Power Transitions, Emerging Powers, and the Shifting Terrain of the Middle Ground

Abstract

As power diffuses away from the Western, liberal developed core and as the intractability of the international system to liberal prescriptions becomes more evident, so the character of writing on global justice changes. Global liberalism is entering harder times, and the space for a ‘middle-ground ethics’ comes into sharper focus. For Amartya Sen, we should resist attempts to find universal principles for perfectly just social arrangements and to identify transcendental principles of global justice (Sen 2009). Instead, we should concentrate on our shared sense of ‘injustice’ and on the possibility of agreement on realization-focused strategies to mitigate some of the worst and most pressing forms of injustice. Just as important, we should see value pluralism both as an inescapable reality and as an opportunity. Hence, the importance, as I will discuss below, of non-parochialism and of deploying the ‘the eyes of many people’.