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This chapter discusses the complaint that the statist ideal is excessively biased in favour of the status quo and argues that this critique is only partly successful. While the statists’ (especially Rawls’s) refusal to extend egalitarian justice to the global realm does not in itself indicate subservience to the status quo, statist principles have unduly conservative implications because they are insufficiently sensitive to morally relevant phenomena characterizing the global realm. Although statists rightly identify peoples (states) as important subjects of international justice in virtue of the particular forms of coercive power they exercise by directly interfering in one another’s affairs, they fail to appreciate that these are not the only forms of international coercion in need of justification. Because the normative outlook underpinning Rawlsian statism is blind to these other potential sources of injustice, its principles may very well turn out to be status-quo biased and, therefore, rightly criticized on guidance grounds.

This chapter applies the framework developed in the book to the issue of justice beyond borders. It argues that, thanks to its double focus – on systemic and interactional coercion – this framework steers a coherent middle course between cosmopolitanism and statism, and explains why each seems to get only part of the ‘global justice picture’ right. While statists typically concentrate on the moral evaluation of interactional coercion between states – marking out conditions for domestic sovereignty and international intervention – cosmopolitans are concerned with the justification of global systemic coercion. A closer look at our world reveals that both types of coercion exist at the international level. This means that a good theory of global justice should set the principles for the moral assessment of both. Statist principles of internal legitimacy and just interstate conduct need to be supplemented by cosmopolitan principles of global justice, assessing the justifiability of global systemic coercion. The chapter concludes with the sketch of a theory of this kind.

This chapter focuses on the official grievances to trace frames deployed by prisoners and staff across four levels of review. It reveals that these written documents present, in their hardened form, the respective logics of rights and confinement. Comprised of prisoners’ narratives and officials’ responses, the official grievances offer a dramatic illustration of the broader contradiction. Not only are prisoners’ grievances—which are typically framed in the language of rights and needs—usually denied by officials, but officials speak in the clipped language of carceral policy and rarely engage directly with the issues of rights and needs that dominate inmates’ narratives. The authors underscore the diametrically different languages and logics deployed by the two sides in these formal documents and the sharp contrast of this rigid opposition with the more ambivalent positions expressed in the interviews. The chapter ends with a discussion of the strategic and fluid quality of legal consciousness and the key role played by power inequalities in shaping it.

This chapter explores what makes iThemba Pharmaceuticals’s mission of finding new drugs for TB, HIV, and malaria in South Africa distinctive. The chapter contrasts iThemba’s approach with that of the three most prominent discourses of pharmaceuticals and the Global South: access to medicines campaigns that aim to increase distribution of generic drugs; pharmaceutical research based on bioprospecting and traditional knowledges; and clinical trial research. Putting iThemba into comparative relief with these disparate sets of global health discourses reveals a common element among them: all three have an implicit reliance on a problematic conceptual bifurcation between Global North and South. They rely on an assumption that the most prestigious forms of pharmaceutical knowledge will be made in the North, while the South will be relegated to more circumscribed roles: recipients of generic drugs, providers of raw materials, and providers of test subjects. Whether these endeavors operate under a rubric of philanthropy or of science as usual, power inequalities are maintained and reinforced. South Africa itself is in many ways betwixt and between Global North and South, and this small drug discovery company’s mission helps to illuminate some of the limitations of pharmaceutical knowledge-making projects that take global bifurcation for granted.