The transnational sphere of justice: disability praxis and the politics of impairment

Abstract

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?

Keywords:

• impairment
• disability movement politics
• transnational justice
• North–South power relations
• Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from a British Academy International Visiting Fellowship. The author would like to thank Lorna Pimperton, Legal Librarian at Lancaster University, for the research into the US Supreme Court rulings on Bhopal and Vietnam, Janaka Biyanwila and Donna Reeve for their thoughtful comments, and Kelly Somers for her editorial assistance.

Notes

1. Mexico’s position is, of course, largely related to its closest northern neighbour, the USA, and was largely driven by the biopolitics of so-called free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, and their impairment creation effects within the border towns and maquiladoras.

2. This includes anti-discriminatory law and policy, and employability for the capitalist labour market, which studies by Samuel L. Myers, Jr and Ding Sai (forthcoming) reveal are not as effective as they purport to be when compared with non-liberal strategies operating in other forms of the modern territorial state.

3. See, for example, disability philosophers such as Vehmas (2012), who clearly works within a western-centric gaze of the impairment/disability divide.

4. It should be noted here that one of the reasons for the ruling against the Vietnamese plaintiffs was due to the positioning of Agent Orange as a herbicide by the US military industrial complex, ‘used to protect US troops against ambush’, rather than a chemical agent, used ‘as a weapon of war against human populations’ (Military.com 2009), moving it outside the boundaries of international law on chemical warfare. The security/safety divide appears to be a consistent feature of human rights law, discourse and practice, despite its emancipatory promises.

5. This is significantly different to Sherry’s (2007) argument on the conflation of disability and colonization used within either field of study, and I concur with his argument entirely. The aim of this issue is to engage with impairment as a socio-political material reality of geopolitical power, rather than a cultural representation system.

6. This is not to say that poverty, exclusion or marginalization are not real within the South, particularly for disabled people. These ‘insights’, presented however into the lives of disabled people within the South, exhibit the qualities of a panopticon orientalist gaze, where disability geopolitical knowledges are captured under a single rubric (Campbell 2009).

7. This logical progression from impairment to disability, as southern feminists such as Spivak and Mohanty claim, follows that of the northern orientalist gaze within the feminist movement – where it is assumed that because one is female they are a feminist. Here, it assumes that because one has an impairment they are disabled, and willingly claim a disabled identity for claims of justice.

8. The manufacturers of Agent Orange, to support their defense against the Vietnamese plaintiffs’ claims for justice in The United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, 373 F.Supp.2d 7, argued that a precedent had been set in US law with the ruling of the case Bano v. Union Carbide Corp., the claim for justice made by the people of Bhopal against Union Carbide (which they lost), where Union Carbide argued that under the guise of Indian national sovereignty the US Court had no jurisdictional power and therefore was unable to rule in favour of the plaintiffs. While the Vietnamese claim for justice on the grounds of impairment and that of the people of Bhopal for the exact same claim may seem far apart, historically, spatially and temporally, indeed they are mutually constitutive and deeply intertwined.

9. The reference to distant others is to reflect the distinctly separate lives that these two bodies orbit outside the small number of hours that they share for personal support and care. Even though they may be in proximity to each other spatially, this does not necessarily mean they are affectively close.

10. I borrow this from the poet Krishantha Sri Bhagyadatta, who asks the question ‘what kind of Indian are you?’ to reveal the contested notion of being Indian that is flattened under the orientalist eurocentric gaze.

11. Sri Lankan Hill Tamils who were indentured labour under the British colonizers have, too, had a long-protracted battle with the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist state for citizenship, which has been granted and taken away on numerous occasions through various parliamentary acts (see Wickramasinghe 2006).