Poverty alleviation, global justice, and the real world

For nearly half a century, political theorists have wrestled with the problem of globalsocial justice, producing evermore elaborate and analytically sophisticated models,but without engaging significantly with, or materially influencing, real-world politics. Responding to Global Poverty: Harm, Responsibility, and Agency summarizes this discourse very effectively, but without transcending its limits. The actual causes of global poverty are barely touched upon, and the “agency” in the subtitle of the book is almost exclusively that of the affluent world. The impression remains that those seeking answers to the problem of global poverty would be well advised to look elsewhere than towards analytical political theory.