International Economic Justice in a Troubled Era

Tadhg O’Laoghaire (Keele University); Nina van Heeswijk (University of Gothenburg)

Many seminal discussions of international economic justice (e.g. Pogge 2002, Wenar 2008, Miller 2010, James 2012) were written during what, in hindsight, appears to have been a unique historical moment – when the United States’ global influence was at or near its apex, major states enjoyed an unprecedented era of peaceful relations, and the persistence and pre-eminence of multilateral institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF was largely taken for granted. Today we live in a different era. Democracy is declining globally (Diamond 2021), while the climate emergency accelerates in severity (IPCC 2023). Emerging powers like China, Brazil, and India have become increasingly central to the global economy, while mutual suspicion and hostility has reduced major powers’ commitment to economic openness and intensified their efforts to dominate pivotal industries, from AI to green tech (Miller 2022, Sanderson 2022). With the return of major interstate warfare, and the subsequent weaponisation of economic instruments in response to Russian aggression (see Bown 2023), these trends have only increased. Looking beyond the state, increasing economic and even political power has become concentrated in the hands of a small selection of technology giants and investment management companies, leading some to speculate that we are moving beyond capitalism towards a new economic order entirely (e.g. Kotkin 2023, Varoufakis 2023). It is not obvious that the international justice literature as it currently stands is equipped to make normative sense of agents’ obligations in this new era.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on international economic justice to reflect on how existing justice theory relates to, and new theoretical challenges are generated by, contemporary geopolitical and other developments. We welcome a wide variety of responses to such questions, including work which defends the continued relevance of existing frameworks, and work focusing on corporate and individual as well as state-level duties of justice. To increase the diversity of perspectives brought to bear on the subject, we welcome contributions from (in addition to political philosophy and theory) cognate disciplines such as political economy and international relations.

Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:

• How should we conceptualise the economic duties of emerging developing countries?
• What are the ethical merits or drawbacks of multilateralism in international economic governance, versus the increasing tendency towards regionalism, bilateralism, and even unilateralism?
• How should non-state actors, such as corporations, NGO´s, and consumers respond to injustices in international economic practices?
• To what extent are issues of international tax competition subject to an analysis of international economic justice, and how do they relate to analyses of fairness in trade?
• What responsibilities do actors have when trading with authoritarian states, including authoritarian superpowers such as China?
• What does fair resource management, or fair resource competition, amount to in the context of the green energy transition?
• What, if anything, is wrong with weaponizing states’ economic interdependence in pursuit of geopolitical goals?