Resisting ‘Global Justice’: disrupting the colonial ‘emancipatory’ logic of the West

Abstract

This paper takes issue with global justice theory, seeing it as a ‘global–local’ in which the perspectives and demands of post-Kantian Western liberalism silence ways of being in the world that move beyond a narrowly circumscribed definition of ‘reasonableness’. Taking its cue from critics of dominant liberal conceptions of the self, such as Spivak, Deleuze and Freire, the paper examines the impact of epistemological diversity and the radical ‘otherness’ of indigenous, peasant and marginal epistemologies on how Western intellectuals might think about global justice. We look at a number of examples of indigenous and marginal resistance to injustice in the global system, including the West Papuan and Zapatista movements, and conclude that the goals of such movements cannot be encapsulated in distributive or juridical terms. An alternative theorisation of global justice might, contra global justice theory, insist on a dialogical, contingent basis for discussing justice, whether local or global.

Notes

1 Among the key texts in this discourse are T Pogge (ed), Global Justice, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001; C Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979; S Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Philippe van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (if Anything) can Justify Capitalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; and John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

2 GC Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

3 Margaret Thornton, cited in P Handley, ‘Theorising disability: beyond “common sense”, Politics, 23 (2), 2003, p 115.

4 Cf EP Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. In postcolonial theory, dissensus is often expressed as ‘interruption’.

5 J Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1975.

6 DC Galvan, The State must be our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, ch 1.

7 M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972.

8 V Bennholdt-Thomsen & M Mies, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy, New York: Zed Books, 1999.

9 I Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, pp 32–35.

10 F Guattari, The Three Ecologies, London: Athlone, 2000, p 65.

11 ‘The supposed alternative to the government's so-called monopoly of power allows private violence for those with the will and the means to exercise it.’ Rawls, The Law of Peoples, p 26.

12 RJF Day, Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, London: Pluto, 2005, p 54.

13 A Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001; B Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000; and P Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

14 P Clastres, Society against the State, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977; and Clastres, The Archaeology of Violence, New York: Semiotext[e], 1994.

15 Clastres, Society against the State, p 34.

16 M Mauss, The Gift: Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, New York: Routledge, 2001.

17 P Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, London: Freedom Press, 1987; H Barclay, People without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy, St Louis, MO: Left Bank Books, 1982; and J Zerzan, Future Primitive, New York: Autonomedia, 1994.

18 RB Lee & I DeVore, Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and their Neighbours, New York: Harvard University Press, 1978; and CM Turnbull, The Forest People, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

19 J Crabtree, Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia, London: Latin America Bureau, 2005.

20 G Harrison, Issues in the Contemporary Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa: The Dynamics of Struggle and Resistance, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002, p 135.

21 F Bayart, S Ellis & P Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, Oxford: James Currey, 1999.

22 Cf Crabtree, Patterns of Protest, p 108; and Clastres, Society against the State, pp 9, 15.

23 Stephane Chauvier states in his paper for a volume edited by Thomas Pogge: ‘I shall not distinguish among the terms “peoples,”“states” and “nations”, though I am aware that distinctions can be made amongst these kinds of entities.’ See Chauvier, ‘Justice and nakedness’, in Pogge, Global Justice, p 91. Similarly Wilfried Hinsch declares that ‘I shall use “state”, “state-like organized people” and “society” interchangeably to refer to a politically independent state with a government of its own’. Ibid, p 55.

24 Workers' Solidarity, ‘Interview with Subcomandante Marcos, 11 May 1994’, at http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/anmarin.html.

25 J Rabasa, ‘Negri by Zapata: constituent power and the limits of autonomy’, in TS Murphy & A-K Mustapha (eds), The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, London: Pluto, 2005, pp 163–204.

26 N Harvey & C Halverson, ‘The secret and the promise: women's struggles in Chiapas’, in D Howarth, AJ Norval & Y Stavrakakis (eds), Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester University Press, 2000.

27 ‘Mamberamo madness: progress and resistance in West Papua’, Do or Die, 8, 1999, pp 225–228, at http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no8/pdfs/papua.pdf, p 227.

28 Ibid, p 226.

29 ‘Rumble in the jungle: fighting for freedom in West Papua’, Do or Die, 8, 1999, pp 229–241, at http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no8/pdfs/papua.pdf, pp 229–230.

30 ‘Mamberamo madness’, p 226.

31 ‘Rumble in the jungle’, pp 236, 240.

32 ‘Mamberamo madness’, p 228.

33 ‘Rumble in the jungle’, pp 230, 232.

34 ‘Real subsumption’ is a term found in Marx's Grundrisse and associated with the work of Antonio Negri. It refers to the absolute commodification of social relations as capitalism develops from an economic relation to encompass social and political life more generally. It thus implies the total commodification of life, as opposed to mere ‘economic’ goods.

35 The Nomadic War Machine is discussed in A Thousand Plateaus, where it stands emblematically for forms of non-statist organisation that disrupt statist or ‘striated’ logics. Thus it need not be violent or invoke ‘war’, as the concept implies. See G Deleuze & F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, London, Athlone, 1987.

36 Organisasi Papua Merdeka, ‘Basic principles’, West Papua Action Update, 00, 1999, at http://www.eco-action.org/opm/wpau/00/wpau00.html, p 7.

37 ‘Rumble in the jungle’, pp 230, 232.

38 Ibid, pp 232, 235.

39 Ibid, p 232.

40 Ibid, p 233.

41 Ibid.

42 M Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p 12. Wittgenstein's notion of the ‘availability of other worlds’ functions in his later thought as a barrier to the colonising tendencies of Western thought. See, for example, the comments at s147–149 of his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967, notable for several reasons relevant to this paper: its focus on indigeneity, the possibility of non-equivalential logics, and the colonial imperative underpinning occidental thought that refuses the possibility that it may itself be the product of a specific time and place.

43 The phrase is from GC Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p 101.