The Third Wave of Theorizing Global Justice. A Review Essay. (original) (raw)

Debates on global justice are flourishing. In this review article I examine three recent contributions to this debate, which, even though they differ from each other in their overall approach and normative conclusion, exemplify what might be called the third wave of global justice theorizing. Aaron James’s Fairness in Practice, Mathias Risse’s On Global Justice, and Laura Valentini’s Justice in a Globalized World belong to the third wave of theories of global justice in virtue of a combination of features: They disentangle conceptual and normative disagreements that underpinned debates between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans, or statists and globalists; drawing on their refined conceptual toolkit, they develop both substantive and methodological alternatives to familiar positions; and they take these alternatives as a vantage point for thinking about what justice would require of particular aspects of the international order, sometimes in very practical terms. My discussion of the third wave proceeds in four steps. First, I shall present the key arguments and most important ideas of each book. I introduce Valentini’s coercion framework for thinking about questions of global justice, explain how James thinks of structural equity as a requirement of fairness in international trade, and present Risse’s approach of pluralist internationalism and its focus on common ownership of the earth. Second, I shall explain how each contribution exhibits at least some of the features characteristic of the third wave. On the one hand, this section explains why in spite of their differences a common label is appropriate for James, Risse and Valentini. On the other hand, it offers an account of the virtues and strengths of each approach. Third, I present what I believe is a systematic challenge to the third wave of global justice: Each way of covering the middle ground between statism and globalism comes with a particular difficulty, giving rise to what one may call a third wave dilemma. Finally, I conclude by sketching how the third wave is likely to transform the research agenda of international political theorists. Even those developing alternatives to the third wave will have to be measured by the standards it sets.