Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention

Available for purchase from Oxford University Press • Now in paperback!

Honorable Mention, 2022 ISA International Ethics Book Award • Reviewed in Ethics & International Affairs and Nationalities Papers • Symposium in CRISPP

This book begins with a simple proposal: we need a new political theory of global politics to guide us in a world increasingly marked by global interconnection, transnational activism on the part of non-state actors, and political actors that utilize many different means (besides force and coercion) to exert influence on the world stage.

In the book, I develop such a theory by examining the ethics of “reform intervention”—a category that includes any attempt to promote justice in a society other than one’s own. I identify several dimensions along which reform interventions can vary (the degree of control interveners exercise over recipients, the urgency of interveners’ objectives, the costs an intervention poses to recipients, and how interveners interact with recipients’ existing political institutions) and examine how these variations affect the moral permissibility of reform intervention. I argue that, once one acknowledges the variety of forms reform intervention can take, it becomes clear that not all of them are vulnerable to the objections usually leveled against intervention. In particular, not all reform interventions treat recipients with intolerance, disrespect recipients’ legitimate institutions, or undermine recipients’ collective self-determination.

Combining philosophical analysis and discussion of several real-world cases, I investigate which kinds of reform intervention are or are not vulnerable to these objections. In so doing, I also develop new understandings of the roles toleration, legitimacy, and collective self-determination should play in global politics. After developing principles to specify when different kinds of reform interventions are morally permissible, I investigate how these principles could be applied in the real world. Ultimately, I argue that some reform interventions are all-things-considered morally permissible and that sometimes reform intervention is morally required. Moreover, we are sometimes morally required to open our own societies to reform intervention. Taken together, my findings suggest we should re-conceive the ordinary boundaries of political activity and begin to see the pursuit of justice via political contestation as humanity’s collective project.

ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE

The cover depicts a Dymaxion projection of the world map. This is also known as the Fuller projection, after its creator, Buckminster Fuller. The more common projection, the Mercator projection, reflects (roughly) what would happen if you mapped the world onto a sphere and then flattened it out (imagine drawing the world map on an orange, then peeling the orange and flattening out the peel). This results in size distortion. E.g., the Mercator projection is sometimes criticized for making Africa look smaller compared to North America than their actual relative sizes would suggest. The standard rendering of the Mercator projection also equates the global North with “up” and presents the world as many distinct land masses separated by oceans. The Dymaxion projection, by contrast, reflects what would happen if you mapped the world onto an icosahedron (a 20-sided, 3-dimensional solid) and then flattened it out. This results in less size distortion. The rendering of the Dymaxion projection on the cover does not equate North with “up” and presents the world as one interconnected land mass. In a way, it visually represents some of the the book’s goals: to challenge conventional ideas about the proper boundaries of politics and about the (actual or aspirational) separateness of different societies, and to challenge the hierarchies that influence world politics (e.g., those that privilege people from the global North). I am also happy to bring attention to Justin Kunimune, who created the specific image used on the cover, and who makes freely available maps using his own freely available map-making software.