Avia Pasternak, "Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States: Should Citizens Pay for Their States' Wrongdoings?" (Oxford UP, 2021)
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What is the central problem of holding states responsible for their wrongdoing?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps, so I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the Best Education Podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share a map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast online.
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Hello, and thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books and Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talese. I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figder, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. Today, my guest is Avia Pasternak. Avia is associate professor in political theory at the University College London. Her research focuses on questions of collective responsibility and political obligation in both democratic and non-democratic states. Her new book has just been published with Oxford University Press. It's titled Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States. Should Citizens Pay for Their State's Wrongdoings? Now, we tend to think that states can act wrongfully and even criminally.
Thus, we also tend to think that states can be held responsible for their bad acts. They can be made to pay compensation to the victims of their acts. They can be made to suffer penalties with respect to their standing in the international community, and so on. The trouble, though, is that when states are held responsible It's typically the case that the cost or the burden of that wrongdoing and the responsibility for it is transferred to the citizens of the offending states. This holds for citizens who may have been unaware of the state's wrongful action or those citizens who were powerless to prevent the wrongdoing. It even holds for citizens who may have objected and protested their state's actions.
So what could justify this shifting of the burden from the states who committed the wrongs to the citizens of the state? Now, in her new book, Avia Pasternak develops a new defense of the idea that citizens have a duty to share in the burdens of their state's wrongdoing. However, Avia also addresses the practical and moral complexities of state wrongdoing. She defends a context-sensitive framework for distributing the burden for states' wrongs. Now, as usual, there's a lot to talk about, but also as usual, we'll begin with our guest. Hello, Avia. How are you? Hi,
Bob. Thanks very much. I'm good. Thanks for having me here.
I'm glad to hear that you're good, and I'm really delighted to be talking to you about this wonderful book that you've just published. But why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Sure, I'd be happy to. So... I was born in Jerusalem, in Israel, and that's where actually I grew up. And around the age of 21, after I did my military service in Israel, I enrolled as an undergraduate student in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Political Science. And pretty quickly, it became very clear to me that political philosophy is my subject and that what I want to do in life is to be a professor of political philosophy.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the central problem of holding states responsible for their wrongdoing?
0:00–8:27
2
How does Avia Pasternak’s personal and academic background shape her view on state responsibility?
8:27–16:56
3
What are the two main models for distributing the burden of state wrongdoing among citizens?
16:56–28:05
4
Why does the proportional‑blame model struggle to work in practice?
28:05–38:55
5
What is ‘intentional citizenship’ and how does it justify collective responsibility?
38:55–48:26
6
How do empirical surveys inform the prevalence of intentional citizenship in democracies?
48:26–59:55
7
What challenges arise when applying these ideas to non‑democratic or authoritarian states?
59:55–1:01:41
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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