ABSTRACT
From Plato’s Republic (390-47 bc; reprinted 1974) to Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971), political theory has always been characterized by the predominant consideration it gives to the domestic sphere of socio-political interaction. This stubborn concentration on the individual and domestic domains of justice has doubtless contributed to the reluctance of political thinking to address inter-community normative issues, and has thus helped in generating the phenomenon of international political exclusion. Although modern theories of political philosophy have suggested a number of different combinations of legitimate relationships between the individual and the state, they have largely failed to expand their arguments to the wider vision necessary to realize an inclusive theory of international political justice. The repeated challenges that recent global transformations have made to this limited perspective, however, have put increasing pressure on both the traditional sociopolitical structure of the nation-state and the conventional political concepts underpinning it. Arguably, the tenaciousness of this limited focus has contributed to the intensification of the debate surrounding international ethics in the last thirty years, with universalistic theories contesting the conventionally assumed exclusivity of the binomial individual-state.
