We construct an effective topological Landau-Ginzburg theory that describes general SU(2) incompressible quantum liquids of strongly correlated particles in two spatial dimensions. This theory characterizes the fractionalization of quasiparticle quantum numbers and statistics in relation to the topological ground-state symmetries, and generalizes the Chern-Simons, BF ('background field') and hierarchical effective gauge theories to an arbitrary representation of the SU(2) symmetry group. We mainly focus on fractional topological insulators with time-reversal symmetry, which are treated as SU(2) generalizations of the quantum Hall effect.