The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas

Eisenberg, Avigail, Ethics & International Affairs

The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas, Courtney Jung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 350 pp., $85 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The scholarship on identity politics tends to be divided between those who argue that threats to culture constitute legitimate grounds for minority entitlements, and those who argue that culture has no independent moral force in politics and thereby provides no grounds for legitimate entitlements. Courtney Jung's book belongs in the second group. Jung offers a normatively informed and empirically grounded critique of approaches that justify minority rights on the basis of the need to protect culture, arguing that the political significance of culture depends only on how it has been used by the state as a "marker of exclusion and selective inclusion" (p. 286). The political condition of minorities is determined by structural injustice, not cultural difference. Therefore, the morally compelling basis for minority …

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Publication information: Article title: The Moral Force of Indigenous Politics: Critical Liberalism and the Zapatistas. Contributors: Eisenberg, Avigail - Author. Journal title: Ethics & International Affairs. Volume: 23. Issue: 1 Publication date: Spring 2009. Page number: 71+. © 2009 Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale Group.

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