PhD thesis defence by Pavel Skigin
This thesis addresses a considerable theoretical lacuna in political theory: the disconnect between ideal theories of global distributive justice and non-ideal theories of international coercion. While discussions on global justice and economic sanctions abound, the moral permissibility of sanctions aimed at enforcing distributive justice, particularly concerning natural resources, has been largely overlooked. To bridge this gap, I propose a novel property-based theory, grounded in the widely shared idea of humanity’s pre-institutional equal claims to natural resources. This ecumenical approach synthesises three major philosophical traditions: Steiner’s left-libertarianism, Risse’s Grotian sufficientarianism, and Beitz’s cosmopolitan Rawlsianism.
The argument progresses from a conceptual analysis to an actionable policy framework for morally permissible sanctions. I argue that justice in rectification justifies sanctions in response to violations of humanity’s common natural resource ownership. Due to this special ownership status, sanctions targeting trade in natural resources face a lower threshold of moral permissibility compared to those targeting manufactured goods or services. As in class action litigation, aggregating minor property rights violations globally yields enforceable claims to redress. Adopting Pattison’s non-ideal approach, I argue sanctions are morally preferable to inaction and war due to their fairness in distributing unavoidable harms.
I outline a three-tier policy framework of tariffs, price caps, and embargoes, building on Wenar’s Clean Trade proposal. Each policy is tailored to varying degrees of common resource ownership violations, liability of domestic social groups, and the target government’s accountability. To refine the theory’s implications, I examine in reflective equilibrium the cases of injustices of three distinct levels of natural resource distribution: (i) intra-nationally, Russia’s resource curse; (ii) internationally, Norway’s over-appropriation of fossil fuels; (iii) globally, climate impact of Brazil’s Amazon deforestation. Finally, the thesis culminates in a policy table mapping permissible resource sanctions for any constellation of the said variables.
Pavel Skigin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. He is a political theorist whose research focuses mainly on distributive justice, non-ideal theory, natural resource ownership, and just war theory.