Routledge Animal Justice: Confronting Oppression with an Interspecies Politics of Care (Routledge Studies in Animals, Society and the Environment)

Animal Justice argues that the systematic wrongs inflicted on billions of nonhuman animals 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 entrenched hierarchical arrangements that obstruct the conditions necessary for self-development. Through interconnected sites – ableism and capitalist production, migration and border regimes, global commodity chains, and the everyday fabric of multispecies life – the book maps the architecture of interspecies subordination and shows how the oppression of animals is 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 care and solidarity – understood not as personal virtues or sentimental dispositions but as demanding principles of institutional design. It asks what it would mean for political institutions to genuinely care for all those whose lives they shape, and what solidarity requires when the equal standing of animals is left to the discretion of the benevolent rather than secured as a requirement of justice. Animal Justice honestly confronts the possibility that institutional transformation may be blocked, arguing that when democratic arrangements persistently fail to honour the demands of justice, direct action may constitute not a rejection 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, animal political theory, and animal studies, as well as advocates and activists for social and interspecies justice.