Corridors to Global Justice?

Abstract

Challenges and Paths to Global Justice. Edited By H. Richard Friman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 185 pp., $69.95 (ISBN-10: 1-4039-7583-3). The twentieth annual conference of the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (WPICS) was held at Marquette University in 2004. Challenges and Paths to Global Justice presents a selection of papers from this conference. Edited by H. Richard Friman, the director of the Institute for Transnational Justice at Marquette University, this volume contributes to the growing literature on global justice and ethics and international relations. As with “equality,” “justice” is one of the most contested words in politics and philosophy. Efforts to conceive a comprehensive framework of “global justice” have drawn similar controversy (Caney 2005; Kuper 2005). In the introduction to Challenges and Paths to Global Justice , Friman provides a useful summary of three groupings of theoretical approaches to global justice: Rawls and Justice, Cosmopolitanism and Justice, and The English School and Justice. While the Rawlsian approach bounds the application of justice within the limits of domestic societies, the cosmopolitan perspective envisions connections and obligations of individuals worldwide, independent of specific societies or sovereign governments (Fisk 1993:48–67). The English School, on the other hand, explores whether common interests, values and laws have emerged within an “international society” of states pledged to uphold “substantive moral standards” and universal conceptualizations of justice (Boucher and Kelly 1998:80–101). Friman briefly assessed the eight subsequent contributions …