Lea Ypi's "Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency"

Lea Ypi is a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD.

Ypi applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Analysing the issue of the principles of global justice from a fundamentally appropriate point of view requires focusing on global circumstances of injustice and explaining how they generate egalitarian claims. An interpretation of the function and purpose of existent institutions which does not merely rely on the facts of poverty but is also able to investigate the moral and empirical nature of its causes offers the sort of relational analysis of global injustice upon which the cosmopolitan demand of a particular kind of global justice principle (e.g. egalitarian) can be grounded. In other words, the sort of justification outlined above provides a plausible account of the relevant circumstances in which egalitarian requirements might apply and of the reasons supporting the emergence of such requirements

This passage summarizes one of the key methodological points the book makes in order to identify relevant normative principles compatible with the ideal of global equality. The book criticizes current normative political theories troubled by the persistence of global poverty but neglecting an analysis of its causes. I contend that the right approach to global justice should combine normative requirements with a causal analysis of global poverty able to tell us not merely why poverty is what it is but also what triggers it. Applying a dialectical method of enquiry to the relations between rich and poor citizens of the world and focusing in particular on the distribution of global positional goods, my book introduces and develops the concept of avant-garde political agency to provide an egalitarian account of global justice that tells us not merely what justice requires in the global sphere but also how to change the world compatibly with its requirements.

Learn more about Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue