Seminar in Global Justice

Catalog description

Until fairly recently, the dominant view of international relations has been that the governments and citizens of one country have no, or extremely few, obligations to those beyond their borders. With the rapid growth in globalization has come a drastic shift in attitudes about our moral and political obligations to those with whom we share global institutions of trade and finance but neither legal systems nor national identities. This course aims to introduce students to the problem of global distributive justice in the context of neoliberal globalization, with emphases on both theoretical accounts of justice and the practical implications of those accounts for important current global issues. In addition to familiarizing students with contemporary debates within global justice, this course aims to help students strengthen their skills in analytic reading, interpretation, and writing. Assignments are therefore structured to emphasize writing and analysis (rather than content-reproduction, as in exams). This course is conducted as a seminar and is discussion- rather than lecture-based.