Microfinance, Rights and Global Justice

Tom Sorell is Professor of Politics and Philosophy and Head of the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University. He is an RCUK Global Uncertainties Leadership Fellow (2013-16), and previously he was John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics, University of Birmingham. He directs the major UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project, FinCris, and he led the AHRC-funded Research Network in Microfinance. He has published widely in moral and political philosophy. His most recent monograph is Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach (Cambridge, 2013). Luis Cabrera is Associate Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He has published widely on global poverty, individual rights and justice across national boundaries, besides serving as a co-principal investigator on British Council and other grants to develop global justice networks and initiatives internationally. His most recent monograph is The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge, 2010).

• Introduction Tom Sorell; 1. Credit is not a right John Gershman and Jonathan Morduch; 2. Is there a human right to microfinance? Tom Sorell; 3. Financial inclusion, education, and human rights Kimberly Brownlee and Zofia Stemplowska; 4. Microfinance, non-ideal theory, and global distributive justice Daniel Butt; 5. Microfinance, poverty relief, and political justice Miriam Ronzoni and Laura Valentini; 6. Is exploitation permissible in microcredit? Lesley Sherratt; 7. What's wrong with exorbitant interest rates on microloans? Joakim Sandberg; 8. Tensions between financial and organisational sustainability: the problematic case of group-based microfinance and possible ways forward Ana Marr; 9. Freedom and credit Mark Hannam.

'Discussed in this volume are important moral issues arising with the spread of microfinance as a poverty alleviation tool. The authors debate whether there is a human right to microfinance and, if so, whether this is a new human right or a conceptual expansion of conventional ones. These debates are especially useful because they closely examine the actual practice of microfinance: whether interest rates are excessive, for instance, and whether indefensible pressure is put on participants in group finance schemes. The volume's rigorous and empirically informed normative analyses are important for scholars and students focused on severe poverty, development practice and global justice.' Thomas Pogge, Yale University