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According to Keller, we have no hope of explaining what is or is not a Just Peace in global relations unless we pay more attention to the intellectual context in which international law was formed. From its birth in the 16th century, there was a progressive retreat by Europeans from conceding sovereign rights to specific non-European peoples, to then only recognizing a conditional sovereignty, and eventually to denying any right to self-determination of non-white peoples. However, there was a tradition of thought that recognized and accommodated cultural diversity that can be found in the writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau, among others. This chapter argues that these writers proposed one of the cornerstones of the concept of a Just Peace, the principle of recognition. This notion was developed from an effort to understand another’s point of view and an appreciation of otherness.

In this concluding chapter, Allan and Keller posit that Just Peace should be defined as a process resting on four necessary and sufficient conditions: thin recognition whereby the other is accepted as autonomous; thick recognition whereby identities need to be accounted for; renouncement, requiring significant sacrifices from all parties; and rule, the objectification of a Just Peace by a ‘text’ requiring a common language respecting the identities of each, and defining their rights and duties. This approach, based on a language-oriented process amongst directly concerned parties, goes beyond liberal and culturalist perspectives. By moving beyond the idea of a peace founded on norms claiming universal scope, each side of a conflict has a place at the negotiating table to present their own perspective on what justice might entail. This inclusion into the decision-making process helps create the feeling of personal investment in the final negotiated product. In addition, negotiators need to work towards building a novel shared reality as well as a new common language to help foster an enduring harmony between previously clashing peoples.

The Afterword opens with a letter of 1791 in which Mozart relates an experience he has while attending a performance of Die Zauberflöte. He represents the episode as a recognition narrative in miniature that illuminates the opera's dependence on recognition as a vehicle for enlightenment. A final section makes two observations about the workings of recognition in the operatic context: the first concerning the almost unfailing optimism of the operas of Mozart and his contemporaries, and the second concerning the power of recognition in contexts beyond Mozart. The book concludes with the thought that critical thinking about recognition has much to tell us about operas of other types and periods.

This paper seeks to articulate a conception of justice in reparations for victims of human rights violations when the aim is to repair a large number of cases, as opposed to individual, isolated cases. It starts with an effort to establish some semantic clarity by trying to distinguish between two different contexts for the use of the term “reparations”. It discusses some of the problems with merely transplanting the ideal of compensation in proportion to harm from its natural home in the resolution of individual judicial cases, and using it as a standard of justice for massive reparations programs. Instead, it argues in favor of thinking about justice in the context of massive cases in terms of the achievement of three goals, namely, recognition, civic trust, and social solidarity — three goals that are intimately related to justice. Finally, it tries to shed light on the basic trade-offs that accompany some of the choices that have to be made in the process of constructing a comprehensive and coherent reparations program.

This chapter introduces a new framework for testing the recognition/redistribution hypothesis. It develops an index of twenty-three different types of MCPs that have been adopted for three different types of minority groups (immigrants, national minorities, and indigenous peoples). Western countries are then categorized in terms of their level of MCPs. Whether countries with higher levels of MCPs have faced an erosion of the welfare state as compared to countries with lower levels of MCPs is tested. It is shown that there is no negative correlation between the strength of a country's commitment to MCPs and its ability to sustain welfare spending or economic redistribution. The chapter also examines the heterogeneity/redistribution hypothesis, and shows that this too is overstated. In general, the size of immigrant groups, national minorities, and indigenous peoples in Western countries does not affect a country's ability to sustain its welfare commitments, although a rapid change in the size of immigrant groups does seem to have an effect. Yet even here, the authors of this chapter argue, there are hints that adopting MCPs can help to mitigate whatever negative effect a rapidly increasing immigrant population may have.

This chapter considers whether the accommodation of national minorities through the according of self-government at the regional level undermines the welfare state. Most Western states with sizeable national minorities have accommodated minority nationalist aspirations through some form of federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy. This chapter examines the impact of this sort of devolution or regionalization on the welfare state in the UK, Belgium, and Canada. The chapter concludes that such institutional reforms have had complex effects on social policy, both at the central level and in the self-governing regions. It has set in play political dynamics that sometimes work to strengthen social policy as a tool of nation-building, and sometimes serve to inhibit new redistributive policies. As a result, no simple general patterns leap out, challenging assertions that accommodating substate nationalism inevitably weakens the welfare state.

This chapter develops the theoretical framework, discussing the concept of sovereignty and its evolution since 1945. Looking at sovereignty in terms of political authority, it argues that sovereignty must be legitimized by the way and the ends towards which it is exercised. It argues that a new ‘standard of civilisation’, encompassing democracy, human rights, the rule of law, a free market economy, and effective administration, has emerged since the end of the cold war, and has influenced sovereignty-related practices of state recognition and statebuilding.

This chapter considers the basic options for the design of a democratic federation. These include how to determine the boundaries of federal provinces, how to divide legislative and administrative powers, how to represent provinces and minority groups in central institutions, and how to amend the constitution. It looks at the importance of recognizing both majority and minority identities in the constitutions of both classic nation-states and multinational states. An appendix is included on the history of Canadian attempts to solve these design and recognition problems, especially concerning the place of the French-speaking province of Quebec.

This chapter examines the principles that liberal democrats, including liberal nationalists, should use when choosing between the constitutional and federal options discussed in the preceding chapter. Instead of envisaging a completely novel set of principles for multinational federal constitutionalism, it explores the normative resources available in some of the major theories typically used in uni-national states, including ‘classical’, ‘deliberative’, and ‘consequentialist’ theories of democracy; and ‘classical’ and ‘contractualist’ theories of constitutionalism. It argues for seven principles of recognition that would be appropriate for justifying certain design features in a multinational federal constitution.

Preventing secession is the central design challenge in a multinational federation. This chapter considers how a well-designed legal secession procedure in a federal constitution could be attractive to both majority and minority nationalists. Legalizing (or ‘domesticating’) secession the right way could, paradoxically, make secession less likely by taking away some incentives for secessionist politics. It could also provide a powerful form of symbolic recognition for a national minority. The background context of secession in international law, as well as some lessons from the history of secessionist politics and the recent ‘legalization’ of secession in Canada and Quebec are discussed.

This chapter presents an introduction and overview of the book as a whole. It lays out the need to apply recent theories of justice — distributive, recognition-based, participatory, and capabilities — to environmental justice movements. It discusses the gap between the academic accounts of environmental justice (or justice among humans on environmental issues and risks) and ecological justice (or justice to non-human nature).

This chapter explores recent theories of justice, focusing on those that move beyond a sole emphasis on the traditional distributive paradigm. Particular attention is paid to various theories of recognition, the capabilities approach, and participatory justice. Ultimately, the argument is that a thorough understanding and approach to justice requires us to see the linkages between distribution, recognition, capabilities, and participation.

This chapter examines the definitions of justice by both academics of, and groups within, the environmental justice movement in the US. After a brief description of the types of groups and organizations that make up the environmental justice movement in the US, the chapter goes into detail describing equity-based, recognition-focused, procedural, and capability-oriented frames of justice from both the movement itself and the literature about it.

This chapter turns to the potential of developing a theory of ecological justice that moves beyond a sole concern with the distributive paradigm. The central focus is on bringing conceptions of recognition of nature, and of capabilities for the non-human world, into a broad and comprehensive understanding of ecological justice. The point is not to develop a singular universal theory of ecological justice, but rather to illustrate the potential of various discourses, concepts and frames as they can be extended to animals, communities, and natural systems.