Animal Justice : Confronting Oppression with an Interspecies Politics of Care

This book examines the shared oppressions of human and non-human animals and argues that a non-speciesist politics of care is required in order to respond to the violence that billions of animals routinely suffer at human hands.

Animal Justice argues that the systematic wrongs inflicted on billions of nonhumananimals in industrialised societies are structural injustices, embedded in the institutions,economies, and cultural norms through which human societies organise collective life. It analyses the situation of animals not as a problem of inclusion but as one of entrenchedhierarchical arrangements that obstruct the conditions necessary for self-development. Through interconnected sites – ableism and capitalist production, migration and borderregimes, global commodity chains, and the everyday fabric of multispecies life – the bookmaps the architecture of interspecies subordination and shows how the oppression of animalsis not an injustice parallel to human oppression but structurally entangled with it,produced by the same institutional logics and sustained by the same cultural norms. Against this diagnosis, the book develops an original normative response grounded in careand solidarity – understood not as personal virtues or sentimental dispositions but asdemanding principles of institutional design. It asks what it would mean for politicalinstitutions to genuinely care for all those whose lives they shape, and what solidarityrequires when the equal standing of animals is left to the discretion of the benevolent ratherthan secured as a requirement of justice. Animal Justice honestly confronts the possibilitythat institutional transformation may be blocked, arguing that when democratic arrangementspersistently fail to honour the demands of justice, direct action may constitute not arejection of political community but an act of fidelity to its ethical foundations. Situated at the intersection of political theory, care ethics, and environmental philosophy,this book will be of interest to students and researchers in animal ethics, animalpolitical theory, and animal studies, as well as advocates and activists for social andinterspecies justice.