About this Event
The SIS Office of Research invites you to a book talk with Department of Global Inquiry Professor Hansong Li on his new book Common Justice: Interpolitical Thought in Western, Indian & Chinese Traditions. He will be joined in discussion by fellow SIS and AU scholars Amitav Acharya, Akbar Ahmed, Piper Campbell, Thomas Merrill, and Jin Y Park.
Tuesday, December 1
1:00 - 2:30 PM EST
Abramson Family Founders Room, American University School of International Service
About the Book:
Theorists of justice set out to solve a difficult puzzle: What ideas, if any, could guide us to live together in harmony? While some enumerate universal values, critics argue that these very principles are ineluctably contingent and culturally specific—that human societies affirm vastly different tenets across intellectual traditions.
In this bold, ambitious book, Hansong Li offers an alternative approach to world justice. He argues that while different cultures do conceive of justice in different ways, many also share important relational norms—ideas about how they might relate to and reason with other polities. To demonstrate as much, Li identifies parallel patterns of interpolitical arguments in ancient Greek, Indian, and classical Chinese traditions. Eschewing claims to universalism, he argues that the comparative study of these intellectual heritages can help transfigure us-versus-them logics. Thinkers in these traditions saw communities as guests and hosts, committed to love and justice, in pursuit of ethics and expediency. Then too, these thinkers all were concerned with stability and subversion, constraint and consonance, beauty and violence. Most significantly, Li traces among the three traditions an aspiration to define justice in the broadest possible terms: not as something worked out merely in courts but as a value of global and cosmic consequence.
A work of rigorous philological scholarship and dazzling philosophical range, Common Justice points toward a new avenue for global political thought and comparative political theory. More than tracing how justice has been elaborated in different contexts, it demonstrates how—while using culturally and linguistically distinct concepts—diverse peoples have long been thinking in startlingly compatible ways, enabling the possibility of global justice.
About the Author:
Hansong Li is a humanist and social scientist who writes on international law and politics, ethics and economics, and the history of political, economic, and legal thought.
In 2026-2027, Li co-chairs the Historical International Studies (HIS) Research Cluster at SIS.
Li has written on the normative forces of time and space in early-modern European intellectual history. His book, to be published by Harvard University Press, examines philosophical debates over world justice in Western, Indian, and Chinese traditions.
Before joining the School of International Service, Hansong Li lived in Beijing, Chicago, Paris, Cambridges of Old and New England, as well as Germany, where he was recently a research fellow at the Law School of Freie Universität Berlin.
Event venue & nearby stays
American University, School of International Service, Founders Room, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, United States
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