The volume, Empowering Affected Interests: Democratic Inclusion in a Globalized World, edited by Archon Fung and Sean W.D. Gray, is a compilation of new perspectives and new ways to extend one of the most enduring and hotly-debated principles in democratic theory—the All-Affected Principle (AAP). According to the AAP, “everyone who is affected by a decision should be able to influence that decision” (pg. 2). Given the ambiguity surrounding what it means to be affected, this principle has often been cast as too vague and sometimes too demanding, but the chapters in this volume, written by some of the most influential thinkers in the field, bring the principle back down to earth by demonstrating where it has use and, perhaps more importantly, where it does not.

One would expect an edited volume dedicated to just one principle to mostly include proponents of that principle. This volume finds strength in breaking this mold. Most of the authors disagree with at least some of the ways the AAP may be used. For Melissa S. Williams (Chapter 4), the AAP can be useful for evaluating and resisting already-constructed political powers based on their inclusiveness, but it falls short of providing a normative account of democratic agency, or of how these powers come to be. Anna Stilz (Chapter 5) takes an even more antagonistic stance against the AAP. Giving outsiders influence over a group’s internal decision-making, as is a consequence of the AAP, can help the less powerful assert claims over problems like pollution, but it does so at the expense of protecting a deeper principle of justice, self-determination. Joseph H. Carens (Chapter 6) takes on the AAP’s usefulness for thinking through one specific topic—immigration—and determines, quite surprisingly, that the AAP does not help us think more deeply about it. The most important questions about immigration are not about who should participate in immigration decisions but are rather about what those decisions should be. This volume is thus ripe with disagreements with its guiding principle.

But these disagreements with the AAP should not leave the principle to be abandoned, and a number of authors use the AAP’s faults to better clarify its strengths. Mark E. Warren (Chapter 2) argues that, while the AAP can help us conceive of democratic deficits, the principle collapses if it requires equal inclusions for all of our interdependencies, of which there are many. The AAP thus requires a limited scope, which for Warren means limiting the AAP to essential interests, specifically the interests of self-development and self-determination (this is in contrast to Stilz’s arguments in Chapter 5). Carol C. Gould (Chapter 9) claims that using the AAP as the essential principle in democratic theory would make our common activities excessively individualistic, but still argues that it can supplement other core democratic principles by providing a framework to deal with the increasingly dispersed outcomes of our decisions, although only as a secondary principle. For Clarissa Rile Hayward (Chapter 13), the AAP is inattentive to structural power, but instead of abandoning the AAP, she reformulates it as such: “People should have an adequate and equal social capacity to shape the power relations that delimit their fields of possible action” (pg. 231).

The volume finds its strengths in using the faults of the AAP to delimit its scope. Delimiting the AAP’s scope pulls the principle out of its ambiguity and back down to earth. That said, the volume is not without weaknesses. The main weakness I find with the volume is that it lacks synthesis. There are numerous common themes and points of contrast between the authors that are not spelled out in depth. Enabling self-determination, as an example, is proposed to be a distinct strength of the AAP by Warren (Chapter 2), but for Stilz (Chapter 5), the AAP is at odds with self-determination. The volume leaves this argument unresolved. Additionally, there are disagreements about what is called the “proportionality principle”—the idea that influence should be allocated relative to level of affectedness. These disagreements can be found between numerous authors, including Thomas Christiano (Chapter 11), who takes the proportionality principle to be fundamental, and Tomer J. Perry (Chapter 8), who resists strict proportionality in the AAP. Again, this disagreement remains unresolved. Still, these loose ends can serve as fodder for further discussions and contributions to the study of the AAP.

All in all, Empowering Affected Interests: Democratic Inclusion in a Globalized World is a must-read for anyone interested in the study of democracy. While I was not able to discuss every contribution in the fifteen-chapter volume here, each chapter discusses the AAP with nuance and makes a sometimes-ambiguous principle more concrete. The volume also extends the AAP into a number of key topics, including climate change (Chapter 12), philanthropy (Chapter 14), and INGOs (Chapter 15). I highly recommend the volume, as I believe it will serve as an essential resource for anyone interested in one of the core questions in the study of democracy—the question of who should, and who should not, be included in democratic decision-making.