RESPONDING TO GLOBAL INJUSTICE: ON THE RIGHT OF RESISTANCE

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Caney
Keyword(s):  
Global Justice ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Just Cause ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Level I ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Of Resistance ◽  
Do So

Abstract:In the debates surrounding global justice, the overwhelming focus has been on the duties that fall to the affluent and powerful, and the emphasis has been on their duties to comply with various principles of justice. In this essay, I examine what those who bear the brunt of global injustice are entitled to do to secure their own entitlements and those of others. In particular, I defend an account of what I term the “right of resistance against global injustice.” To do so I advance several methodological and substantive claims. On the methodological level: I argue that in deriving and defining this right of resistance we can (a) learn from the normative accounts developed to analyze war, humanitarian intervention, civil disobedience, revolution and anti colonialism. However, (b) the right to resist global injustice raises some distinct problems; and, thus, the normative principles that should inform any right of resistance against global injustice are not reducible to those that govern the appropriate kinds of response to other kinds of injustice. Turning now to the substantive component, I propose an account of resisting global injustice that specifies (i) who may engage in resistance, (ii) what would constitute a just cause for engaging in resistance, (iii) against whom those engaging in resistance may impose burdens, (iv) what methods resistors can employ, and (v) in what circumstances resistance is permissible.

The Right to Resist Global Injustice

2020 ◽  
pp. 509-535
Author(s):  
Simon Caney
Keyword(s):  
Global Justice ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Core Idea ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Of Resistance

This chapter tries to motivate support for what it terms the Right of Resistance against Global Injustice, where this should be understood as a right to bring about greater global justice. More specifically it defends two conceptions of this core idea. Roughly stated, the first maintains that persons have the right to take direct action that will immediately and directly secure their rights or the rights of others (what is referred to as the Right of Resistance against Global Injusticei (RRGIi)). The second holds that persons have the right to engage in action that transforms the underlying social, economic, and political structures that perpetuate injustice in order to bring about greater justice in the future (what is referred to as the Right of Resistance against Global Injusticeii (RRGIii)). These formulations are approximate and need to be explicated more fully, but they express the key ideas. The chapter seeks to specify these more fully, and to address various questions about the meaning, content, grounding, and limits of these rights.

scholarly journals Two Concepts of the Basic Structure, and their Relevance to Global Justice

1970 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Ronzoni
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
The Right ◽  
Normative Implications

G. A. Cohen argues that John Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society as the exclusive subject of social justice is misguided. I argue that two understandings of the notion of basic structure seem to be present in the literature, either in implicit or in explicit terms. (1) According to the first, the basic structure is to be equated with a given set of institutions: if they endorse the right principles of justice, the basic structure of society is just; (2) According to the second, a society has a just basic structure if and only if its institutional web manages to realize the relevant principles of justice as well it can. In (2), the institutional structure is not a given: different social circumstances call for different institutional solutions in order to achieve a just basic structure overall. The first part of the paper make a case for (2), and explores some of its normative implications. The second part asks which consequences this understanding may have for the idea of a global basic structure.

Heinrich von Kleist and the Right to War

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-254
Author(s):  
Jan Mieszkowski
Keyword(s):  
Heinrich Von Kleist ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

This essay explores the conceptualization of warfare in Romanticism. The focus is on two plays by Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea and Prince Friedrich von Homburg. I begin by discussing Carl von Clausewitz's influential understanding of conflict and the problems that arise when he attempts to explain the interdependence of warring parties. I go on to argue that in Kleist's dramas war is a competition between different languages of authority. When no coherent paradigm of agency emerges from this contest, the right to wage war is revealed to be anything but a guarantee that one knows how to do so.

Recognition of a Person’s Rights and Ethical Fulfilment

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Vereno Brugiatelli
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Level I ◽  
The Right ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Desperate Attempt

Man's ethical fulfilment often faces objective obstacles in the deprivation of rights. The negation of the recognition of certain fundamental rights, or worse, the radical misrecognition of man, which translates into different forms of violence, often artfully disguised both on an individual and collective level, produces devastating consequences in the private life of a person upsetting all forms of positive self-esteem. The recognition of human qualities, accompanied by the right to express and extend them, is an integral part of the ethical life of each individual and, at the same time, constitutes a fundamental moment in the construction of a responsible civilized community. In this dissertation, I aim to analyse the connection between ethical life and human rights in order to draw attention to the repercussions that the recognition and misrecognition of liberty produce with regard to man's ethical fulfilment. From this perspective, I intend to highlight the importance of the existence of favourable juridical and institutional conditions to ensure ethical fulfilment. At this level, I will underline that the deprivation of capabilities is often the main cause of the profound sense of discontent affecting individuals in their desperate attempt to realise a type of existence which corresponds to their ambitions.

Other People's Struggles

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Owen
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
British History ◽  
Original Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Do So

Other People’s Struggles is the first attempt in over forty years to explain the place of “conscience constituents” in social movements. Conscience constituents are people who participate in a movement but do not stand to benefit if it succeeds. Why do such people participate when they do not stand to benefit? Why are they sometimes present and sometimes absent in social movements? Why and when is their participation welcome to those who do stand to benefit, and why and when is it not? The work proposes an original theory to answer these questions, crossing discipline boundaries to draw on the findings of social psychology, philosophy, and normative political theory, in search of explanations of why people act altruistically and what it means to others when they do so. The theory is illustrated by examples from British history, including the antislavery movement, the women’s suffrage and liberation movements, labor and socialist movements, anticolonial movements, antipoverty movements, and movements for global justice. Other People’s Struggles also contributes to new debates concerning the rights and wrongs of “speaking for others.” Debates concerning the limits of solidarity—who can be an “ally” and on what terms—have become very topical in contemporary politics, especially in identity politics and in the new “populist” movements. The book provides a theoretical and empirical account of how these questions have been addressed in the past and how they might be framed today.

In the Labyrinth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew McNeillie
Keyword(s):  
The Right ◽  
First Time ◽  
Do So

It is now widely acknowledged, and far beyond Ireland, that Tim Robinson’s two volumes jointly known as Stones of Aran (‘Pilgrimage’ and ‘Labyrinth’) are modern classics, exemplary in every way of how to write about place and to do so with a formal, literary accomplishment that more than earns the right to nod at Ruskin’s own classic. In 2012, Robinson went back to Árainn, the largest of the three islands, for the first time in nearly ten years. He did so at the urging of Andrew McNeillie, with whom he spent two and a half days revisiting old haunts. This chapter makes account of the occasion and uses, in the process, a unique document provided by Robinson as an experiment in annotating his work. This prompts McNeillie to investigate some of his own annotations and footnotes to Aran.

The Leeriness Objection to the Responsibility to Protect

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
International Order ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Just Cause

This chapter argues that even non-abusive interventions (those that are motivated purely by altruistic concern, have a just cause, are a last resort etc.) are morally problematic due to their effects on the international order. The trouble is that ‘bystander states’—those that are neither prosecuting the intervention nor targeted by it—usually do not have sufficient direct evidence that the intervention is just and properly motivated, nor can they trust the testimony of the intervening state. Thus, for all that bystander states know, any and every instance of humanitarian intervention is abusive: an act of unjust international aggression masquerading as something else. This, in turn, weakens the willingness of these bystander states to comply with the non-aggression norm themselves, since states are ‘conditional cooperators’—they abide by norms only insofar as they are reasonably assured that other states in the international arena are abiding.

scholarly journals After Hajj: Muslim Pilgrims Refashioning Themselves

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Kholoud Al-Ajarma
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Religious Behavior ◽  
Transformative Experience ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Community Expectations ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
The Right ◽  
Self Formation ◽  
Do So

The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) is one of the five pillars of Islam and a duty which Muslims must perform—once in a lifetime—if they are physically and financially able to do so. In Morocco, from where thousands of pilgrims travel to Mecca every year, the Hajj often represents the culmination of years of preparation and planning, both spiritual and logistical. Pilgrims often describe their journey to Mecca as a transformative experience. Upon successfully completing the pilgrimage and returning home, pilgrims must negotiate their new status—and the expectations that come with it—within the mundane and complex reality of everyday life. There are many ambivalences and tensions to be dealt with, including managing the community expectations of piety and moral behavior. On a personal level, pilgrims struggle between staying on the right path, faithful to their pilgrimage experience, and straying from that path as a result of human imperfection and the inability to sustain the ideals inspired by pilgrimage. By ethnographically studying the everyday lives of Moroccans after their return from Mecca, this article seeks to answer the questions: how do pilgrims encounter a variety of competing expectations and demands following their pilgrimage and how are their efforts received by members of their community? How do they shape their social and religious behavior as returned pilgrims? How do they deal with the tensions between the ideals of Hajj and the realities of daily life? In short, this article scrutinizes the religious, social and personal ramifications for pilgrims after the completion of Hajj and return to their community. My research illustrates that pilgrimage contributes to a process of self-formation among pilgrims, with religious and non-religious dimensions, which continues long after Hajj is over and which operates within, and interacts with, specific social contexts.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document