IAS Book Launch: With Power Comes Responsibility

ABOUT THE EVENT

At least, this is the story we have been told about structural injustice so far. In her first book With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice, Maeve McKeown tells a different story. Sometimes structural injustice is an unintended accumulation of disparate activities, and it will require wholesale systemic change to overcome. However, there are also cases where the injustice could be ameliorated without wholesale structural change, but the agents with the capacity to make these changes fail to do it. In yet other cases, even though structural injustice emerges from the accumulation of multiple processes and activities, there are powerful agents that deliberately perpetuate the injustice because they benefit from it. McKeown calls these different types of structural injustice pure, avoidable and deliberate respectively. In distinguishing different types of structural injustice in this way, it follows that not all agents are equally responsible for it or responsible in the same way.

A critical theory of structural injustice should incorporate power. Thus, this book addresses the questions: what does it mean for injustice to be structural, or what is structural injustice? What is the relationship between power and structural injustice? Who bears responsibility for structural injustice? And what can ordinary individuals do about it? McKeown explores these questions using the case studies of sweatshops, poverty and climate change. She addresses the moral responsibility of powerful agents versus the political responsibility of ordinary individuals. And she assesses our responsibility for historical, as well as contemporary structural injustice, and what actions we can take.

The book will be published by Bloomsbury Academic on 8 February 2024.

For the book launch, (Oxford University) and (UCL) have agreed to comment on the book, and Maeve McKeown will be on hand to respond.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maeve McKeown is a political theorist based in Groningen, the Netherlands. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the interdisciplinary faculty Campus Fryslân, University of Groningen and is a member of the Young Academy Groningen.

As a political theorist, Maeve researches responsibility for global structural injustice. Alongside her first book, her edited volume with Jude Browne, What is Structural Injustice? (Oxford University Press), will be published Open Access in February 2024.

Before joining Campus Fryslân in 2021, she was a Lecturer in Philosophy at Cambridge University from 2019, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, and a Postdoctoral Research fellowship at Justitia Amplificata, Goethe University Frankfurt. She obtained her PhD from UCL (University College London) in 2015. Maeve has published in Philosophy Compass, Contemporary Political Theory, The Journal of Social Philosophy, European Journal of Political Theory and the International Encyclopedia of Ethics.

To learn more about Maeve's work, please visit her website.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

IAS Common Ground, G11, South Wing, Gower Street, London, United Kingdom