Counterpoints for a New Agenda in the Study of Global Injustices

Abstract

Debates about global justice have long dominated the fields of political theory, IR, international law and the social sciences and humanities in general since at least the 1990s. Global justice as a field emerged in the Anglo-American (and analytical) tradition with its own abstract framework based on ideal theorizing, as pioneered by John Rawls, and generated its own internal and rather ahistor- ical debates within that tradition. This is not to say that its main concerns were not relevant to other scholarship and academic traditions, but global jus- tice remained for a long time a confined field to the extent that scholars out- side the analytical Anglo-American tradition very rarely engaged with it. It does not come as a surprise that the emergence of global justice in the 1990s as a central area in international political and legal theory coincided with what Martti Koskenniemi has suggestively termed theet hical turn in human rights, that is, the adoption of individual human rights as the main regulatory prin- ciple in global politics. Yet in recent years a new body of scholarship in polit- ical theory, IR and international law has contributed to shift the focus from this previous ethical turn towards a historical turn, exploring how past his- torical injustices, such the past legacies of empire, colonialism, international inequalities and racism have shaped the contemporary international order and its current institutional structure of global governance.