Book Presentation of Darrel Moellendorf's Mobilizing Hope – Climate Change and Global Poverty (OUP)

A climate crisis and other pressures on planetary ecology are cause for profound anxiety. Climate change threatens to trap hundreds of millions of people in poverty and to separate further an already deeply divided world. However, a new generation of activists is offering inspiration, serving as a hope-maker. This book offers an accessible and empirically informed philosophical discussion of climate change, global poverty, and the importance of a political response that offers hope.

Darrel Moellendorf is Professor of International Political Theory and Professor of Philosophy at Johann Wolfgang Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, a member of the research group Normative Orders at Goethe Universität, and a Goethe Fellow at the Forshcungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Bad Homburg). From 2008-2009 he was a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He is the author of Cosmopolitan Justice (2002), Global Inequality Matters (2009), The Moral Challenge of Dangerous Climate Change: Values, Poverty, and Policy (2014), and Mobilizing Hope: Climate Change and Global Poverty (2022). He co-edited (with Christopher J. Roederer) Jurisprudence (2004), (with Gillian Brock) Current Debates in Global Justice (2005), (with Thomas Pogge) Global Justice: Seminal Essays (2008), and (with Heather Widdows) The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics (2015). He has published in journals such as Nature Climate Change, Climatic Change, Ethics, Ethics and International Affairs, Journal of Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy and Policy, Social Theory and Practice, The Journal of Social Philosophy, and The Monist. His paper “Treaty Norms and Climate Change Mitigation,” was the most frequently downloaded paper in 2009 at Ethics and International Affairs. He has been a Senior Fellow at Justitia Amplificata at Goethe Unviersität, Frankfurt and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for Humanities, the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst. And he has been the feature of interviews about justice and climate change for major German newspapers such as Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Tagezeitung, Tagespiel, and Frankfurter Rundschau. Before coming to Goethe Universität, he held academic positions at San Diego State University, University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), Cal Poly Pomona, and Riverside Community College.