CEPPA Talk: Eilidh Beaton (Aberdeen), “Paying Attention to Global Politics”

The Sudanese civil war has been described as a “forgotten crisis” that the world ought to pay more attention to. Some campaigners object that excess attention on migration is a “distraction” from other important issues. Such calls for cross-border attentional change are a frequent feature of our global political landscape. Yet while philosophers have been paying ever more attention to attention in recent years, political philosophers have mostly theorised about the role of attention within democratic states. This paper shifts away from the dominant statist framing to develop an account of attention’s significance for global politics. Specifically, the paper (i) offers an account of who is implicated in calls to better attend to global politics, (ii) explains how collective failure to attend to global politics can constitute an injustice, and (iii) develops an account of responsibility to attend to global politics.