ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the characteristic ways in which international relations (IR) scholars approached issues of justice in the formative, post-World War II years of the discipline. It examines the debates of the 1970s in which issues of international distributive justice were addressed. By the late 1960s and 1970s, mainstream IR was in crisis, under challenge from a number of directions. Throughout the 1960s, the largely poor, newly decolonized states of Africa and Asia joined with many of the equally deprived Latin American states to form a voting bloc in the United Nations (UN) which was held together by its concentration on economic issues. Institutional cosmopolitanism is the doctrine that the world's political structure ought to be reorganized to create some kind of 'world government'. Moral cosmopolitanism is concerned not with institutions but 'the basis on which institutions, practices, or courses of action should be justified or criticised'.
