John Rawls’s in The Law of Peoples introduces five types of political regimes, themost interesting and controversial of which are decent peoples. This ideal type is authoritarian in character, but has a reasonable basic structure, offers some form of political participation and honours core human rights. Rawls claims that they not only have to be tolerated by liberal peoples but respected as equals and offered fair terms of cooperation due to the principles of reasonable pluralism. Rawls elaborates on decent regimes by sketching the imagined model society “Kazanistan”. That bears the question of decent regimes exist in the real world. Identifying decent societies is crucial in three ways: First, it would make LP more applicable to real world structures and thus more helpful for improving real world conditions. Second, it gives reason for the assumption that Rawls does take reasonable pluralism seriously; if decent societies lacked counterparts in the real world, Rawls’s justification for imposing the principles of the Law of Peoples on other societies – non-compliance is a reason for intervention – was pointless. Third, it would suggest itself to liberal regimes to improve relations to states qualifying as decent, not only as they are suitable cooperation partners, but also to enhance international stability and justice and advance peaceful relations. The purpose of the paper is to identify decent peoples in the real world. As peoples are ideals, one has to reduce the standards to identify non-ideal counterparts. Those are referred to as “aspiring decent regimes”. Criteria for aspiring decent societies are identified on the basis of Rawls’s elaborations and translated into measurable criteria. Those are then applied to 17 candidates that have been taken from secondary literature or identified as suitable by means of a coding frame. Candidates for aspiring decent peoples are discussed.
