A photograph of a march during the American Civil Rights movement

MAJOR IN
GLOBAL JUSTICE

One of the core ideas animating The Democracy Institute’s academic pathways is the idea of transition. How do we shape our world in light of the transformations that it has begun to—and ought to—undergo? In what ways can we prepare our students and communities for the inevitable transitions that they will need to make? Transitions in our use of energy, to take one example. Transitions in our ways of approaching the planet. Transitions, above all, in the relationship between our moral imagination and sense of justice, on the one hand, and contemporary drifts in public policy, regulation, and legislation, on the other, much of which still struggles to address the linkages between unsustainable use of resources, technological advancement, and political distraction.

The academic pathways at the Institute are designed to train our students to write about these intellectual and structural transitions. But they are also meant to elevate their voices and reveal how powerful many of our student-writers are.

The Major in Global Justice will reimagine the study of modern political thought and the social contract in a global frame. The Pathway will be based on specifically-designed seminars that will address the five great questions shaping the forms of justice and injustice worldwide today, opening students to the most critical thinkers and traditions of our democratic inheritance.

The Pathway will offer an intensive list of courses taught by CPP’s top faculty in the Humanities and Sciences. The idea behind the Global Justice Seminars will be to train students to read and interpret often the same set of texts from The GIFT Common Core, while reorienting their points of entry into the moral, political and legal universe from which these texts emerge. CPP students who have already taken the seminar on "The Faces of Freedom" (American Institutions 3340) fulfil the gateway requirement in Global Justice. The Director's seminar on “What is Injustice?” will serve as the Capstone requirement.

WHAT IS
FREEDOM?

Freedom is unarguably the most fundamental idea in scientific and philosophical conceptions of human life. In truth, no investigation of our social and moral life can do without touching upon either the cognitive dimensions of freedom or the logic of force that physically constitutes it. What is it that makes the idea of freedom so vital to human existence and to the relationship between humanity and other life forms? Certainly, this vitality of the concept cannot be attributed solely to freedom’s cognitive and worldly value: for instance, the right of human beings to physically move and their liberty to think freely. Indeed, it is often claimed that freedom is our only truly universal moral imperative, expressed by every human collectivity and social formation as a normative claim that everyone ought to have such liberties to move and think.

DIFFICULT
QUESTIONS

It is by now clear, despite the pervasive denialism that marks the contemporary political condition, that we have entered a planetary age. It is an age inaugurated by the convergence, on the one hand, of the voracious human will to colonize land and expand in space, and, on the other, of the increasingly destructive unfolding of natural events and transhuman forces that are altering the physical face of the planet. The effects of this convergence are not being tempered, let alone ameliorated, by the worsening norms of moral and political conduct in global affairs. Quite the opposite: international institutions and law—whose power to mine, extract, railroad, and police the earth was defined, at their very origin, by punitive imperial interests and juridical visions drafted in nineteenth-century capitals of European nation-states—continue to haunt the planet today.