Domination, global harms, and the problem of silent citizenship: toward a republican theory of global justice

Abstract

Many citizens across the globe suffer domination and injustice in silence. It is not a silence of apathy or approval, but is another sort of silent citizenship born of deep inequality. This article attempts to come to terms with the global scope of silent citizenship as a form of domination that has become increasingly common among the worst-off in society. I argue that identifying problems of silent citizenship requires us to give priority to injustice over justice in future efforts to promote global justice. To illustrate how this might be done, I broaden the scope of republican theories of nondomination to consider how they might be applied to silent citizenship from a global perspective.

Keywords::

• silence
• domination
• nondomination
• global justice
• silent citizenship
• republicanism

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions as well as Sean Gray for his careful editorial work in seeing this manuscript through to publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. On this distinction applied to the global order, see Bohman (2010).

^2. Parts of this section and the next are based on arguments that originally appeared in Bohman (2015).

^3. Philip Pettit's Rawlsian inflected work, ‘The Republican Law of Peoples: A Restatement,’ is vulnerable to a similar critique.

^4. On the various positions and controversies over globalization, see Held et al. (1999).

^5. See Held (1995) for an argument of this sort that emphasizes the scope of interconnections and their consequences for the realization of autonomy as the key problem for democratic governments.

^6. For a republican criticism of Held's account of globalization for failing to begin with such asymmetries rather than with mere scope or intensity, see Dobson (2003).