Intergenerational Justice Review 2012: Call for Papers

Antony Mason, Guest Editor of the forthcoming Intergenerational Justice Review (IGJR), reports on the recent Call for Papers

The Intergenerational Justice Review (IGJR) is a peer-reviewed journal much respected in the field of intergenerational studies, published by the Stuttgart-based Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations (FRFG).

For the 2012 edition the FRFG has invited the Intergenerational Foundation (IF) to publish the journal as a joint venture, and I have been given the honour of joining the FRFG editors as Guest Editor.

The following text is extracted from a Call for Papers recently circulated to numerous academics and university departments in the UK.

If you were omitted from that mail-out, and would like to be added to the list, please contact me by emailing: [email protected]

Intergenerational Justice Review

The Intergenerational Justice Review (IGJR, ISSN 2190-6335) aims to improve our understanding of intergenerational justice and sustainable development through pure and applied research. Published annually in English, it seeks articles on the cutting edge of research in politics, law, and philosophy of intergenerational relations.

It is published on a professional level with an extensive international readership. The editorial board comprises over 50 international experts from ten countries, representing eight disciplines.

The IGJR is read not only by the academic community but also by members of parliaments, decision-makers from the global economy and persons with a general interest in intergenerational justice.

Call for Papers for the Intergenerational Justice Review 2012

The theme of the 2012 edition is:

‘Ideal Theory and Non-Ideal Politics: The Interdependencies between Justices’

Intergenerational justice deals with justice between generations whilst intragenerational justice is focused on lines of cleavage between contemporaries such as economic disparities, gender issues and differences between states in the international system. This theoretical dichotomy is often rigidly formulated: that is to say that intra- and intergenerational concerns become independent from each other in the realm of ideal-theory. However, in the sphere of realpolitik, claims for both inter- and intragenerational justice must necessarily co-exist.

The philosopher Hans Jonas points out that the logical corollary of mankind’s increasing ability to fundamentally transform (and potentially impair irreversibly) nature is the need for a new ethics to account for future generations. But it is important to stress that this partition is not purely academic in scope: political decisions are often informed by only one type of justice, ignoring the consequences for other justices. On the other hand, proponents of the sustainability concept take all types of justice into account and, by often implicitly assuming that they are complementary, ignore possible trade-offs. Hence one can find, across a range of areas, a lack of intellectual endeavour focused on bridging the theoretical gap between the more traditional demands of social and international justice and the exigencies of intergenerational justice with real implications for praxis.

We welcome articles that explore philosophical questions as well as issues of practical politics at regional, national, and supra-national levels. Articles could relate to demography, ecology, pensions, state finance, employment, education and other topics traditionally related to intergenerational justice.

You can find the full call for papers here pdf

Size limit of final manuscript: up to 30,000 characters (including spaces, annotation etc)

Manuscript submission deadline: 1 November 2011

Detailed guidelines for authors can be found on the FRFG website here.