Coercion and (global) justice: towards a unified framework

The current theoretical debate on global justice has reached an impasse between two seemingly irreconcilable views. Cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, holds that liberal principles of distributive justice should apply globally. Statism, on the other, argues that only weaker duties of assistance extend beyond state borders. Is there a way out of this impasse? In this paper I argue that there is. I develop a coercion-based approach to justice which provides a general conceptual framework from which cosmopolitanism and statism can be derived as special cases, and systematically assessed. I then argue that both views presuppose implausible accounts of the nature of contemporary global politics and suggest how the debate on global justice could learn from as well as move beyond them