In this insightful book, Brooke Ackerly offers bold ideas about how to rethink approaches to tackling injustice. She grounds her theory of global justice and responsibility in everyday experiences of injustice and in common practices for taking constructive political action. In her view, if we want to learn about injustice, a sensible approach is to look at cases in which people are engaged in struggles to combat actual injustice in our world. We can learn much from examining such cases and practices.

In Part I, Ackerly provides an account of injustice that emphasizes the need for personal stories in coming to understand what injustice really is. Part II offers what she describes as a methodology for noticing and addressing injustice. Part III is particularly original and contains some of the most inspirational ideas, in my view. Here, she discusses how we should take responsibility for global injustice in ways that support strong, connected, and mutually reinforcing movements for transformative politics. As we see, particularly in Part III, human rights serves as a central focus for her approach concerning how we do so.

Ackerly draws extensively on two long case studies. These are particularly well chosen as they illustrate the complexities involved in analyzing injustice and responding appropriately to any real-world, substantial problem with which we might grapple. The two detailed case studies are the 2008 Food Crisis and the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse. By considering these important actual cases, she is able to explore and tease out structural features of the political economy that gave rise to the problems. No simple causal account of liability explains these disasters sufficiently well. She is also able to show how real-world webs of activism have been transforming local and international politics, and these have led to real gains in improved human rights practices. She considers her view to be a grounded normative theory of responsibility, as it is informed by actual struggle by activists for human rights improvements.

We need to be accountable for how we take action, and be especially accountable to those we are aiming to assist. So, for instance, consider how boycotting clothes made in Bangladesh would lead to massive loss of jobs for those workers in Bangladesh. We need to listen to the workers’ thoughts on how best to help them. Most of them do not support boycotts. Rather, they want improved processes and practices concerning their work conditions. We can help them achieve these goals. Using the case studies, Ackerly is also able to show how to make constructive progress in addressing these complex problems throughout various roles, such as being politically responsible consumers, advocates, or philanthropists, joining with others to transform the nature of our political communities and the networks for change among them. Indeed, through such transformative action, we are able to redefine the boundaries of political community.

In some of the earlier, more theoretical parts of the book, Ackerly covers several ways in which patterns of injustice and inequality limit our abilities to see injustice in relationships, especially those that embody unequal power relations. These include habituation, misinterpretation, and marginalization. The author also describes how injustice gets normalized as a product of habituation through familiarity. We also need to appreciate our cognitive limitations; we cannot know everything we would like to know before we can and should take responsibility for injustice.

Part III develops an account of how we take responsibility justly, by elaborating on a human rights theory of political responsibility. Ackerly’s theory relies on, and develops, an account of human rights “that emerges through the political struggles of those whose rights are denied” (p. 190). The author’s account of taking responsibility for injustice importantly focuses on how we take responsibility for injustice, for instance, in ways that challenge hierarchies and privileges, and support rights enjoyment. She offers “principles-in-practice,” which play a key role in shaping the contours of how we should take responsibility for injustice in just ways. For example, we should think about issues with an awareness of their cross-issue dimensions; we should promote “the capacity for self-advocacy and other political skills of ourselves and those throughout our partners and allies” (p. 193); and we should work in ways that enhance learning.

Taking responsibility for injustice should also be done in ways that support the ongoing human rights politics of change. Indeed, we should “understand human rights as a qualitative description of the kind of political life we live together, or want to live together” (p. 213), and so it matters greatly how we promote human rights and “how we take responsibility for rights enjoyment” (p. 213). An important caveat Ackerly offers is that even though human rights activists support claims that rights should be enjoyed universally, this does not entail that strategies to improve the security or enjoyment of human rights need to look the same everywhere. There certainly can be local variation in our engagement in struggles against injustice, even if we use the common language of human rights.

For Ackerly, when we can take responsibility for injustice in the right ways, we join with others who are similarly engaged, nurturing and cultivating broader political networks so that we enhance our capacities to tackle a variety of existing or emerging forms of injustice. She believes that “the key to just responsibility for injustice” is a political commitment “to transforming exploitable power inequalities by (1) being inclusive of experiences of marginalization and oppression, (2) making connections across those affected by different issues, (3) developing our and others’ capacities for advocacy, particularly self-advocacy, (4) building bridges among movement actors and cultivating a web of networks created by that bridge building, and (5) conscientiously learning from ourselves and others in struggle, expanding our awareness of injustice itself” (p. 223).

While much of the book focuses on consumption practices and the role of consumers in making justice improvements in this domain, the author does discuss ways in which we can take responsibility for injustice in other roles and domains. One of the most interesting sets of observations concerns how we should see our jobs and professions as further avenues for promoting justice that also deserve our concern. We should examine our professional responsibilities and consider how we do our jobs in light of human rights concerns. I believe this is an undertheorized and under-discussed area that deserves more attention, and I hope Ackerly and others will focus on it in future work on taking responsibility for injustice.

All in all, I would place Ackerly’s excellent research program in the same camp as Iris Marion Young’s later projects (such as her social connection model of political responsibility). Indeed, we might see Just Responsibility as a useful development of Young’s most promising ideas. Given the wide appeal of Young’s social connectedness model of political responsibility, I expect Ackerly’s book to draw a large audience. It certainly deserves to be widely read by all those interested in issues of justice. It has many fresh ideas to offer and helps us gain important insights concerning the way that we should view global injustice and how we should go about addressing its many challenges.