This article scrutinizes recent histories of colonial and international law that use metropolitan reactions to the ‘scandals of empire’ to project a reform-oriented version of European colonialism. In French West Africa, most scandals never reached the level of metropolitan debate; they hit dead ends in colonial bureaucracies. Analyzing one dead-end scandal, the M'Pésoba Affair, this article argues that colonial justice on the ground often adhered to a politics of expediency, not a reformist rule of law. To maintain their precarious grip on power, colonial administrators had to simultaneously appease their superiors, economic interests, and powerful African actors. Resolving the M'Pésoba Affair, for one, entailed navigating the complex entanglements of cotton production, chiefly disputes, Islamic policy, and interracial sexual relationships in a backwater of empire marked by anticolonial revolt and world war. Especially in moments of crisis, political constraints shaped the application of justice.

Switzerland is widely known for its successful integration of linguistic and religious minorities. At the same time, a prolonged absence from the collegial, seven-member central government can give rise to feelings of political exclusion. This begs the question whether inclusion really has the desired, let any alone any effect on political behavior. This paper makes use of the frequent use of referendums in Switzerland to assess the extent to which citizens vote differently when somebody from their canton of residence sits in the central government. Studied are all the 670 nationwide referendums held between 1848 and February 2022. Analyzed are cantonal turnout, approval rates, likelihood to vote as the federal government recommends, and chances of being overruled by the state-wide majority. The three main findings are that 1) government inclusion is indeed significantly associated with some of the positive effects theorized, 2) on average, these effects are very small, but also that 3) there are some stark cross-cantonal differences, which are due mostly to national minority languages. In short, including minorities matters more than including majorities.

What does vaccine justice require at the domestic and global levels? In this essay, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, we argue that deliberative-democratic participation is needed to answer this question. To be effective on the ground, abstract principles of vaccine justice need to be further specified through policy. Any vaccination strategy needs to find ways to prioritize conflicting moral claims to vaccine allocation, clarify the grounds on which low-risk people are being asked to vaccinate, and reach a balance between special duties toward countrymen and universal duties toward foreigners. Reasonable moral disagreement on these questions is bound to exist in any community. But such disagreement threatens to undermine vaccine justice insofar as the chosen vaccination strategy (and its proposed specification of vaccine justice) lacks public justification. Inclusive democratic deliberation about vaccine justice is a good mechanism for tackling such moral disagreement. By allowing residents and citizens to participate in the specification of abstract principles of vaccine justice, and their translation into policy, democratic deliberation can enhance the legitimacy of any vaccination strategy and boost compliance with it.

The democratic backsliding that has accelerated across the globe over the past decade has included a rollback of liberal arts and sciences (LAS) as a system of university education. This essay explores the origins and goals of the global LAS education reform movement. I argue that while the movement is under threat largely due to its principled value of educating democratic citizens, it still has powerful potential and global impact; in part because LAS education is primarily an indigenous phenomenon adapting to local circumstances. I also argue that U.S. universities could contribute more constructively to the movement if they conceived of their role as global civic actors that conduct themselves in the spirit of mutuality and reciprocity, not as multinational corporations that channel neoliberal tendencies to maximize revenue. U.S. critics of the global LAS movement should also pay heed to the United States’ own history. Specifically, they can learn from historically Black colleges and universities how, operating under the extreme authoritarianism of the Jim Crow era, they managed to produce leaders who shaped a more democratic country. Liberal arts education produces short term benefits for students and alumni, but in the democratic context it is a long-term wager.

How should we understand the relationship between global justice and global democracy? One popular view is captured by the aphorism “No global justice without global democracy.” According to Dryzek and Tanasoca's reading of this aphorism, a particular form of deliberative global democracy is seen as the way to specify and justify what global justice is and requires in various contexts. Taking its point of departure in a criticism of this proposal, this essay analyzes how to best understand the relationship between global justice and global democracy. The aim is not to offer a first-order substantial account of this relationship, but to theorize the normative boundary conditions for such an account; that is, the conditions that any plausible theory should respect. These conditions take the form of what is here called a “three-layered view,” which is specified through three claims. It is argued, first, that global democracy is best seen as a partial normative ideal; second, that global democracy must be grounded in fundamental principles of justice; and third, that global democracy is an ideal through which applied principles of distributive justice are formulated and justified in light of reasonable disagreement about what justice requires.

Several decades of scholarship on international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have established their important role in leading cosmopolitan political projects framed around moral ideals of global justice. But contemporary legitimacy crises in international liberalism call for a reexamination of NGOs’ global justice activism, considering how they should navigate the real-world moral contestations and shifting power dynamics that can impede their pursuit of justice. Recent work by deliberative-democratic theorists has argued that NGOs can help resolve disputes about global justice norms by facilitating legitimate communicative exchanges among the diverse political voices of subjected global communities on the correct interpretation and implementation of global justice norms. In response, this essay argues for an expanded account of the political roles of NGOs in global justice activism, which reflects greater sensitivity to the multifaceted political dynamics through which power in real-world global politics is constituted and contested. It is shown that in some NGOs’ real-world operational contexts, structural power imbalances and social division or volatility can undercut the operation of the ideal deliberative processes prescribed by democratic theory—calling for further attention to work focused on mitigating power imbalances, building solidarity, and organizing power in parallel or as a precursor to deliberative-democratic processes.

The article provides a philosophical explication of an African religious moral philosophy. Often philosophers repudiate the view that African Traditional Religions (ATR) can embody a religious moral philosophy. Theologians, on the other hand, tend to believe that ATR can, but they often do not provide a systematic account of such an ethical system. The article demonstrates that ATR can embody an under-explored moral philosophy. ATR refers to indigenous religious ideas, beliefs, and practices of the indigenous people below the Sahara. The article will invoke the metaphysical and moral concept of vitality as the basis to construct an African religious moral philosophy. (It is worth noting that this article merely constructs, but it does not defend, this ethical system.) Vitality is the spiritual energy that originates, maximally inheres and defines God, and God has since distributed it to all that exists, albeit in varying degrees. By ‘moral philosophy’, the article focuses on (1) meta-ethics (it proffers a vitality-based account of the moral terms right and wrong); (2) normative theory (it expounds on the perfectionist and deontological principles of right action); and (3) applied ethics (it invokes a vitality-based conception of moral status to explore environmental ethics and select bioethical themes).

The conflict in Ukraine indicates some of the features of a potential post-liberal order and raises several potential ethical issues that may arise for international interventions as the world changes. What types of interventions, if any, are justifiable in response to situations such as the one in Ukraine? Can interventions be permissible given the potential undermining of universalist claims that are often used to support them? How should states prioritize between situations if there is an even greater number of global challenges in a post-liberal order? Three new books—Solferino 21 by Hugo Slim, Decolonizing Human Rights by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, and Promoting Justice across Borders by Lucia Rafanelli—can help to navigate these questions. Drawing on their insights, this essay argues that reform interventions can be justified to defend the liberal international order, that intervention can be defended from a relativist basis, and that socioeconomic rights should be given greater priority.

Studies of futurity typically privilege licit economies and assume that the lines between licit and illicit institutions are largely clear to the actors involved. But what happens to those actors, and their grip on the future, when such lines blur? This article explores the epistemic crossroads of futurity and legality by focusing on ambiguity. From 1986 to 2009, the Stanford Financial Group reaped billions of dollars selling fraudulent investment products to thousands of Venezuelans. During this span, Venezuelans suffered successive governments’ shambolic currency schemes, bureaucratic dysfunction, judicial corruption, political upheaval, and worsening street crime. As crises became routinized, middle-class Venezuelans faced “normative ambiguity,” a loss of familiar legal and moral certainties, undercutting their sense of futurity. Drawing on 54 interviews with defrauded investors and others linked to the case, this article shows how such ambiguity left investors vulnerable to a fraud that promised to restore that threatened futurity.