Prioritizing Global Responsibilities: New book by James Pattison
James Pattison and Luke Glanville鈥檚 new book, published by Oxford University Press, considers how should states should decide which global issues to prioritise and which crises to address.
, Professor of Politics, co-authors with Luke Glanville, Professor at the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University.
The book considers that 鈥榮tates 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.鈥� It seeks to answer how, given these constraints, states should prioritise their global responsibilities.
It does so 鈥榖y 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.鈥�
The book considers a number of urgent issues, such as global poverty, climate change and global health.