Justice Claims Research Articles

The Emancipatory Justice Claim

This paper examines whether the current lack of a secular alternative to capitalism and liberalism constitute an eschatology of its own, one that places severe limits on the spectrum of possible alternative approaches in relevant theories of justice.

The Lore and Laws of Peace-Making in Early-Modern and 19th-Century European Peace Treaties

As the works of Gentili and Vattel exemplify, the writers of the law of nations of the 16th to 18th centuries largely construed the legal conception of peace on the basis of their conception of war. The nature of peace was dictated by the nature of war. In this, their theories gelled with peace treaty practice. Whereas some of the dualistic logic of the justice and legality of war transpired in the twin pair of amnesty and restitution clauses, early modern peace treaties were designed to deal with the consequences of war under the conception of legal war. They were founded on the assumption that all belligerents had a right to wage the war and equally enjoyed the protection and benefits of the laws of war. This created space to disregard claims of right and justice and negotiate a compromise without having to heed too many legal constraints with relation to pre-existing rights and claims. The triumph of legal over just war in peace treaties, albeit not in the discourse of the justification of war itself, was a logical consequence of the ascendancy of the sovereign state.

Intergenerational Justice Today

AbstractA theory of intergenerational justice consists in the study of the moral and political status of the relations between present and past or future people, more specifically, of the obligations and entitlements they can potentially generate. The challenges that justify talking about responsibilities between generations are myriad (e.g., the amount of public debt that is fair to incur; the funding of future pensions; reparations for past wrongs; climate change). And the disputes they prompt can focus on the past just as much as on the present, even though the fact that the human species has reached a state of technological progress that enables it to have an irredeemable impact on the planet and perhaps even endanger future human existence tends to make concerns about the future more pressing. Debates on intergenerational justice are twofold. The first revolves around the issue of whether claims of justice across generations whose members' lifetimes do not necessarily overlap could be justified. And the second revolves around the specific conception of justice in play, that is, around the nature of the standard that must be applied as well as around the identification of the contents of the duties that present generations supposedly have vis‐à‐vis past or future generations. This survey article depicts the conceptual and argumentative framework in which these debates are set. It aims to outline certain of the main features shared by the most influential contemporary theories of intergenerational justice, and the problems inherent in them. It concludes by suggesting that, even though the idea of succeeding generations is merely an abstraction, there are specific empirical states of affairs that require different theoretical responses to intergenerational justice.

Socially Just Triple-Wins? A Framework for Evaluating the Social Justice Implications of Climate Compatible Development

Climate compatible development (CCD) aims to help people improve their lives in the face of climate threats without exacerbating these threats for current and future generations. It is proving an attractive concept to both academics and practitioners. However, the social justice implications of CCD have not yet been comprehensively explored and an absence of adequate evaluation frameworks has led to multiple, legitimate cross-scalar social justice claims being marginalised. This article develops a framework to guide holistic social justice evaluation of CCD initiatives across levels and scales. Underpinning this framework is a social justice approach that embraces particularism, pluralism and procedural justice. Drawing on existing research, the framework is used to explore the implications of the Clean Development Mechanism for recognition, participation and distribution in the Least Developed Countries. Findings show that achieving social justice through CCD is not a given; rather, the social justice implications of CCD differ within and between levels and scales. We conclude by suggesting ways in which our framework can be applied to augment knowledge on CCD. Understanding the processes through which social justices and injustices are created is integral to considerations of whether and how CCD should be used to underpin a new development landscape.

Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay by Andrew C. Rajca

Reviewed by: Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay by Andrew C. Rajca Adolfo Bejar Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human Rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay Northwestern UP, 2018 by Andrew C. Rajca Andrew C. Rajca's Dissensual Subjects advances the "ethical fusion" of memory and human rights and the "non-subject of nunca más/nunca mais" to grapple with contemporary debates about liberal humanitarianism and political subjectivity in Latin America. Through a close reading of the nunca más/nunca mais reports, as well as analyses of numerous works by Latin American artists, this book illustrates how memory and human rights function as modes of representation that suture the subject of rights to hegemonic political subjectivities (the heroes and victims of the dictatorships—desaparecidos and militants), eliding the economic and social rights of historically marginalized populations in Latin America. The book is comprised of four chapters and an introduction. In the introduction, Rajca outlines and discusses key debates on human rights and memory in Latin America and advances a theoretical elaboration of what he calls the "ethical fusion" of memory and human rights in post-dictatorship contexts in order to propose the notion of the non-subject of human rights. Chapter one advances a close reading of the nunca más/nunca mais reports from Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, reflecting upon the foundational relationship between the concept of the subject of rights and liberal humanitarianism. Chapters two through four analyze Brazil's "Memorial da resistência," Uruguay's "Centro cultural y museo de la memoria," and Argentina's "Espacio para la memoria y la promoción y defensa de los derechos humanos," arguing, on the one hand, that the permanent installations in all three sites reproduce hegemonic political subjectivities (heroes and victims) and, on the other, that some of the temporary installations in all three sites offer the potential to think beyond the "ethical fusion" between memory and human rights, making visible the exclusion of historically marginalized populations from the discourses of liberal humanitarianism and opening the field of signification to non-hegemonic political subjectivities. This book's key contribution is the elaboration of dissensual political subjectivations at work within and through the tensions between politics and aesthetics at sites of memory throughout Latin America's southern cone. Departing from a humanitarian notion of ethics, Rajca emphasizes the crucial significance of engaging in a critique of liberal humanitarianism discourse in order to "recuperate a space of political subjectivation in postdictatorship studies in ways that move beyond the ethical demand [End Page 312] of … never again" (20). Rajca here enlists the work of Jacques Rancière as the means to fashion a notion of dissensus that foregrounds moments of political subjectivation "where uncounted subjects of human rights and memory can rearticulate unqualified notions of victim, justice, and inequality in postdictatorship" (ibid). Given this more compelling notion of the (non)subject of rights, Rajca then advances the tension between politics and aesthetics as a means to critically engage with sites of memory as spaces that offer the possibility "to explore the heterogeneous relationship between politics and art to trace previously invisible processes of political subjectivation in contemporary social discourse" (29). Rajca, for instance, argues that it is through temporary photography installations—such as the work of Sub (coperativa de fotógrafos)—that we can begin to challenge the ethical fusion between memory and human rights in order to open spaces for subjectivation for the "nonheroes and nonvictims" of the dictatorships. For Rajca, the aesthetic intervention of Sub's work, specifically its photography series on the "Villas Miseria" in Argentina, allows us to understand "The discourses of memory and human rights [as] complementary, not coextensive," this, in turn, opens the possibility of "making visible a claim for social equality and economic justice by subjects excluded from consensual notions of rights" (193). In this sense, the tension between politics and aesthetics in artistic projects such as Sub's is indexed as the primary movement to "reopen the processes of political subjectivation as practiced thought, exceeding the institutionalized sites into which they are inscribed, thus creating a dissensual cut where anonymous, nonethical human rights subjectivities become visible...

Fair Process and Sexual Misconduct on Campus

Pressured by directives from the Obama Administration's Department of Education, colleges and universities across the country scrambled to revamp their processes of adjudicating sexual assault on campus. Critics of the new campus sexual misconduct codes charge that the rules are now unfairly biased against those charged with offenses. Two recent developments – the election of Donald Trump, and the arrival of the #MeToo movement – have substantially shifted the political and social ground upon which the new sex misconduct codes were created. Pressed now from advocates of due process, schools must give careful thought to the question of what fairness means in the context of adjudicating sexual misconduct in the campus setting. In deciding their response, colleges and universities should not reflexively defend misconduct codes which were themselves hastily assembled in response to controversial mandates from the government. Instead, they should acknowledge that sanctions imposed on offenders in these cases operate as punishment, and look to the Criminal Law – the law of individual punishment – as a model for mediating the competing claims of justice which fight for dominance in these cases. Campus sexual assault adjudications are not criminal trials, and criminal procedure cannot be wholly imported into such adjudications. But campus proceedings should be motivated by the core principles – of Harm, Proportionality, and Parsimony – which have produced our social system of punishment. College sexual misconduct codes lack a coherent set of principles upon which to ground the structure of sexual assault adjudications; such principles do ground the criminal process and should serve as a model for other forms of institutional punishment.

Environmental remediation and its discontents: the contested cleanup of Vieques, Puerto Rico

Since protest forced the US Navy off Vieques Island, Puerto Rico in 2003, the US military has embarked on one of the largest environmental remediation projects it has ever undertaken. This article explores the way a narrowly conceived, technocratic cleanup process is translated onto an island with a deep history of grassroots mobilization and antagonism towards federal authority. The Restoration Advisory Board (RAB) is a crucible for considering the uneasy dynamics of cleanup. US law enshrines the RAB as the principal venue for public in the cleanup process. However, the prevailing technocratic framework, constrained by under-resourced bureaucratic agencies, clashes with more encompassing concepts of environmental justice. Citizen members of the RAB, nonetheless, approach the committee as a point of access to information about the remediation process, and leverage their participation as a tool for advancing a broader set of environmental justice claims.

The Emancipatory Justice Claim

The Emancipatory Justice Claim

Past Conflicts, Present Uncertainty: Legal Answers to the Quest for Information on Missing Persons and Victims of Enforced Disappearance. Three Case Studies from the European Context

This article is intended to provide a legally sound explanation of why and how the contemporary International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law legal frameworks offer tools to address the uncertainty, lack of information, and the consequences thereof in relation to missing persons and victims of enforced disappearances in the context of armed conflicts which predated the adoption of such frameworks. To this end, three scenarios will be examined: the contemporary claims of the families of those who were killed in the Katyn massacre in 1940; the claims for information and justice of the families of thousands who were subjected to enforced disappearances during the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939; and the identifcation efforts concerning those reported missing while involved in military operations in the context of the 1944 Kaprolat/Hasselmann incident which took place during the Second World War. Te analysis of these scenarios is conducive to the development of more general reflections that would feed into the debate over the legal relevance of the distant past in light of today’s international legal framework

Tribal Courts, Restorative Justice and Native Land Claims

The Native American tribes in the United States have maintained distinctive customs which they practice within their ‘eviscerated’ sovereignty. The tribes exercise their jurisdiction as ‘sovereign’ nations under devolution of their lands granted by the federal government, which still has a right of preemption and the power of alienation. The tribal courts exercise the restorative justice principles that are integral to their judicial procedures and where the emphasis is on healing. The disputes in tribal courts are settled by mediation through Peacekeeping Circles that restore the parties to the pre-trial status and there is input from elders in the community. The Native people not only have to differentiate and preserve their justice framework, but also claim title to land where it has been extinguished by treaty, eminent domain or Executive order of the us government. The argument in this paper is that the restorative justice principle is part of the customary law of the tribes in the us and in Canada, and their dormant land claims can be revisited if this judicial process is maintained in the context of sustaining their customs within the federal legal framework.

Self-represented witnessing: the use of social media by asylum seekers in Australia's offshore immigration detention centres.

The act of witnessing connects audiences with distant suffering. But what happens when bearing witness becomes severely restricted? External parties, including the mainstream news media, are constrained from accessing Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres. The effect is that people seeking asylum are hidden from the public and excluded from national debates. Some detainees have adopted social media as a platform to communicate their stories of flight, and their experiences of immigration detention, to a wider audience. This article examines the ways in which social media, and particularly Facebook, has facilitated what we call self-represented witnessing. We analyse two public Facebook pages to assess how detainees use such social media networks to document their experiences, and we observe the interaction between detainees, other social media users and mainstream media. Significantly, these social media networks enable detained asylum seekers to conduct an unmediated form of self-represented witnessing that exposes human rights abuses and documents justice claims.

The political dimension of humanitarian action. Rethinking the humanitarian space

Is emergency relief tackling the symptoms, but not the root causes of complex emergencies, humanitarian? Should No Governmental Humanitarian Agencies integrate a political component to their job, would this compromise the humanitarian imperative and the principles of impartiality, neutrality and independence? Is humanitarian action contributing to exempt State from a more direct involvement in the re-solution of complex emergencies? Is there a place for humanitarian action in international politics? If yes, what is that place and what form can that action take? This work explores these questions and attempts to identify which tools would enable NGHA to accomplish their humanitarian imperative, i.e. to prevent and alleviate suffering, while responding to the human claim for justice without compromising the so called "humanitarian space".Published online: 11 December 2017

“IT WAS NO ACCIDENT!” THE PLACE OF EMOTIONS IN THE MOBILIZATION OF PEOPLE AFFECTED BY THE COLLAPSE OF SAMARCO'S TAILINGS DAM IN BRAZIL

Abstract This article presents the dynamics of collective action and the construction of claims of people affected by the rupture of a tailings dam of the Samarco mining company in Minas Gerais, Brazil in November, 2015. Our analysis focuses on affected people in Espírito Santo State and is based on interviews, observation, participant observation and a series of meetings with affected people during the year following November, 2015. We describe initial processes of mobilization which involve various actors and interactions marked by emotions and by the creation of affective bonds. We draw on a culturalist framework of social movement studies to understand the emotional mechanisms in play in the construction of collective action, in particular, claims for justice (Jasper 1997; Gamson 1992; Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2009; Johnston and Klandermans 1995). We conclude that emotions play fundamental roles in the process of mobilization. The manner in which the disaster on the Rio Doce was felt by activists constituted a critical emotional event.

Street Justice: Graffiti and Claims-Making in Urban Public Space

It is getting increasingly difficult to avoid the notion that justice claims are not limited to the formal venues of law or even the public accountability processes of journalism, but are also expressed in everyday activities of public outreach. We can see this outreach in informal efforts toward mass communication, in graffiti and Internet communication (and connections between the two, as we will see) oriented toward passers by and browsers, consumers of information, the possible-to-convince sympathizers of the plights of others. This non-professional realm of justice claims tells us something about the extent to which justice is experienced and expressed outside the law, but at the same time through the influence of law. Human rights in particular can be seen as a source of inspiration and expression of new and emerging forms of rights-consciousness and the public expression of grievance. This consciousness, in turn, relates to the popular dynamics of human rights lobbying and a corresponding awareness of humanity as a reference point for what is fair, equitable, and honorable, grounded as they are in the “soft” processes of persuasion and mass influence.

How well do wealthy countries support working parents? Comparing Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. through the prism of justice

ABSTRACTThis article identifies four strands of justice and uses them to evaluate the work–family support policies of five postindustrial democracies, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. It provides a full-bodied set of concepts for thinking critically and comparatively about how countries go about supporting working families, and makes a case for the value of thinking about how justice claims are used to frame such policies.

Criminal Justice, Inc.

In the past decade, major retailers nationwide have begun to employ a private, for-profit system to settle criminal disputes, extracting payment from shoplifting suspects in exchange for a promise not to call the police. This Article examines what retailers’ decisions reveal about our public system of criminal justice and the concerns of the agents who run it, the victims who rely on it, and the suspects whose lives it alters. The private policing of commercial spaces is well known, as is private incarceration of convicted offenders. This Article is the first, however, to document how industry has penetrated new parts of the criminal process, administering sanctions to resolve thousands of shoplifting allegations each year. Proponents of private justice claim that everyone wins. Critics say it’s blackmail. The Article takes a tentative middle ground: While “retail justice” is not the American ideal, it may nonetheless be preferable to public criminal justice, at least if certain conditions are met. Rather than cancel the private justice experiment, therefore, as several states are poised to do, the government should aim to foster optimal conditions for its success. Extending the central analysis, the Article then shows how the study of private justice leads to fresh perspectives on important criminal justice issues. It suggests, for example, that the costs to crime victims of assisting the prosecution may be a feature of the system, not a bug, if they encourage victims to invest in efficient crime-deterring precautions. It also complicates legal academic models of police and prosecutorial behavior built on maximizing arrests and convictions. The Article concludes by identifying conditions that conduce to private criminal justice and speculating about the next frontiers.

The Park is Ruining our Livelihoods. We Support the Park! Unravelling the Paradox of Attitudes to Protected Areas

Despite considerable field-based innovation and academic scrutiny, the nexus between conservation approaches, local support for parks and park effectiveness remains quite puzzling. Common approaches to understanding notions of environmental justice are to understand distributional and procedural issues, representation in decision making, and recognition of authorities and claims. We took a different approach and analysed environmental justice claims through institutional, ideational and psychological lenses. We sought to understand how the national park could have such broad support from local communities despite their acknowledgement that it severely curtailed their livelihoods. We conducted 100 household interviews in three villages that border Nam Et-Phou Louey National Protected Area. Our study found that villagers 1) hold on to broken promises by the State for agricultural activities and alternative revenues without fully changing forest use behaviours; 2) were influenced heavily by the ‘educational’ programmes by the State; 3) accepted the authority of the State and lack of participation in decision-making based on historical experiences and values; 4) justified their burdens by over-emphasising the positive aspects of the park. Our findings present a complementary framework to explain environmental justice claims, allowing for a nuanced analysis of how people respond to justices and injustices, and specifically how injustices can be identified through proven social science concepts.

Toward an urban political ecology of energy justice: the case of rooftop solar in Tucson, AZ

The rapid deployment of rooftop solar panels in many US cities has raised new concerns about the fair distribution of electricity costs through rates. Electric utilities argue that existing rate structures shift costs from solar owners to lower-income ratepayers, while critics say rooftop solar benefits all ratepayers and helps address environmental injustice. In light of these competing justice claims, this article asks: what are the implications of rooftop solar for energy justice? Drawing on a case study from southern Arizona, we use urban political ecology (UPE) to analyze debates about rooftop solar that speak to three types of justice: distributive, procedural, and recognition. While dominant justice claims revolve around the distribution of costs through rates, competing claims emphasize procedural and recognition (in)justice. Focusing on political economy, power relations, and the materiality of the grid, we reframe the utility company's cost shift argument as a strategic narrative and explain why this understanding of justice is recognized as legitimate while others are not. We propose that UPE can further an energy justice analysis by understanding procedural and recognition injustice as systemic products of rate of return regulation, and the material configuration of the electric grid.Keywords: urban political ecology, energy justice, rooftop solar, decentralized energy, electric utility regulation

Undoing ruination in Jakarta: the gendered remaking of life on a wasted landscape

ABSTRACTThis intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler's (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became the most restive of Jakarta's landscapes as residents returned to make claims for justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression alongside one another.

SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH THE PHENOMENON OF MORAL CHAOS TO STAGE TEENS A FIELD STUDY AT THE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

the phenomenon of moral mess adolescents phase of Secondary Education the product of many of the effects of the social, psychological and physical infrastructure of social variables. The study aims to identify the most important social variables, and physical infrastructure which affect the phenomenon of moral mess and identify the most important manifestations of the moral mess in adolescence on environmental factors that helped to spread the moral mess, as well as to identify the social factors that led to the spread of moral mess in adolescence, family upbringing, relatives, friends, identify external factors (the mechanisms of globalization), which helped in the spread of moral mess in the levels of adolescence. And economic factors that led to the spread of moral mess .with identify the differences between males and females in adolescence toward the phenomenon of moral mess. Where the study sample of (403) single sample of secondary schools, Ain Shams, educational, distributed as follows: (250 males and 153 females. Of the students in the secondary schools and the region. The study on a social survey sample, a group of students in the secondary stage. In the collection of data used, Researcher (direction) to know what attitudes toward the claim of social justice. Then the researcher adopted on the analysis of the content of the standard moral mess, study has to several results; there are no differences between males and females in the interpretation of the phenomenon of moral mess, the design of training programs for parents to help them on how to control of anger outbursts of violence with the statement of the most important methods of sound upbringing, non-violent to reduce the possibilities of attacking their children to physical or verbal or psychologically. Programs and psychological care list to play would have the opportunity to express their feelings to get rid of the negative phenomena with the consolidation of the students who suffer familiae*with students have the skills of strong social to attract them to participate in the fun activities and positive in order to learn of them these how to establish relations of positive interaction with others*intensive supervision on students in times prayer and the illegal activities including classroom supplies and urged them to cooperate and altruism and tolerance