It has been well-established that many of the injustices that people around the world experience every day, from food insecurity to unsafe labor conditions and natural disasters, are the result of wide-scale structural problems of politics and economics. These are not merely random personal problems or consequences of bad luck or bad planning. Confronted by this fact, it is natural to ask what should or can we do to mitigate everyday injustices? In one sense, we answer this question when we buy the local homeless street newspaper, decide where to buy our clothes, remember our reusable bags when we shop, donate to disaster relief, or send letters to corporations about labor rights. But given the global scale of injustices related to poverty, environmental change, gender, and labor, can these individual acts really impact the seemingly intractable global social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate and exacerbate them? Moreover, can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences?
Just Responsibility integrates ways of taking political responsibility into a rich theory of political community, accountability, and leadership, in which taking responsibility for injustice itself transforms the fabric of political life.
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“Brooke Ackerly is a political theorist who knows how to make questions of global accountability come alive. I can already hear the lively classroom discussions.”
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Cynthia Enloe, author of The Big Push