Structural injustice and alienation: a reply to my critics

ABSTRACT

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Reinhard Wolf, Alasia Nuti, and Kimberly Hutchings of my 2017 book, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics. First, I restate the normative and practical significance of focusing on challenges of structural injustice for resolving many serious and pressing problems in world politics, including climate change. Second, I begin to resolve some puzzles about the concept of alienation and its relationship to justice and reconciliation, by outlining two concepts of alienation, and distinguishing them from alienation as a cognitive-affective experience. Third, I clarify the limits and potential of decolonial political theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Structural injustice
• alienation
• freedom
• reconciliation
• agency
• colonialism
• settler colonialism
• decolonization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is a great compliment in academic work to have colleagues interested in discussing one’s work. In addition to my thanks to Kimberly Hutchings, Alasia Nuti, and Reinhard Wolf for these stimulating critiques, I am grateful to Peter Niesen for organizing the book roundtable at the General Conference of theEuropean Consortium for Political Research that took place in August 2018 in Hamburg, Germany, from which this symposium developed. My thanks also go to CRISPP’s editor, Richard Bellamy, for chairing the ECPR session, and sponsoring this productive exchange.

2. 2019 is UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous languages. See https://en.iyil2019.org/.

3. Ngũgĩ was imprisoned by the Kenyan authorities for a year in 1978 for writing a social critique of his postcolonial state, not in English, but in his native Gikũyũ language, which allowed the play to be accessible to a wide audience, and performed by peasants and workers (Dorfman, 2018).

4. The point here is not that climate adaptation strategies necessarily contribute to reproducing structural injustices, but that without conscious and robust efforts to counteract their influence, the effects of structural domination and oppression on the formulation, adoption, and implementation of such strategies will be foreseeable and persistent.

5. On Kimberly Hutchings’ worry that the concept of reconciliation invokes ideals of belonging that are attached to ‘older’, essentialist ‘discourses of authenticity and human flourishing,’ I have noted elsewhere (Lu, 2018) that by using the negative and process-driven concept of ‘nonalienation’ to define reconciliation, I aimed to reject prevalent accounts of reconciliation that imply an implausible essentialist notion of social identity, harmony, or unity, which typically accompanies notions of reconciliation as engendering ‘belonging’ or ‘feeling at home’ in the world.

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Notes on contributors

Catherine Lu

Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her research intersects political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative studies of humanitarianism and intervention in world politics; colonialism as structural injustice; alienation and reconciliation; and cosmopolitanism, global justice, and the world state.