Justice and International Order East and West

A comparative exploration of Western and Chinese understandings of justice and their possible use to reframe Sino-American relations and international governance. The concept of justice is central to politics: it justifies the ordering of society and the distribution of rewards. In Justice and International Order, Richard Ned Lebow and Feng Zhang compare and contrast Western and Chinese conceptions of justice. They argue that justice can almost invariably be reduced to the principles of fairness and equality, although they are developed and expressed differently in the two cultures. Lebow and Zhang show that there has been a noticeable shift in both in favoring equality over fairness in the modern era. They analyze the growing conflict between China and the West in the light of these conceptions of justice and show how they might be deployed to ameliorate it. The authors also offer a critique of what passes for global order and explore ways in which fairness and equality, and trade-offs between them, offer pathways to better and more peaceful worlds.

Richard Ned Lebow is Professor of International Political Theory in the War Studies Department of King's College London; Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge; and James O. Freedman Presidential Professor, Emeritus, at Dartmouth College. He has authored or coauthored forty-five books and over three hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters in international relations, political theory, comparative politics, history, psychology, classics, and philosophy of science. His most recent books are The Quest for Knowledge in International Relations: How Do We Know? (2022); Ethics and International Relations: A Tragic Perspective (2020); Between Peace and War: 40th Anniversary Revised Edition (2020); Reason and Cause: Social Science and the Social World (2020); and with Feng Zhang, Taming Sino-American Rivalry (Oxford, 2020). Feng Zhang is Professor of International Relations and Executive Dean of the Institute of Public Policy at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, and editor of the book series IPP Studies in the Frontiers of China's Public Policy published by Palgrave. He studies Chinese foreign policy in East Asia, international relations in East Asian history, and international relations theory. He is the author of Chinese Hegemony: Grand Strategy and International Institutions in East Asian History (2015) and, with Richard Ned Lebow, Taming Sino-American Rivalry (Oxford, 2020). He previously held positions at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Murdoch University and Australian National University in Australia.