The success or failure of our political arrangements depends on whether they can provide convincing answers to the fundamental questions concerning how they are organized. These answers must make sense in terms of how we conceive of ourselves and the problems that we face. Across four essays, this dissertation examines the consequences that this point has for political philosophy, and particularly approaches to political philosophy that focus exclusively on the moral perspective. I begin in chapter 1 by defending the idea of a distinctively political domain of normativity, organized around the value of political orders that make sense to their subjects as authoritative. In chapter 2, I develop the thought that political power can achieve this value by addressing problems that communities take themselves to have, thus furthering common interests. I argue that this comports well with the constructivist idea that normative political concepts are best understood as problem-solving tools, successful insofar as they achieve the goals of their users. The second half of the dissertation examines two central issues in global justice in light of these results. In chapter 3, I con-sider global egalitarianism as both a moral position and political project, offer a critique of the for-mer, and sketch the elements of a political global egalitarianism based around the failure of our un-equal world to address shared problems. In chapter 4, I illustrate the problem-solving nature of political concepts by arguing that self-determination is best understood as a tool for opposing inter-group hierarchies of power. I draw out one important consequence of this: self-determination’s connection to the exclusion of migrants is considerably weakened, especially in cases involving powerful states. Taken together, these essays offer a way to think about how to ground demanding political projects in global justice that is sensitive to the different contexts that such claims arise in and the different problems that they are meant to solve. They also paint a picture of politics as a source of normative demands that are interwoven with and yet distinct from morality.