Is Distributive Justice a Necessary Condition for a High Level of Regime Robustness?

Abstract

The paper looked at the hypothesis that only regimes that secure a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of cooperation amongst their memebers prove highly resilient when confronted with exogenous challenges to their existence and effectiveness. The bulk of the article is to concern with clarifying the methodological issues that are involved in empirically testing such a hypothesis. The article concludes with a brief examination of a particular regime, the nuclear non-proliferation regime as a plausible potential falsifier of the justice hypothesis.