Make It So: Envisioning a Zoopolitical Revolution

Abstract

Much contemporary animal rights theory operates within a liberal rights framework which is prone to a kind of legalism—mistaking rights on paper for genuine transformation. This charge has been made of the theory developed in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Zoopolis, which extends not only liberal ideas of basic rights to animals but also liberal conceptions of citizenship. For critics, incorporating animals into a liberal democratic state is impossible, irrelevant, or hollow, and justice for animals can only be achieved through some “anti-system” alternative to the capitalist liberal nation-state. In this chapter, Donaldson and Kymlicka explore how Zoopolis could be achieved—how incremental advocacy and reform within liberal democratic states could lead toward interspecies justice.