Does global justice require a “right to resist” oppression? This question exposes a gap in contemporary thinking on global justice. The dominant theory, liberal-cosmopolitanism, emphasizes human rights enforcement by the international community. But it fails to determine whether peoples whose rights are denied have a right to resist their oppressors. Continuing to assume that global justice is a goal to be secured by outside intervention risks delegitimizing the ideal of universal human rights. This is because the willingness of outsiders to intervene is questionable, and largely contingent on geopolitical factors, making rights enforcement arbitrary. This paper proposes the need to develop a theory of resistance that links human rights to a claimable right to resist.
