Prioritizing Global Responsibilities

Department of International Relations Seminar Series: Launch Event

States face multiple ongoing and emerging challenges, from climate change to global disease, mass atrocities to forced displacement, humanitarian crises to entrenched global poverty, and are constrained by material and political limits to the amount of resources that they can devote to these issues. How should states decide which issues to prioritize and which crises to address?

Prioritizing Global Responsibilities answers this question by proposing a two-level account of just prioritization that aims to be both philosophically sound and practically relevant. The authors assess several potential prioritization principles, including diversification, culpability, urgency, disadvantage, and national interest, and argue that states should prioritize issues where they can assist most effectively and where they can help those who are most underprivileged.

Speakers
Luke Glanville is Professor of International Relations at The Australian National University. He is the author of several books including Sharing Responsibility: The History and Future of Protection from Atrocities (Princeton University Press, 2021) and Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

James Pattison is Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester. His publications include The Alternatives to War: From Sanctions to Nonviolence (OUP, 2018), The Morality of Private War: The Challenge of Private Military and Security Companies (OUP, 2014), and Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect: Who Should Intervene? (OUP, 2012).

Discussant
Cian O'Driscoll is Professor of International Relations at the Department of International Relations located within the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University.

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This Launch Event is part of a series celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Department of International Relations, located within the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University.