Citizens’ Complicity in State Action: Exploring the Limits

In his new book Beyond the Law’s Reach? Shmuel Nili shows how affluent democracies have become entangled with violent autocratic regimes and brutal international cartels, and have thereby become complicit in serious global injustices. This essay asks who bears responsibility for this complicity. It argues that citizens of affluent democratic societies often share responsibility for their own government’s unjust entanglements and explores the conditions under which this holds true. It focuses in particular on the challenge posed by relatively “obscure” injustices, which even well-informed citizens cannot be expected to know about. In addressing these cases, this essay outlines a theory of civic obligation that can help explain when citizens have a duty to take action against government injustice and clarify how much they can be expected to know about their representatives’ wrongdoing.