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Speaker: Lea Ypi, Associate Professor in Political Theory, London School of Economics
Many people seem to think that members of indigenous groups have special, attachment-based, claims to the natural resources essential to the pursuit of their projects. The purpose of this paper is to criticise that argument. The first part suggests that attachment-based claims should be considered in analogy to luxury tastes and are subject to similar distributive requirements. The second part argues that to provide a normatively compelling account of why sometimes agents who are attached to certain resources might also have special claims over them, the only consideration that counts is whether such agents suffer from structural injustice in the present. I further explain what structural injustice is and why it matters.
Lea Ypi is an Associate Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and, in the current academic year, a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is interested in issues of global justice (including migration and colonialism), democratic theory (with particular focus on parties), and the philosophy of the Enlightenment (especially Kant). A co-editor of The Journal of Political Philosophy, she is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford University Press 2012), The Meaning of Partisanship (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), and of articles in Philosophy and Public Affairs, The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Political Philosophy, and others. This year she was the recipient of the British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in political science, and her article "What's wrong with colonialism" was selected by The Philosopher's Annual as one of the ten best published in philosophy.