According to the standard model of accountability, holding another actor accountable entails sanctioning that actor if it fails to fulfill its obligations without a justification or excuse. Less powerful actors therefore cannot hold more powerful actors accountable, because they cannot sanction more powerful actors. Because inequality appears unlikely to disappear soon, there is a pressing need for second-best forms of accountability: forms that are feasible under conditions of inequality, but deliver as many of the benefits of standard accountability as possible. (...) This article describes a model of second-best accountability that fits this description, which I call surrogate accountability. I argue that surrogate accountability can provide some of the benefits of standard accountability, but not others, that it should be evaluated according to different normative criteria than standard accountability, and that, while surrogate accountability has some benefits that standard accountability lacks, it is usually normatively inferior to standard accountability. (shrink)

In Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention, Lucia Rafanelli offers a framework for normatively evaluating reform interventions. In this comment, I focus not on Rafanelli’s explicit argument, with which I largely agree, but rather on how this argument implicitly maps the terrain of justice, injustice, and justice-promotion. I suggest that Rafanelli overstates the importance and distinctiveness of reform intervention compared to other justice-promoting projects, and in so doing downplays forms of justice-promotion besides reform intervention, including powerful entities (...) reducing their own unjust practices and subaltern groups fighting for justice for themselves. However, if we view reform intervention as one type of justice-promoting project among others, then we can see that, while Rafanelli’s framework is in one sense less consequential than she suggests, it also potentially offers insight into a much wider range of contexts than she acknowledges. (shrink)