Book excerpt: 1 2 Andreas Follesdal and Thomas Pogge 1 The Norwegian Centre for Human Rights at the Faculty of Law and ARENA Centre for 2 European Studies, University of Oslo; Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, and Oslo University; Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University, Canberra This volume discusses principles of global justice, their normative grounds, and the social institutions they require. Over the last few decades an increasing number of philosophers and political theorists have attended to these morally urgent, politically confounding and philosophically challenging topics. Many of these scholars came together September 11–13, 2003, for an international symposium where first versions of most of the present chapters were discussed. A few additional chapters were solicited to provide a broad and critical range of perspectives on these issues. The Oslo Symposium took Thomas Pogge’s recent work in this area as its starting point, in recognition of his long-standing academic contributions to this topic and of the seminars on moral and political philosophy he has taught since 1991 under the auspices of the Norwegian Research Council. Pogge’s opening remarks — “What is Global Justice?” — follow below, before brief synopses of the various contributions.