page_title: Alasdair Cochrane
section_title: International animal rights
hierarchical_section_title: Alasdair Cochrane / Research / International animal rights
caption_attribution_description: English: The is a picture of en:Will Kymlicka that I took myself at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, in June 2007. It will be used to illustrate the article about Kymlicka.
context_page_description: Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently a senior lecturer in political theory in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation. His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Cochrane is a Sentientist. Sentientism is a naturalistic worldview that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.
  Cochrane's work forms part of the political turn in animal ethics—that is, the emergence of academic literature exploring the normative aspects of human/nonhuman animal relationships from a political perspective.
context_section_description: Some of Cochrane's research concerns animal rights from an international or cosmopolitan perspective. As an alternative to Donaldson and Kymlicka's proposal for a "zoopolis", Cochrane proposes a "cosmozoopolis", drawing upon cosmopolitan theory. The zoopolis picture, Cochrane suggests, unfairly elevates the interests of nonhuman "citizens" over other nonhuman animals, even though these other animals may have comparable interests, and, in offering sovereignty to free-living animals, denies the importance of nonhuman animal mobility. Ahlhaus and Niesen consider Cochrane's criticism of Donaldson and Kymlicka valuable, but question the extent to which his "cosmozoopolis" picture is compatible with his liberty thesis. Donaldson and Kymlicka offer a defence of their zoopolis picture against Cochrane's criticism, affirming the importance of nonhuman animals' interests in their territory and the legitimacy of offering benefits to members of particular societies denied to non-members. Despite this, they say that, citing Cochrane's cosmozoopolis picture as an example, "one of [their] aims is to inspire people to develop ... alternative political theories of animal rights" to their own.
  Cochrane is of the view that "a lack of a clear, focused and coherent set of international standards and policies for animal protection is an important contributing factor" to the gulf between the theoretical and legal valuation of nonhuman animals and their treatment around the world. With Steve Cooke, he argues that it is theoretically acceptable—drawing upon Simon Caney's account of just war—for states to go to war to protect nonhuman animals. Nonetheless, the pair argue that it will almost never be acceptable in practice.
caption: As an alternative to the "zoopolis" of Will Kymlicka (pictured) and Sue Donaldson, Cochrane argues for a "cosmozoopolis".
exif: {}