Citizenship, International Justice, and the View from the South

The project is based primarily on a book manuscript under contract with Routledge Press: Citizenship in a Globalized World. This book articulates an “outward-looking” conception of citizenship that takes into account the responsibility citizens have for the acts of their state in a deeply unjust world. The book begins with citizens of robust democracies but moves to consider responsibility in newly and semi-democratic contexts. Moving beyond the book, which is due in March 2020, this project will investigate this newly- and semi-democratic context in more detail: in particular, it will explore what duties such states might have in the international realm. This theory of international relations from the perspective of the South will interrogate underexplored questions such as: what do we owe as a matter of justice to our fellow African states? Are these duties affected by how internally legitimate these states are? How do we function ethically in an historically unjust international trade system? Taken holistically this project creates the resources for citizens of all kinds of democracies to better understand the role of their state in perpetuating or ending global injustice, and the normative implications their states’ actions have for them as a typical citizen.