Since the publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice in 1971, debates about global justice have been dominated by liberal and analytic philosophers who seek to scale the concept of distributive justice up to global politics. Drawing on Rawls’s key analytic device—the veil of ignorance—political philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have reworked justice as fairness to account for entrenched inequalities in international society. Duncan Bell’s Empire, Race and Global Justice breaks out of these constricted frameworks by foregrounding the lineages of race, empire, and colonialism that have constituted the modern international order.
In his introduction, Bell explores the various ways that liberal theories of global justice have disavowed the centrality of race and empire. One central reason concerns the complex historical relationship between liberalism and empire. Bell outlines three ways to understand this relationship: (1) the rejection thesis, wherein imperialism and an authentic commitment to liberal principles are incompatible; (2) the necessity thesis, which casts the two as symbiotic and mutually constitutive; and (3) the contingency thesis, in which the relationship can only be understood in historical context, leading to a view of liberalism as either anti-imperial or imperial. Although the rejection thesis lacks many serious adherents, liberal theorists of global justice sidestep these debates by ignoring the central role of imperial history in shaping contemporary conceptions of global justice.
The disavowal of imperial history is another key reason why global justice debates have failed to grapple with race and empire. As Jeanne Morefield notes in her chapter, liberal frameworks “assume history has no bearing on the practice of theorizing global justice today” (p. 188). Though philosophers like Beitz and Pogge might mention how present inequalities between the Global North and South are rooted in imperial history, their theoretical frameworks are largely untouched by the specific dynamics of that history. What Morefield calls “ahistorical liberalism” (p. 186) and the evasion of “the burdens of history” (p. 3) comprise a consistent target throughout the volume. Along with Bell’s introduction, the contributors productively expand the boundaries of global justice, rooting it in both historical and contemporary legacies of race, imperialism, and colonization. This landmark volume will be sure to open new avenues for normative and historical theorizing of the racial and imperial dynamics of the contemporary global order.
Contributors to the volume shift debates about global justice in political theory, political philosophy, and international law in three key respects. First, they reframe conventional concerns of global justice such as distributive justice, just war, human rights, and the rights of migration across national borders by accounting for the central racial and imperial contexts shaping these key concepts. Second, they pose new challenges by amending this list of familiar themes in global justice debates: struggles against global white supremacy, indigenous struggles against settler colonial dispossession, and the transnational reach of corporate dominance. Third, they expand the archive of global justice beyond conventional arenas of Anglo-American philosophy by building an alternative genealogy of the concept that includes theorists like Edward Said, W. E. B. Du Bois, Salvador Allende, and activists of the Global South associated with the World Social Forum.
Bell’s introduction helpfully frames the volume and gives it an admirable degree of coherence that foregrounds these central theoretical advances. However, one issue he leaves unaddressed concerns the meaning of the “global” in global justice. Despite this inattention to meaningful delineation of the volume’s central concept, one can discern three ways in which the “global” modifies claims for and theories of justice. In the first, justice is commensurate with cosmopolitanism, which as Anne Phillips writes, “typically speaks to us as individuals, stressing our rights and obligations as human beings rather than as members of a community or citizens of a nation” (p. 186). For Phillips, this conventional notion of global justice relies on methodological individualism and tradition/modern distinctions that obscure the historical contexts of the hierarchical interstate order.
In the second meaning of the “global,” which is probably the dominant one in the volume, justice entails addressing postcolonial hierarchies within the international state system. Here, global justice resides in forms of postcolonial solidarity as formerly colonized populations seek the transformation of imperial hierarchies that persist after formal decolonization. Sundhya Pahuja, for instance, shows how Chilean president Salvador Allende asserted “international institutional control over transnational corporations” (p. 76) by invoking authority over private property within postcolonial nation-states and by internationalizing the regulation of corporate conduct. Pahuja then demonstrates how US foreign policy makers like Henry Kissinger reasserted informal imperial control by inverting Allende’s formula, which internationalized private property regimes and restricted corporate regulation to national politics.
Although understandable, this second meaning risks reifying the “global” as a distinct sphere of justice confined to relations within the international state system, which is then separated out from “domestic” claims for justice in nation-states. For this reason, the most compelling and original contributions cast the “global” as transnational relations between peoples that move across and through the boundaries of race, nation, colony, and empire. For example, Katrina Forrester brilliantly shows how black power activists in the 1960s United States framed black reparations claims through anti-imperialist rhetoric that cast African Americans as an internally colonized population. In this regard, reparations claims for national minorities in the United States were global in the sense that they connected to broader anticolonial struggles, despite the fact that black power activists directed these claims at the nation-state. In the 1970s and 1980s, liberal political philosophers domesticated and in turn de-radicalized reparations claims by disconnecting them from this anti-imperial context.
Inés Valdez’s contribution similarly examines anticolonial solidarities between African Americans and the colonized world in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Tracking Du Bois’s efforts to build anticolonial, transnational coalitions by convening numerous Pan-African conferences throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Valdez upends the predominant focus of global justice on obligations owed by the Global North to South. Du Bois’s work, with its attention to the complex interweaving of different forms of imperialism and racialization, warns theorists of global justice against “separating structures of domination neatly between geographical and political units and assuming their internal homogeneity” (p. 123). Robert Nichols’s essay on the transnational connections between indigenous struggles in the Americas also “presses upon conventional and taken-for-granted distinctions, such as between the domestic and foreign, internal and external, the Global North and Global South, the West and ‘the rest’” (p. 231). Because they challenge these central distinctions, indigenous struggles against settler states receive little attention by theorists of global justice.
Together, these and other essays deconstruct rigid distinctions between the international system and national politics by tracking the transnational circulation of claims for justice and by demonstrating the construction of “the global” as a separate sphere of justice. Thus, one of the clear though underdeveloped implications of the volume is the blurring of any strict delineation of justice within bounded nation-states and justice in international politics. If, as Bell notes in his introduction, more than 80% of the world was once colonized by Europe, then attention to race and empire is indispensable to any conception of global justice. From this perspective, the adjective “global” does not name a distinct spatial scale, but rather the fundamental condition of all contemporary claims for justice. Indeed, in a world where even white nationalism has gone international, attunement to race and empire demands that all justice is global justice.
