Justice Beyond Borders

Which political principles should govern global politics? Simon Caney engages with the work of philosophers, political theorists, and international relations scholars to examine some of the most pressing global issues of our time. Are there universal civil, political, and economic human rights? Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice? Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror. Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

Justice Without Borders is a collection of essays on international criminal law, European criminal law and international cooperation of distinguished authors that honours Judge Wolfgang Schomburg on the occassion of his 70th birthday on 9 April 2018.

The cosmopolitan idea of justice is commonly accused of not taking seriously the special ties and commitments of nationality and patriotism. This is because the ideal of impartial egalitarianism, which is central to the cosmopolitan view, seems to be directly opposed to the moral partiality inherent to nationalism and patriotism. In this book, Kok-Chor Tan argues that cosmopolitan justice, properly understood, can accommodate and appreciate nationalist and patriotic commitments, setting limits for these commitments without denying their moral significance. This book offers a defense of cosmopolitan justice against the charge that it denies the values that ordinarily matter to people, and a defence of nationalism and patriotism against the charge that these morally partial ideals are fundamentally inconsistent with the obligations of global justice. Accessible and persuasive, this book will have broad appeal to political theorists and moral philosophers.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. We must find new and innovative ways of conceptualizing transboundary energy issues, of embedding concerns of ethics or justice into energy policy, and of operationalizing response to them. This book stems from the emergent gap; the need for comparative approaches to energy justice, and for those that consider ethical traditions that go beyond the classical Western approach. This edited volume unites the fields of energy justice and comparative philosophy to provide an overarching global perspective and approach to applying energy ethics. We contribute to this purpose in four sections: setting the scene, practice, applying theory to practice, and theoretical approaches. Through the chapters featured in the volume, we position the book as one that contributes to energy justice scholarship across borders of nations, borders of ways of thinking and borders of disciplines. The outcome will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students studying energy justice, ethics and environment, as well as energy scholars, policy makers, and energy analysts.

Global political actors, from states and NGOs to activist groups and individuals, exert influence in societies beyond their own in myriad ways--including via public criticism, consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns, sanctions, and forceful intervention. Often, they do so in the name of justice-promotion. While attempts to promote justice in other societies can do good, they are also often subject to moral criticism and raise several serious moral questions. For example, are there ways to promote one's own ideas about justice in another society while still treating its members tolerantly? Are there ways to do so without disrespecting their legitimate political institutions or undermining their collective self-determination? To understand the ethics of justice-promoting intervention, Lucia M. Rafanelli moves beyond the traditional focus of other scholarship in this area on states waging wars or employing other conventional tools of coercive foreign policy. Specifically, Rafanelli constructs a philosophically-grounded and nuanced ethics of intervention to determine when attempts to promote justice in foreign societies are morally permissible. Promoting Justice Across Borders develops ethical standards for justice-promoting intervention that call on us to rethink received notions about the ordinary bounds of politics, and to abandon the thought that politics does and should take place primarily within the state. These ethical standards also give us a model for how to engage in political struggles for justice on a global scale--not only in conditions of supreme emergency, but in the ordinary circumstances of everyday global politics. They therefore form the basis of a cosmopolitanism that is neither premised upon nor aimed at bringing about the end of politics. Ultimately, Rafanelli shows how the promotion of justice everywhere can be the legitimate (political) concern of people anywhere.

This text examines which political principles should govern global politics, exploring the ethical issues that arise at the global level and addressing questions such as: are there universal values? Is national self-determination defensible? And when, if ever, may political regimes wage war?