International Justice As Equal Regard and the Use of Force‪.‬

Academic debates about international justice in recent decades have typically ranged over the terrain of distribution and redistribution. From Dame Barbara Ward's Rich Nations, Poor Nations, published in the early 1960s, to calls during the Jubilee Year of 2000 for forgiveness of the Third World debt, justice is thought of in economic terms. The reigning assumption is that all of us are persons who, through neither fault nor merit of our own, happen to be born within the boundaries of an impoverished country or a wealthy one. Justice consists in righting the balance between these cases. I am not going to revisit this question, in part because I believe a more exigent matter lies before the international community; namely, how to bring about the political stability--the minimal civic peace--necessary to attain and secure fundamental human goods, including, of course, a measure of distributive justice. These are preeminently political questions that involve the good or ill use of power. THE PREEMINENCE OF "THE POLITICAL"