Natural resources are distributed unevenly throughout the world. The territories of some nation-states, for instance, possess abundant mineral resources which are capable of commanding high prices on world markets, while others possess reserves of coal and iron capable of driving industrialization. Others possess meager levels of resources, however, and indeed have scarce and sometimes insecure access even to essentials of life such as clean water. This unevenness has often been thought to have implications for global justice. After all, the processes by which national borders have come to be drawn on maps, and defended by military force – and as a result of which coalfields or seams of gold may end up inside one national jurisdiction or another – are often scarcely defensible from a normative point of view, involving as they sometimes do violent usurpation, dispossession, or even genocide. Can nation-states be thought to deserve, or to have a just claim to, the resources that happen...
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Armstrong, C. (2011). Global Resource Distribution. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_286
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