Does justice stand alone?

A common feature of leading liberal-egalitarian political theories is the sharp priority they attribute to justice, and to distributive justice in particular. In this article, I argue that liberal egalitarians have yet to offer a persuasive argument for prioritizing justice, and distributive justice in particular, in this way. I focus on assessing arguments advanced in the seminal work of John Rawls and employ the pluralist liberalism of Isaiah Berlin to illustrate that Rawls’ arguments are not even persuasive for reasonable liberals like Berlin, let alone for non-liberals. The upshot of my argument is not that liberals should abandon the pursuit of greater equality of wealth and income, but only that such goals should still be balanced against the claims of other fundamental values, such as individual liberty and the common good (contrary to those who want to give sharp priority to distributive justice).     

Going green together? Brownfield remediation and environmental justice

Research on the location of hazardous facilities that contribute to environmental degradation indicates an unequal distribution of such sites within low socioeconomic status communities. In this paper, we contribute to research investigating whether there are similar patterns of unequal prioritization in environmental remediation, by assessing cleanup of a broader, more diverse set of contaminated sites, all brownfields that receive federal grants, with a finer level of geographic detail than previous studies. First, we set the context by assessing the characteristics of the communities in which brownfield sites are currently located. Then, we compare the likelihood and temporal prioritization of cleaning up brownfield sites based on the composition of the neighborhoods in which they are located. We find that brownfield sites are more likely to be located in both poor and predominantly minority communities, but while sites located in poor communities tend to be cleaned up relatively quickly, sites located in communities with larger minority populations tend to be cleaned up more slowly.     

Van Parijsian linguistic justice – context,analysis and critiques

This introduction does three things. We first give an overview of the linguistic justice debate in normative political philosophy. We then situate Philippe Van Parijs’s position within it, by zooming in on Van Parijs’s two major normative claims: the support of the rise of English as the global lingua franca and the defence of linguistic territoriality. Finally, we clarify how each of the essays that follow this introduction relates to those two claims.     

Palpable insecurity and Sen’s comparative view of justice: anthropological considerations

Amartya Sen’s comparative approach to justice makes clear that notions of justice are shaped by human agency and experience, and both his focus on the ‘internal view’ of well-being that emphasizes suffering as a central feature of illness and his recognition that social and cultural factors shape perceived injustice are critical to this approach. However, Sen questionably depicts the contributions of anthropological research to this project as limited to ‘the sensory dimension of ill-health.’ Focusing on mental health in the context of global justice, I argue that Sen’s treatise on justice can be refined through an ethnographic method that synchronizes attention to (1) cultural knowledge and social relations in ecological settings; (2) fundamental human needs; and (3) levels of analytic specificity involving situations, categories, and events. This method integrates analysis of internal phenomenology and external constraints of political economy and ideology. To demonstrate I discuss three cases involving students and violence in Rio de Janeiro, women and witchcraft in Ghana, and historical migration and war trauma among Vietnamese immigrants in which external conditions of insecurity and inequality contributed to deteriorating mental health conditions including depression, trauma, and debilitating anxiety.     

Enacting multi-layered citizenship: Turkey’s Armenians’ struggle for justice and equality

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s Armenians have been subjected to a trade-off between the limited minority rights granted by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and equal national citizenship. Traditionally a closed, depoliticized community, the citizenship practices of the Armenian minority have become increasingly differentiated in recent years. Building on a notion of citizenship as multi-layered and constituted through collective practice, this article investigates the implications of the political acts of Turkey’s Armenian minority on sub-national and national citizenship in Turkey. We show that Turkey’s Armenians are coupling rights demands, identification, normative references, and mobilization at the sub-national, national, and transnational levels in innovative ways, and are thereby negotiating different layers of citizenship in Turkey in a way that strengthens equal national citizenship.     

What motivates adherence to medical recommendations? The procedural justice approach to gaining deference in the medical arena

Although it is within their long‐term interest, patients often fail to follow health care recommendations made by medical experts. This failure results in the widespread occurrence of preventable health problems and a significant increase in health care costs. Taking a new approach to confronting this issue, this paper examines whether the procedural justice model, which has been useful in explaining cooperation with legal and managerial authorities, can provide a basis for increasing patients' willingness to voluntarily adhere to health care recommendations. Three studies tested and supported this proposition. Study 1 experimentally manipulated physicians' procedural fairness or unfairness to explore its influence on patients' acceptance of doctors' recommendations. Study 2 used patients' reports about the fairness of their personal physicians and linked those evaluations to their willingness to follow their doctor's recommendations. Finally, study 3 explored the role of general procedural justice judgments in promoting willingness to accept health policies when they are advocated by private doctors and government health care authorities. The results of all three studies support the argument that when health care authorities use fair procedures, patients are more likely to accept their recommendations. Importantly, this procedural justice effect is distinct from, and in some cases stronger than, the influence of competence.     

The urbanisation of justice movements? Possibilities and constraints for the city as a space of contentious struggle

Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movement is conceptualised as geographically extensive mobilisations that achieve a degree of territorial fixity at different spatial scales. It is proposed that a number of factors can encourage organisations implicated in this movement to make the urban arena a key front in their struggle to achieve justice. These factors include the intensification of urban inequalities, increased political opportunities resulting from the devolution of state capacities to sub‐national levels of government and new actors interested in pursuing innovative strategies and tactics. This hypothesis is tested through a comparison of movements in three different cities: Los Angeles, USA; Rotterdam, Holland; and Toulouse, France. The findings show that, despite the fact that new actors have begun to mobilise in these three cities around justice issues, they have experienced different degrees of territorialisation. The divergent outcomes are explained by the particular state–civil society power relations found in each of the cities. Thus, the paper concludes that, though the factors in our hypothesis may encourage actors to initiate urban justice movements, the degree of their territorialisation ultimately depends on local state–civil society power relations.     

‘Kat Mai Ploi’ – bite and don't let go: motherhood and pursuits of justice in Thailand

This article examines the long-term struggles of two Thai mothers to define and attain their visions of justice: one to recover land flooded by a state dam project and the other to defy a municipal order to demolish her house for a vehicle turn-around. In particular, it studies how tropes and institutions of motherhood and human rights articulate with, and provide social and political resources to one another as these two women fight to lay claim to traditions of rights specific to Thai society.     

Tackling invisible frontiers of global justice: an extension of Sen’s ‘Comparison View of Justice’ into IR

A central challenge of Amartya Sen’s comparative view of justice is to bring cultural diversity to bear on conceptualizing global justice, which includes building bridges across cultures that enable effective action, and rendering compatible the most beneficent of Rawlsian (or transcendental) intentions with irreducible cultural diversity. For social scientists meeting this challenge requires, first, taking account of variation of social practices in the social construction of meaning, and second, uncovering invisible frontiers of global justice that remain hidden due to conceptual or empirical oversight. The latter is especially true for contemporary International Relations (IR) theory, which assumes state actors to be the main interlocutors in the global realm, and thus precludes consideration of micro-level forms of inter-national relations (understood as interaction among all types of actors that takes place across country borders and that bears traits of national identity). Alternatively, Sen’s micro-perspectival approach offers a welcome support for pluralist approaches that both appreciate non-state access to contestation in the international arena, and account for the meaning-in-use of fundamental norms (democracy, rule of law, human rights) in different cultural and inter-national contexts.     

Totalitarianism and justice: Hannah Arendt’s and Judith N. Shklar’s political reflections in historical and theoretical perspective

We locate Arendt’s and Shklar’s writings within what Katznelson has identified as an attempt to create a new language for politics after the cataclysm of the twentieth century, and Greif has called the new ‘maieutic’ discourse of ‘re-enlightenment’ in the ‘age of the crisis of man’. More specifically, we compare and contrast two related, but in many ways also differing, ways of thinking about totalitarianism and its legal repercussions. To this end, we examine two sets of studies: Arendt’s The origins of totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil and Shklar’s After utopia: The decline of political faith and Legalism: An essay on law, morals, and politics. While The origins of totalitarianism and After utopia discussed totalitarian ideology and its consequences for modern political thought, the Eichmann report and Legalism dealt with the question of whether and how justice is possible after the extreme experience of totalitarianism. We argue that the maieutic impulse led Arendt and Shklar to find distinct routes to address a common concern. Our paper ends with a discussion of some of the surplus meaning that was generated by the different maieutic performances of the two thinkers.     

Multiple imaginations of the state: understanding a mobile conflict about justice and accountability from the perspective of Assyrian–Syriac communities

This article examines how the struggle for the recognition of genocide in the twentieth century opens up a political space which, on the one hand, generates historical discourses and imaginaries about the categories of victim and perpetrator and, on the other hand, redefines relationships between the state and its minority citizens. Genocide becomes a ‘critical event’, in the sense of Veena Das, that citizens from different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds use to express their positions concerning the repressive state practices they have been victims of. This expression creates a collective space of solidarity where parties support each other by adopting similar strategies in the struggle for state accountability. At the same time, it opens up a space for negotiation among the state, minority citizens and migrant communities regarding claims to rights and justice.