dalit activist ("Dalit" being the self-applied term for those outside of the Hindu caste hierarchy) and Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar, the historical thought leader of Hindu nationalism. Second, Cabrera reaches across the colonized-colonizer divide, engaging with intra-nation difference, enabling cross-time comparisons, broadening the moral and political meanings of, contributions to, and criticisms of cosmopolitan thinking. Third, using grounded normative theory, it is methodologically comparative, utilizing the author's own empirical research through over 150 interviews of activists and politicians from both Indian and European cosmopolitan and anti-cosmopolitan struggles.
By understanding populism as an "anti-" politics we can see two strands of populism: the anti-democratic strand which marginalizes certain groups of people and the anti-structural injustice strand coming from marginalized people. The potential of this anti-structural injustice activism encourages activists to expand their coalitional politics and government and philanthropic donors to see the import of funding and otherwise supporting work against structural injustice that explicitly takes on patriarchy and racism, among the full gamut of ideologies based on hierarchy and injustice.
Abstract This article argues that a politics against domination needs to take on oppression (violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and epistemic injustice) and that doing so requires attending to the rage and resistance of those oppressed. Politics against Domination does not. However, the adaptive approach to political theory, which Ian Shapiro advocates and models in the book, could lead us to modifications of the institutions and practices of politics against domination if it were more thoroughly informed by the politics of rage and resistance cultivated into and in social movements. Politics against Domination is full of cautions against progressives' institutional proposals (strengthening separation of powers, courts, and deliberation in the Senate) because they may not consistently create obstacles to domination, but rather be conduits for it or obstacles to redressing it. Proceeding cautiously given this concern, I offer some institutional renovations that might support the hearing of marginalized views.
As part of a celebration of Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family (JGF), this article notes how some impacts of the book were so accepted that their original source (JGF) has been forgotten. It goes on to make three critical arguments about 1) Okin's pared‐down account of gender injustice, 2) her choice to embrace the Rawlsian distributive view of justice, and 3) her treatment of the family as the linchpin of gender injustice.
"Girls rising" offers a grounded, critical, and human rights theory of political responsibility for global injustice. This theory of human rights tells us not just what rights are but how to take responsibility for bringing about their enjoyment for all. It grounds a theory of human rights in the political view of human beings as fundamentally relational and human rights as fundamentally collectively enjoyed. Using girls' education activism as an illustrative issue area, it outlines five political practices and what they tell us about how to take political responsibility for human rights, in a rights-based way.
