Involve’s ‘Room for a View’ is an exciting contribution to the debate on the shape of democracy’s future

Simon Burall of Involve, a think tank specialising in democracy and public engagement, recently authored a new report entitled ‘Room for a View’, which focusses on the idea of UK democracy as a deliberative process. Here, Ed Hammond from the Centre for Public Scrutiny and Temi Ogunye of Citizens Advice respond to the piece

How will capitalism end?

Department of Government PhD candidates Anahi Wiedenbrug, Antoine Louette and Temi Ogunye reflect on Wolfgang Streeck’s recent public lecture at LSE titled ‘How Will Capitalism End ?’, which took place on Monday 7 November. Listen to the event podcast

By any means necessary? A liberal theory of social justice activism

Political philosophers have produced a wide variety of competing theories of the perfectly just society, but they have paid less attention to the question of how perfect social justice is to be achieved or worked towards. This is especially odd because most, perhaps all, societies are unjust by any plausible yardstick. Let us call any attempt to advance social justice or remedy social injustice social justice activism. My aim in this dissertation is to develop a theory of social justice activism. I make three contributions in particular. First, I seek to establish the grounds of the duty to remedy social injustice. I argue that we should appeal to multiple principles to ground remedial duties. Second, I argue that, in order to understand how to remedy social injustice, we must first understand the different kinds of social phenomena that can underpin social injustice. I identify three such phenomena: laws, social norms, and stereotypes. Third, I consider how activism that aims to remedy social injustice underpinned by these three mechanisms should be practised, devoting a chapter to each one. Regarding law, I explore the ethics of activism that seeks to change the law via means that are either illegal or violent, and I argue that the practice of such activism is more morally constrained than is standardly assumed. Regarding social norms, I argue that law and policy will not always be sufficient to remedy injustice caused by social norms, and so ordinary citizens will sometimes need to intervene to change unjust social norms in ways that are not mediated by the state. Finally, because the operation of stereotypes is rather subtle and mysterious, I seek to better understand exactly how it is they generate social injustice. I then draw out some implications of this investigation for the practice of social justice activism

Global justice and transnational civil disobedience

Almost all accounts of global justice recognise that the world, as it is, is unjust, and that something ought to be done about this. But what? In this paper, I argue that wealthy individuals have a duty grounded in the natural duty of justice to engage in civil disobedience against the currently unjust global order with the aim of pressuring for institutional reform. In particular, I argue that those who subscribe to the two main views on global justice—cosmopolitanism and statism—can agree that the conditions which give rise to the duty to engage in civil disobedience obtain in global society today. I then explain why I focus on transnational civil disobedience, argue that only the wealthy have the duty to engage in it, and give an example of how this duty has been discharged in the real world