 The trend towards greater and more sophisticated theorizing about international justice was both exemplified and encouraged by the publication of Rawls’ The Law of Peoples. This work—an extensive elaboration and revision of an earlier essay (Rawls 1993b)—discusses and, has influenced the subsequent discussion of, a variety of issues of international and global import, including and especially the obligations of distributive justice in the international realm. Before we turn to Rawls’s account of international distributive justice, we should acknowledge some salient features of how he conceives of his project. Rawls’ perspective is unabashedly international rather than global. Unlike the early cosmopolitans who conceive of the world as a single cooperative unit and seek a single principle of distributive justice to govern everyone, Rawls explicitly seeks principles that will regulate the interactions among territorially defined political, corporate agents that have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, called peoples—and, only indirectly, govern individuals (Rawls 1999a: 6).