Congratulations to Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, winners of the Canadian Philosophical Association 2013 biennial Book Prize for Zoopolis.

Zoopolis offers a new agenda for the theory and practice of animal rights. Most animal rights theory focuses on the intrinsic capacities or interests of animals, and the moral status and moral rights that these intrinsic characteristics give rise to. Zoopolis shifts the debate from the realm of moral theory and applied ethics to the realm of political theory, focusing on the relational obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals relate to human societies and institutions.

Building on recent developments in the political theory of group-differentiated citizenship, Zoopolis introduces us to the genuine "political animal". It argues that different types of animals stand in different relationships to human political communities. Domesticated animals should be seen as full members of human-animal mixed communities, participating in the cooperative project of shared citizenship. Wilderness animals, by contrast, form their own sovereign communities entitled to protection against colonization, invasion, domination and other threats to self-determination. "Liminal" animals who are wild but live in the midst of human settlement (such as crows or raccoons) should be seen as "denizens", resident of our societies, but not fully included in rights and responsibilities of citizenship. To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights. But we inevitably and appropriately have very different relations with them, with different types of obligations. Humans and animals are inextricably bound in a complex web of relationships, and Zoopolis offers an original and profoundly affirmative vision of how to ground this complex web of relations on principles of justice and compassion.

Sue Donaldson is an independent researcher and author based in Kingston, Ontario. She is co-author with Will Kymlicka of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was the winner of the 2013 Book Prize from the Canadian Philosophical Association. Their joint work is developed further in recent articles in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies; Canadian Journal of Political Science; Journal of Social Philosophy; Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review; and Law, Ethics and Philosophy. Her animal rights play, Stirring the Pot, appears in Phaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture.

Sue Donaldson's profile page

Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen’s University. He is the author of seven books published by Oxford University Press, most recently Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (2011), co-authored with Sue Donaldson. His previous books include Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (1995) and Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (2007). In 2013, he delivered the HLA Hart Memorial Lecture at the University of Oxford on Animals and the Frontiers of Citizenship.

Will Kymlicka's profile page

"An always engaging, often persuasive mix of the particular and general, leavening and defending the more abstract claims with choice case studies" --Christopher Belshaw, Times Higher Education

"deeply serious and brilliantly written" "Zoopolis is in fact a courageous book and an intellectural tour de force. It is the most important philosophical work on human-animal relationships since Singer's Animal Liberation." "an inspiration to those people who want to change how humans treat animals" --Richard Keshen, Literary Review of Canada

"Eloquent and extremely thought-provoking ... astonishingly free of sentimentality while still brimming with passion." --Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly