ABSTRACT
In Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements, Monique Deveaux builds a political theory of poverty as relational and responsibility for injustice as solidaristic. Identifying the ways that poor-led movements have politically theorized and acted, Deveaux develops a theory of relational poverty that entails politicizing poverty which requires local-level organizing, consciousness-raising, resisting injustice and developing and demanding alternatives, and engaging in public debate and discourse. She goes on to argue that the praxis of poor-led movements reveals normative commitments to mutuality, deference and deep listening, and risk taking. These enable movements of people in poverty to take on the injustice of poverty together across difference, privilege, and other obstacles to transformative (solidaristic) politics. Deveaux provides a mode for doing grounded normative theory (GNT) by relying on secondary literature. GNT is a methodology for doing political theory that destabilizes the epistemological authority of the political theory of the academy by treating lived experience – words and actions – as providing relevant text for analysis. The methodology is particularly important for theories related to justice. Deveaux demonstrates how this can be done with secondary sources thus enabling comprehensive engagement without avoiding burdening social movement actors with interviews or other modes of accommodating researchers.
Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social movements: GNT with secondary sources
Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements is an important book for political philosophy generally and for theories of global justice specifically. I will highlight three reasons for this bold description. First, it argues for the importance of theorizing about poverty from the perspective of those in poverty. Second, and to that end, it turns to the poor and poor-led movements as theorists of injustice and agents of change. Third, Monique Deveaux shows that through their actions of self-advocacy, they are authors of a political theory of poverty as relational and of global responsibility for the injustice of poverty as solidaristic. By ‘relational’, she means political. Relations of power create poverty and the conditions for persistent poverty. Therefore, taking on poverty means taking up responsibility for structural injustice with solidarity.
Using sources that include the documentation of movements themselves as well as news, academic, and grey literature by and about these movements, Deveaux identifies the ways that poor-led movements have politically theorized and acted. Thus, hers is a grounded normative theory (GNT) that relies not her direct primary source engagement with these movements, but rather on secondary sources. Analyzing these data, she develops a theory of relational poverty that entails politicizing poverty through local-level organizing, consciousness-raising, resisting injustice and developing and demanding alternatives (110) and ‘at the level of public debate and discourse’ (111) with the goal of eradicating poverty (111–112) as a structural injustice, not merely a deficit of those individuals in poverty. She also identifies the value scheme necessary to sustain this politics: ‘norms of mutuality, deference, deep listening, and a willingness to share the burdens and risks of collective action, they can contribute constructively to the causes of organized poor communities and movements’ (207). She then takes the insights from treating people and poverty and their movements as agents of change and through that as theorists of change and situates these insights in the political theory of solidarity.
Deveaux situates her argument in the context of the field of engaged and grounded normative theory and in the empirical work on and by poor-led social movements, especially local landless movements, urban and rural. Though in conversation about the book both in its development and subsequent to its publications, Deveaux has been reticent about describing her own work as grounded normative theory, in my reading, the book itself situates itself in that field as an example of doing grounded normative theory relying on secondary sources. As such, close analysis of this work and of how the author puts the argument together can (1) help the political theorists better understand the potential for GNT as a resource for political philosophers who do not do their own empirical and (2) contribute to an on-going conversation among engaged and GNT scholars about how to theorize with existing political theory and empirical data and how to assess the work of those who do.
It is important to engage with Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements in this way because the implications of the work are significant both for a theory of global justice and for the development of secondary-source-dependent methodologies for engaged and grounded normative theory. As the field of global justice further develops for the reasons that Deveaux reviews thoroughly in the early chapters, theories of global justice need to be grounded in the experience of injustice and the struggles against them as sites of theorizing about global justice. As the methodological field of engaged and GNT develops, and those who do this work seek to teach others how to do it and to hold themselves to account for doing it well, the field needs careful methodological discussions about both the data and theorizing using those data in relation to the developed and developing field of political philosophy.
While writing six separate projects, Lou Cabrera, Fonna Forman, Genevieve Fuji Johnson, Chris Tenove and Antje Wiener and I met over five years to discern and distill the practices that we observed in our own work and those of others that made the contributions of GNT to political theory (Ackerly et al. Citation2021). I introduce these four criteria for grounded normative theorizing with reference to Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements and to the questions that any scholar of GNT would want to ask themselves as they developed and utilized GNT.
Comprehensiveness. Deveaux is broad and deep in the political theory and philosophy she uses to develop the field in which she situates her argument. She is likewise comprehensive in the knowledge of movements led by people in poverty and the scholarship on these that inform her work. Comprehensiveness knows no bounds other than the need to finish the work, so it is difficult to know where to set that artificial boundary. GNT requires that every inclusion is also an exclusion. The last criteria invites the theorist to revisit the boundary set for the project and consider its implications.
Attentiveness to epistemic exclusions. Deveaux’s argument attends to the historical and current theoretical exclusion of people in poverty as political agents of changes and as agents (theorists) who interpret their experience and context. She reveals what understanding of poverty as relational can be known by treating people in poverty as agents – as theorists of poverty.
Epistemic Accountability. What epistemic accountability requires varies by project. It might be a process interpretation, that is the researcher ‘checks back’ with sources and shares with them interpretations, analysis, and conclusions. It could also mean to work in partnership with those in struggle to develop a theory with fidelity to their views. In each of these interpretations of ‘accountability’, a commitment to accountability is a political commitment consistent with and reinforcing of a relational theory of poverty. Relying on secondary sources, Deveaux does not have a specific ‘they’ with which to check back.
Recursivity. In GNT these three considerations are enriched by recursivity. Again, this commitment can be realized in multiple ways, generally mutually reinforcing, but also opposing. Comprehensiveness becomes more comprehensive with recursivity – a theorist continues to broaden their theoretical and empirical resources. Attentiveness to exclusion, becomes more inclusive as the theorist continues to reconsider what Jose Medina calls ‘blind spots’ (Medina Citation2013). Accountability is more accountable if the theorist has ways of revisiting their data. However, accountability can also be undermined by commitments to recursivity as the theorist delays sharing their insights in accountable ways because they are engaged in an on-going process of recursivity. Deveaux is recursive when she turns to the political theory of solidarity at the end of the book.
These four guide an iterative process of the theorist engaging with theory, with practice, with those who reflect on practice in theory and in practice, and with theory. Some begin with practice (Johnson Citation2015; Ackerly Citation2018). Some begin with those who reflect on their engagement with practice (Ackerly Citation2000, Citation2008). Some begin with theory (Cabrera Citation2010, Citation2020). But all understand their starting point as an interim point in an on-going and recursive process that brings them back to and through theory and experience, with reflections guided by these four general principles.
As noted above, how to do this work and how to do it better is a question to which the criteria of recursivity always returns the researcher. The implication of the reconsiderations inspired by recursivity can be to redo the work, make it more comprehensive, more inclusive, and more accountable. The implication can also be to point to further work to be done. Thus, as I discuss Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements, my critical reflections are better understood in service of the field and as prompts for thinking about how a reader might take up and further the ideas developed in this book or more generally do their work better.
It is wholly appropriate for Deveaux’s findings of practices and theories of solidarity at work in movements led by people in poverty to lead her to put these ideas in conversation with academic theorists of solidarity. Her conclusion illustrates why the criteria of grounded and engaged normative approach might lead a theorist to move through and outside of those theories to revise them in light of the theoretical insights explicitly articulated by the activists, or gleaned from, their experiences.
In the first section, I discuss how Deveaux uses secondary sources for grounding normative theorizing. In the subsequent section, I discuss her analysis. Finally, I discuss her theorizing about poverty.
GNT and secondary sources
Deveaux demonstrates in Poverty, Solidarity and Poor-Led Social movements that drawing on secondary sources is a way of being comprehensive (if the scholarship and other publications enable comprehensiveness). Given the scope of the anti-poverty movements and the long history of the scholarship and activism, the challenge is to focus the scope without having that focus mirror exclusions caused by power and privilege. In light of Deveaux’s finding that agency in theorizing one’s condition is a precursor or part of a theory of global justice, recursivity suggests that further work might look more broadly in the development of theories of justice to consider those being developed by Third World people’s movements related to decolonization and non-alignment, Black feminist movement in the US, Black liberation movements in the US, global women’s peace movements, Indigenous movements around the world, etc. By focusing on ‘poor-led movements’ rather than ‘movements of people in poverty’ Deveaux is deeply attentive to poor-led people’s movements today (and those able to publish their ideas in English or to have English language scholarship about them in circulation). She also sets the boundary of those movements to exclude those led by people in poverty, but not identified as such. Thus, most of the primary and secondary scholarship by and about global women’s movements (for peace, antiglobalization, transformative models of development, etc.) is not utilized. Whether this absence is important to this argument or an indication of what future work requires is a matter of discussion and maybe disagreement. For my purposes, the important thing is the (re)considerations. Deveaux relies on Naila Kabeer’s account of the work of Nijera Kori. This organization began as a resource- and service-provision organization in 1974. By being engaged in the communities where they worked, its organizers realized that the work needed to be community led. Nijera Kori’s history of adaptation and change may be relevant to the role of networking and allyship for poor-led movements.
Given the despite the importance of Nijera Kori, Srilatha Batliwala, and Ella Bhatt to elements of her argument. Below I note the ideas related to context analysis and reclaiming power that are left out due to her choice of scope.
Being attentive to epistemic exclusion, one might note that relying on secondary sources is always at risk of being conservative. Only some groups gain the recognition and visibility necessary to be studied. Academic informants may articulate the work through their own epistemologies rather than through those of the poor-led movement. Additionally, sometimes, when such groups gain recognition, either in order to gain that recognition or due to it, the political aspects of their beginnings and early transformations are lost or unnuanced. Secondary-source informed GNT can attend to exclusions by making more visible the work of those with expertise in empirical methods, particularly methods that facilitate participatory, accountable, and solidaristic research. Those using secondary sources might seek out archival resources to be informed about those beginnings. Additionally, as Deveaux does, the work can address exclusion by citing scholarship and ideas developed in or in solidarity with peoples’ movements. However, secondary sources themselves need to be evaluated for GNT criteria. The GNT scholar would want to privilege research that is theoretically informed by theoretical perspectives of the poor themselves. Feminist grounded normative theory has a lot to teach about what experience brings to theory (see especially, Hooks Citation1994, Introduction and chapters 1, 5, and 6).
Using secondary sources can be a good way of being accountable to peoples’ movements, as this approach does not take up the time and other resource commitments of being studied that is generally required in primary source research. However, the theorist has to attend to who gets to be the spokespersons of the movements. It can be those with relative power within the movement, or relative to time (for example someone becomes an academic or publishes their story on a global stage or is the latest leader of an organization and thus can shape the narrative.) In 2005 I interviewed all of the people who left a meeting early. I found that they were all young women who left because they weren’t part of ‘the agenda.’ They were eager to share what they thought the agenda should include, but had left the meeting because their efforts to be heard went unheard (Ackerly Citation2008). Of interest to the methodological point, without attending to those who felt excluded from the meeting, no theory relying on the insights shared in the meeting would be accountable to the movement, but only to the part of the movement that did not feel silenced by the agenda. Can scholars use secondary sources to be accountable to difference within movements – differences that structure hierarchies and hegemonies of thought within communities? Considering hegemonies related to gender, caste (depending where), race, ethnicity, disability, identity categories, etc. means that secondary source based GNT needs creative ways of checking back in with those whose agency and the meaning of that agency are the source of the analysis.
In sum, there are many advantages of a secondary-source informed approach to GNT, but the expectations for comprehensiveness, attentiveness to exclusion, and accountability are higher because the mechanisms for recursivity are more limited. It is harder to revisit the choices made by another than it is to revisit one’s own choices.
Secondary sources and GNT analysis
If the theorist is meaningfully comprehensive, attentive to inclusion, and accountable then the range of views within the data will necessitate some interpretation and theorizing from that diversity. This is what I see happening in Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements, particularly in the last three chapters. In chapter four through close reading of cases, Deveaux develops the theoretical account of relational poverty (one that other contributors will discuss as enriching and emphasizing the importance of power dynamics to poverty), a politicized theory of poverty. In chapter five she lays out the implications of the politicized theory of poverty, that is, its institutional features: political activity that focuses on local organizing and where necessary consciousness raising, political analysis that supports resists or proposes alternatives or both, and political strategy that includes framing and claiming the policy discourse.
As discussed above recursivity is a tool for reassessing choices related to comprehensiveness, inclusion and accountability. It can also be used to analyse findings. Two theorists who Deveaux works with are themselves engaged in experienced-based theorizing of movements led by people in relational poverty: Paulo Freire and Autoro Escobar. They theorize about the liberatory potential of the experience of the self in community in site(s) of struggle. There work finds two other considerations for the theory of politicization of poverty: the importance of (1) contextual analysis of the political landscape and meshwork analysis of relations of power and (2) claiming and reclaiming power.
Going back over Deveaux’s own exposition, she finds evidence of both of these, and they arguably should be part of the relational theory of poverty she develops. She highlights political activity that focuses on local organizing and where necessary consciousness raising; political analysis that supports resists, or proposes alternatives or both; and political strategy that includes framing and claiming the policy discourse. The activists also demonstrate two additional collective commitments: to context and relational analysis and claiming and reclaiming power. Thus, their activism is and calls for political responsibility. It is clear from chapter 5 what the activists mean by that. How might this thinking affect how a philosopher theorizes about political responsibility for global injustices? To answer this question, in the next section, I turn to Deveaux’s reading for Iris Marion Young.
Theorizing from secondary sources
In chapter 6, Deveaux takes what she has found in chapter 5 and asks the question ‘what could ground a political responsibility for solidarity with poor activists,’ including further identifying its key features and normative criteria (193). That is, what could ground the solidarity of people not in poverty with people in poverty? As she approaches it, this is not a question for people engaged in those struggles alone. Rather, this question calls her back to political theory, back to the arguments that theorists have made about political responsibility and solidarity. Thus, in chapter 6, Deveaux shifts modes. People in poverty are not the central agents of the theory of solidarity as they were in the earlier parts of the book. Instead, scholars (primarily in their more theoretic modes) are her main interlocutors in the effort to define ‘political responsibility.’
Political responsibility can have different interpretations. (1) As in John Rawls’s and Young’s work, ‘political’ is the subject of responsibility, that is, ‘political’ responsibility relates to political topics such as institutions, values, practices, and norms. (2) As in Young’s work, ‘politically’ is why people have a responsibility, that is, ‘political’ is how people come by their responsibilities; for example, they are socially connected through the global structures, or they have specific roles in the global political economy. (3) As in my own work, ‘politically’ is how people should discharge that responsibility; that is, people take up responsibility in a ‘political’ way, through solidarity and engagement.
Deveaux’s review of the relevant theory is thoroughly and thoughtfully executed. The two primary theoretical engagements from the discussion of the data that Deveaux takes forward into chapter 6 are the meaning of political responsibility and the demands of solidarity. For both of these questions, Young’s account of the social connection model of political responsibility (198–200) is an appropriate starting point. Young writes as she concludes her account of the model,
“The sort of solidarity I am invoking is a relationship among
many people who recognize and take up a shared responsibility in
relation to the social institutions and practices they enact and
support, to make them just. This solidarity is an ideal, a promise,
and an engagement” (2011: 121).
Young’s meaning of both political responsibility and the demands of solidarity differ from those of movements led by people in poverty as I read the data Deveaux shares earlier in the book. Young’s social connection model, despite its intent to be an account of forward-looking political responsibility for background conditions, confuses or conflates multiple possible meanings of ‘political responsibility’. In the social connection model, ‘political’ is the subject of responsibility. Much of life is political, and thus to take responsibility for injustices means taking responsibility for changes in political circumstances and institutions. In Young’s account social connection model of responsibility is also why people have responsibility to do so (people are in political relationship).
For Young, solidarity is something people build thorough taking responsibility, but it is not political responsibility itself. Moreover, she is silent as to what our ‘engagement’ entails, but it is clearly an ideal, not a practice or a ‘central organizing principle’ as Deveaux argues it is for the movements (210). For Young, solidarity is an outcome of taking political responsibility (Young Citation2011:121), not a basis for taking political responsibility or a way of taking responsibility as Deveaux and the activists would have it (193, 201).
As someone who shares Young’s privilege relative to these movement actors, my intuition would have been to follow Young’s. However, Deveaux finds something else. And the difference matters.
From the perspective of poor-led movements, solidarity is part of political responsibility. Deveaux spells out a range of concrete ways that those with privilege might engage. Those of privilege wishing to support those in struggle need to begin with solidarity and those in struggle begin with solidarity as an essential building block of political responsibility. Solidarity is not a consequence of taking political responsibility; it is the backbone of it.
Does the normative framework that grounds these social movements’ foundations in solidarity have a normative role in the theory of political responsibility, Deveaux develops? Yes. Deveaux uses their insights to shift and enrich the meaning of political responsibility from beyond Young’s subject and why to emphasize the movements’ how, that is with (among other things) solidarity.
Thus, the second theoretical concept she develops further in the chapter is solidarity. Deveaux engages with the rich scholarship on solidarity to identify practices of solidarity. During this engagement, she also reminds us of the practices of ‘allyship’ within the movements’ ‘mutuality, deference, deep listening, and a willingness to share the burdens and risks of collective action’ (207). I agree that these are ‘in’ her data, but they are not as politically articulated as they are experienced by those in social movements.
Let me explain. These four moral normative values can be understood as individual practices of people in community, in relations that aspire to be solidaristic (following Young above). Deveaux might be right that these are behind the politicization of poverty through solidarity. In fact, in chapter four in which she discusses the cases, there is evidence that these individual practices by some key actors enable the movements to politicize poverty. Thus, it could be that individual strategies matter.
However, while less explicit in her exposition, Deveaux has evidence that they are movement values. Earlier I noted that two important aspects of a politicized theory of poverty (contextualizing and claiming power) were missing from the account in chapter 5. The normative values undergirding Deveaux’s politicized theory of poverty may likewise be more emaciated than those people in struggle would identify. Based on my own research and rereading Deveaux’s data, I would suggest that the modes of politics identified in earlier chapters – capacity-building, consciousness-raising, and collective action – are both values and modes of politicizing poverty. That is, as I read social movements related to global injustices, the values of solidarity are not the foundation of political responsibility or a mode of acting in light of political responsibility. Rather through their practice they propose a theory of political responsibility as a solidaristic praxis. The problem for movements is not identifying what values undergird solidarity, but rather figuring out what they really mean when they do to do their work well: that is, their theory in practice. How does their context analysis guide their (re)claiming power? Does mutuality mean recognition, or would such recognition entail the hierarchy it seeks to undo (Coulthard Citation2014)? Does deference mean engaging or parroting? Does sharing the risk and burdens of a movement mean sleeping in an Occupy encampment or supporting the community-based organizing of a pro-poor political candidate? In each case, I read these movements as offering a theory of political responsibility that means taking responsibility in solidarity. To do so without solidarity would mean not being able to be accountable and thus not responsible at all.
Finally, an important step for engaged and grounded normative theorizing is to return to the theorists as Deveaux does,
“Many of the actions proposed by global justice theorists in aid of the global poor are, prima facie, compatible with a political responsibility for solidarity with poor- led movements— provided allies undertake them in relation or dialogue with poor activists, and with greater accountability to them (207, italics in original).
The discussion in which this argument is embedded develops the implications of the theory and thus is an important step in the recursivity of engaged theory. Her qualifications in italics support a normative argument for behaviour that those in anti-poverty movements would experience as the performance of accountable allyship if not solidarity.
Conclusion
To conclude, I began by asserting that Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements is a work of engaged and grounded normative theory that relies on secondary sources. This excellent work demonstrates that it is possible to do good GNT with secondary sources and the book makes an important contribution to the political theories of poverty, global injustice, and political responsibility using those methods. I have further argued that the commitments of GNT could improve how theorists do GNT with secondary sources, encouraging recursive engagement with the data at all phases of the research, including the theorizing. Normative theory is embedded in action, particularly the actions of people in struggle who have to act in ways that disrupt hegemonies of ideas and political authority. Therefore, turning to GNT methods is a way that a theorist can decentre the epistemic privilege usually seized by political theorists on questions of normative theory.
By shifting the epistemic terrain, Deveaux’s engagement with the agency and insights of social movements led by people in poverty against poverty and the global injustices that sustain severe inequalities leads to a politicized theory of poverty and a political theory of responsibility for global injustice grounded in political solidarity.
Disclosure statement
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