Book Review: Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice, by Brooke Ackerly by Brooke Ackerly

Published date01 December 2019
Date01 December 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718821896
Subject MatterBook Reviews
890 Political Theory 47(6)
Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice, by Brooke Ackerly. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018, 313 pp.
Reviewed by: Michael Goodhart, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591718821896
Brooke Ackerly’s Just Responsibility offers a guide to how and why people
should take political responsibility for injustice. She provides a penetrating
discussion of injustice itself, explains how common epistemological habits
and mistakes can impede its recognition, and develops an account of just
responsibility informed by the praxis of human rights activists in Bangladesh
and around the world to show us what we can do about it. The shape of the
argument powerfully illustrates Ackerly’s grounded normative theory (GNT)
approach, which is the source of both the book’s core strengths and its central
ambiguity.
The book begins with a bold and succinct statement of this approach: “If
we want to learn what to do about injustice and how to do it, we should learn
from those who are doing something about it” (1). What we should learn
from them, Ackerly maintains, is how to take responsibility in an “intention-
ally just way,” one that is mindful not to reproduce or reify injustice through
the actions we undertake to address its effects (5). The book is divided into
three parts: The first identifies “injustice itself” as the core concern; the sec-
ond lays out a methodology of knowing what we should do about injustice, a
feminist critical approach that revises and extends Ackerly’s previous work
on third world feminist social criticism (2000, 2008); and the final part offers
a guide to what we should do about injustice and how we should do it, devel-
oping five “principles in practice” distilled from activist praxis.1 This struc-
ture is complemented and complicated by two introductory chapters, nearly
70 pages in length, which set up and summarize—really, prefigure—the
approach and argument that follow, in part through an extended and illumi-
nating discussion of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS).
Ackerly worries that too often we focus on the effects of injustice without
recognizing or addressing what she calls, following Mill, “injustice itself.”
Injustice itself is variously defined as “injustices for which no simple causal
narrative of liability is sufficient” (30); as a “web of intersecting power
inequalities” (37); as “unjust power inequalities” (39); as consisting or inher-
ing in “structural processes, power inequalities, and norms” (38); and as hav-
ing three dimensions: complex causality, power inequalities, and normalization
(74). At the center of this kaleidoscopic picture of injustice itself is the exploi-
tation of power inequalities, which are instantiated, formally and informally,
in structures, hierarchies, and all relations of dependence and

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT