Global Justice Research Articles

Editors with multiple retractions, but who serve on journal editorial boards: Case studies

In a recent opinion paper (https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2022.e95926), it was argued that individuals with multiple retractions or a record of academic misconduct should not serve as editors, including as editors- in-chief, on the editorial boards of scholarly or academic journals. As a first step towards appreciating how such a policy could be applied in practice, the presence of 30 individuals listed on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard on editorial boards was screened. Six cases are highlighted to gain an appreciation of the potential reputational risks that journals and publishers might incur by including individuals with a tainted academic record on editorial boards. Given the reputational, legal and other risks associated with this type of assessment and decision, more formal positioning and guidance are needed by global ethics policy-related bodies such as COPE, the ICMJE, and the CSE, even more so in journals that claim to follow these organizations’ ethical guidelines.

The SDG agenda and university transformation in Africa: The decolonial turn deferred?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed in September 2015 set the scene for a renewed and ambitious development framework in a global context of widening inequalities within and between countries, global economic crises, conflict and climate change. Higher education is framed in several of the targets that make up SDG 4 and is also argued as central to achieving all 17 goals. However, the extent to which they engage with higher education in the context of calls for responsive, decolonised higher education remains underexplored. It is this gap that this paper addresses, arguing that while the SDGs take a broad approach to education the focus on specific targets and indicators limit states’ autonomy by de-territorialising local frameworks (Sayed & Moriarty, 2020). As a result, universities in Africa struggle to assert their agendas as power is overly located at the supra national level. We use the case of South African higher education to examine how and in what ways the national education agenda articulates with the SDG agenda. In particular, we focus on the lack of a clear equity and anti-racist focus in the SDG agenda which fails to engage with the disciplinary hold of racism over knowledge. We use Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (2014) notion of difficult questions in higher education with weak answers to address what a decolonised and deracialised higher education system might look like. In particular, we articulate how Western domination has marginalised knowledge present in the global South. In so doing, we describe the influence of the SDGs in higher education noting the strides made but also their limited application in the global South and the decolonial turn. We argue that the decolonisation of knowledge in higher education is a collective process in which disruptive disciplinary practices contribute to cognitive global justice.

Beyond vulnerability: contextualizing migrant worker views on rights and wellbeing in the Gulf Arab states

This paper examines migrant workers’ subjective views of their rights and wellbeing in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar. Since the announcement of the World Cup, Qatar has been roundly criticized for the living and working conditions of the low-wage migrant workers responsible for building the country’s social and economic infrastructure. These critiques, however, either emphasize individual migrant experiences of mistreatment or the kafala migration regime that regulates migration and employment. Few quantitative and representative studies ask migrants how they understand and experience their rights and wellbeing, or how these views have changed as the country has embarked on key labor law reforms in response to international pressure. Therefore, we present results from a large-scale, nationally representative survey of low-wage migrant workers conducted in labor accommodations over four years, supplemented by a separate phone survey. The analysis emphasizes the views of migrants—including satisfaction with rights, awareness of rights, fulfillment of contracts, and quality of life—which are critical to successful policy implementation. We examine the objective factors that best explain these views and study the interaction between subjective and objective wellbeing dimensions. The results inform scholarly understandings of the living and working conditions of migrants and provide essential context for questions surrounding migrant rights and global justice in temporary labor migration regimes.

On the importance of solidarity for transforming social systems towards sustainability

As climate change continues to become an increasing threat on top of existing global inequalities and injustices, establishing a common future for humankind becomes more challenging. Solidarity comprises the human ideals of cohesion, equality, and camaraderie and is thus an important principle for facing global challenges together. In addition to pro-environmental attitudes, a solidarity orientation could play a decisive role in enabling climate-friendly action (e.g., with an assumed link to collective efficacy beliefs). The present study was aimed at investigating the potential of such a construct in the context of sustainable behavior. In addition to intent, we also considered self-reported measures of impactful pro-environmental behaviors. To determine how solidarity could be measured and classified (reliability, validity), we conducted Study 1 (N1 = 700). The validated measure was then used (Study 2, N2 = 294) to test how solidarity as value relates to impactful behavior, beliefs and donation intentions in sustainable investments, and collective efficacy beliefs. Results showed significant positive relationships between the new construct of solidarity and pro-environmental behaviors and collective efficacy beliefs. In conclusion, appealing to people's solidarity values might be an additional way to motivate them to take action to protect the climate and may thus forge a new path not yet taken to move toward a common sustainable future.

Assessing benefits and risks of incorporating plastic waste in construction materials

Plastic pollution and climate change are serious and interconnected threats to public and planetary health, as well as major drivers of global social injustice. Prolific use of plastics in the construction industry is likely a key contributor, resulting in burgeoning efforts to promote the recycling or downcycling of used plastics. Businesses, materials scientists, institutions, and other interested stakeholders are currently exploring the incorporation of plastic waste into building materials and infrastructure at an accelerated rate. Examples include composite asphalt-plastic roads, plastic adhesives, plastic-concrete, plastic/crumb rubber turf, plastic lumber, plastic acoustic/thermal insulation, plastic-fiber rammed earth, and plastic soil reinforcement/stabilizers. While some believe this to be a reasonable end-of-life scenario for plastic waste, research shows such efforts may cause further problems. These uses of plastic waste represent an ongoing effort at “greenwashing,” which both delays and distracts from finding real solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. Hypothesized effects of incorporating plastic waste in construction materials, including economic, environmental, human health, performance, and social impacts, are evaluated in this mini review. We compare known impacts of these treatments for plastic waste and provide recommendations for future research. Evidence shows that such practices exacerbate the negative ecological, health, and social impacts of plastic waste and increase demand for continued production of new (virgin) plastics by creating new markets for plastic wastes. We urge caution—and more research—before widely adopting these practices.

GOVERNING THE WARS; THEORY, LEGISLATION, HUMAN RIGHTS, HUMAN SECURITY, AND ETHICS

The study indicates wartime programmed violence's implications within the liberal interpretation of contemporary legislative and human rights debates. It discusses related war theories and practices, problematizing instrumentalization of instilling new global ethics, arguing that humanitarian interventions often became "usable" in the new millennium's geopolitics; wars fatally affect the innocent. It points out that the origins of democracy are structurally violent and that the threat of terrorism, in addition to revealing new forms of "democratic violence," is having a transformative effect on the very character of democracy. How the concept of just cause agrees with armed humanitarian intervention, and whether we have the right to impose democracy by force? Whether the theory of just war in its positivist-legalist paradigm that combines universalist principles with utilitarian harm-weighing versus profit can offer a comprehensive method of morally contemplating current wars. The distinction between liberal cosmopolitan arguments and social democratic ones is apparent. The arbitrariness and the imposition of individual states' views create issues, leading to fragility (human security, socioeconomics, economic development, health). The compulsory international focus and responsibility should incorporate critical medical (children) - "the right to health" and humanitarian goods. Implementing rules to control war's destructiveness is less effective in intercultural conflicts. The doctrine of "just war" application is questionable, and no new victim should suffer even when the goal of the intervention is entirely legitimate and "humane." It cannot be just that it will exempt intervention forces from applying international humanitarian law, nor does the legitimacy of the intervention exempt them from respect for international humanitarian law. The international law concept has evolved from an instrument of promoting peace to an agent of the violent argument of force realization. Ethics is often imposed as politics; human rights ethics transformed into war ethics, leading to human rights violations and civilian casualties. War justice and the moral paradigm within globalization's contemporary forms are questioned. A broader discussion of the assumptions of the universality of Western values that have driven international law for centuries is required.

Mapping urban heat islands and heat-related risk during heat waves from a climate justice perspective: A case study in the municipality of Padua (Italy) for inclusive adaptation policies

Climate change has led to a dramatic increase in extreme events worldwide. Predictions for a + 1.5 °C world indicate that 13.8% of the global population will be exposed to heat waves (HWs), a proportion rising to 36.9% in a + 2 °C scenario. At present, about 9.6 M people in the EU and UK are exposed to extreme heat every year. Overheating has various impacts on cities, including urban infrastructure failures and changes in ecological processes. However, scarce attention is currently paid to the distribution of HWs impacts and the differential vulnerabilities of different social groups, raising the issue of climate justice in cities. HWs directly impact the health of the most vulnerable social groups resulting in an increase in mortality and morbidity rates. This research focuses on the city of Padua (Italy) as a pilot study to assess the effects of urban HWs and heat islands (UHI) combined. By framing the unequal spatial distribution of socially vulnerable groups, this study aims to i) provide a replicable spatially explicit open-access methodology to assess the heat-related risk of UHI; ii) propose the first climate justice heat-related risk index to be adopted in inclusive and just adaptation plans. Specifically, it aims to i) identify HWs and map critical hotspots during summer 2022 at suburban scale; ii) assess the spatial correlations among impervious areas and UHI; iii) map the climate risk to vulnerable social groups; and iv) propose a global climate justice risk index for all the vulnerable groups considered. Images from Landsat 8–9 were processed, and territorial data were acquired from public databases. It was found that three extreme HWs hit Padua in summer 2022, on 2–7 June, 21–23 July, and 4–8 August, when maximum temperatures were 35.1 °C, 36.1 °C, and 35.8 °C, respectively. The intensity and magnitude of UHIs were considerable, with land surface temperatures of 33.8 °C on average (σ = 1.7, min = 27.9, max = 41.4). UHI intensity reached 5–8 °C of difference with rural contexts, mainly in strongly urbanized sectors. Ordinary least squares regression indicated a positive correlation with impervious surfaces, with a β coefficient showing an average increase of 0.3 °C per 10% of soil sealing. Six different hotspots were identified both in industrial areas and within the city centre. However, the integrated climate risk analyses highlight that most critical areas are in sectors where there is a large number of the elderly, migrants, children, and low-income households. Our findings reveal the need for urgent heat island mitigation measures and that the distributive dimension of climate justice should be respected in adaptation planning.

Justice in the Process of Regional Conflict Settlement: Analysis of Russia’s Strategy, 1992-2021

Research in the field of regional conflict resolution rarely touches on the issue of justice. This paper aims to identify what understanding of international justice underlies Russia’s actions as a mediator/peacekeeper in the process of regional conflict resolution in the 1990s-2010s. The study also contributes to the understanding of Russia’s foreign policy by clarifying Moscow’s views on the essence and parameters of a just global order. The paper provides a study of the dominant Russian views on the essence of justice in international relations. It offers an insight into Russia’s peace-making and conflict resolution activities in the context of the three concepts of global justice and taking into account the factor of national interests. The study concludes that the dominant understanding of international justice in Russia is that which corresponds to Allen Buchanan’s concept of subjective justice. In Moscow’s view, international justice is a set of rules developed in the process of consensus driven negotiations between the great powers. According to this logic, a just settlement of the regional conflict is possible only on the basis of the consensus of the parties to the conflict and in accordance with the interests of the global and regional powers concerned. The fair interaction of the great powers in the settlement of the regional conflict and the impact that the conflict resolution could have on the development of the international order were of crucial importance for Moscow within the period under consideration. Moscow’s activity in the conflict resolution in the post-Soviet space generally corresponded to the model of justice as mutual recognition, but with absolute priority of Russian national interests. The strategy for resolving regional conflicts in the post-Soviet space could only be understood in the broad context of relations with Western countries and has changed in line with the development of these relations.

ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND THE GLOBAL ETHICS: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES TOWARDS PEACE EDUCATION IN INDONESIA

The world has many problems, economic interests, chaos, and wars. Man needs a binder to prevent man (countries) from being able to do something that only benefits himself and harms others. Thus, global ethics as a minimalist ethic is needed in this world. The goal is that there be peace and order. This article aims to construct an idea of creating peaceful education through Islamic Religious Education with a global ethical perspective. This research confirms that the main points of global ethics are relevant to Islamic religious education in Indonesia regarding Islamic teachings and Government Regulations. The integration of global ethics in Islamic Religious Education can be implemented in Indonesia. On the other hand, there are challenges to integrating global ethics in learning; how can teachers provide students with an understanding of the universal values of global ethics in Indonesia context of a plural society? The leading global ethics precepts must be included in the Islamic religious education curriculum at the basic, secondary, and higher levels. This study is devoted to developing a rudimentary idea of Islamic religious education from a global ethical standpoint. As a result, additional research on Islamic religious education from a global ethical viewpoint is required.

INFORMATION SOCIETY AND NEW GLOBAL ETHICS

The article is dedicated to analyzing socio-cultural and ethical changes occurring in the modern information society under the influence of globalization processes. The main aim of the research is to analyze cultural transformations in the sphere of information society ethics. In examining these changes, the authors utilize theoretical concepts from leading researchers in the field of information society and ethics, including D. Bell, J. Baudrillard, M. Castells, R. Florida, at al. The article focuses on changes not only oriented towards technological aspects and the proliferation of information but also on the complex aspects of human interaction: the ability to create and transmit ethical values from generation to generation while considering existential priorities and moral norms. The authors regard the information society as a new socio-cultural reality that necessitates the development of a new global ethics. Such an ethics should take into account the global experience in the realm of morality and the necessity for democratizing the information society. The main emphasis of the article is directed towards interactive, networked communication as a key element of interaction, diverse forms of social dialogue, and methods of democratizing social relations through new technologies. In this context, the authors highlight the significance of Generation Z as a new creative class within the information society, serving as a subject of global ethics. This generation possesses new communicative skills and the ability to propose new strategies and forms of ethical behavior to adapt within the changing information society. In the conclusions of the article, the authors underscore that a new global ethics requires norms capable of aligning national, particular values with global universal ethical values, including ecological, humanistic, and human-centered values, ensuring their accessibility through the democratization of the information society. The methodological basis for such ethics could be Kantianism, fostering the harmonization of intergenerational interactions in the context of information society development.

The epistemologies of the South and the future of the university

AbstractEven though the university has the potential to help humanity in what amounts to a paradigmatic transition, it has been very restrictive and very selective in the kinds of knowledges it validates. In fact, the kinds of knowledges in which it has excelled are those most responsible for the paradigmatic crisis in which humanity finds itself. In a nutshell, the paradigmatic change calls for cognitive justice, justice for the different ways of knowing that circulate in society. Cognitive justice is the polar opposite of ‘anything goes’. The assumption is that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice, justice among knowledges. Looking back, while privileging one specific kind of knowledge and, indeed, granting it a cognitive monopoly, the university has been the privileged site for producing and legitimating cognitive injustice. As a result, the immense epistemic diversity of the world has been ignored or suppressed. In the following, I identify the problem and the promise for overcoming it.

Care and the Pluriverse: A Review, by Maggie Fitzgerald

Care and the Pluriverse: A Review, by Maggie Fitzgerald

Global justice, sovereign wealth funds and saving for the future

ABSTRACT In this paper I give some reasons why ‘saving for future generations’ is not as straightforward as it sounds and when we might be skeptical of the permissibility of states saving for future citizens, even though such savings are often seen to be morally praiseworthy. I emerge with an account of when state savings for future citizens through sovereign wealth funds may be morally permissible. I argue that we ought to follow a modified version of Armstrong’s criteria for the moral permissibility of sovereign wealth fund savings. That is, states are entitled to the full proceeds from the sale of a natural resource until their citizens’ basic rights are secured. Once they are, states are entitled only to the improved value of the resource, so long as they have not excluded others from the opportunity also to improve the resource. States may create sovereign wealth funds based on this improved value and, due to justified compatriot partiality, may choose to distribute those funds to current or future members of the state, even if non-citizens may be worse off and/or in greater need. Any residual value of the resource extraction must be redistributed globally.

Building the pluriverse with care

The decolonial concept of the pluriverse challenges the idea of a single world with different paradigms, and instead points to a matrix of multiple distinct yet connected worlds. In so doing, the pluriverse highlights radical ontological and epistemological difference and the implications of such difference for politics. Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics, my own contribution to decolonial scholarship in international political theory, focuses specifically on the question of how to build a pluriversal ethics. This article engages with Kimberly Hutchings, Fiona Robinson, and Vivienne Jabri’s commentaries on the book, and ultimately argues that vulnerability can serve as a generative meta-ethical orientation for building the pluriverse with care.

Beyond ‘globalizing’ care: Care ethics for the pluriverse

The questions and issues that make up the field of global ethics have, for several decades now, largely been understood through the binary framework of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘communitarianism’. Despite the widespread criticism of the limitations of this dualism, and some attempts to ‘qualify or hyphenate core terms’ it has proven ‘remarkably difficult to escape or transcend’ the cosmopolitanism-communitarianism framework (Sutch, 2018: 35). Maggie Fitzgerald’s new book, Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics, manages not only manages to escape these familiar categories, but to break new ground in global ethics.

Global impacts of extractive and industrial development projects on Indigenous Peoples' lifeways, lands, and rights.

To what extent do extractive and industrial development pressures affect Indigenous Peoples' lifeways, lands, and rights globally? We analyze 3081 environmental conflicts over development projects to quantify Indigenous Peoples' exposure to 11 reported social-environmental impacts jeopardizing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous Peoples are affected in at least 34% of all documented environmental conflicts worldwide. More than three-fourths of these conflicts are caused by mining, fossil fuels, dam projects, and the agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock (AFFL) sector. Landscape loss (56% of cases), livelihood loss (52%), and land dispossession (50%) are reported to occur globally most often and are significantly more frequent in the AFFL sector. The resulting burdens jeopardize Indigenous rights and impede the realization of global environmental justice.

Ontology, relationality and an alternative reading of ‘difference’

The article engages with Maggie Fitzgerald’s Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics. It focuses primarily on Fitzgerald’s ontoepistemological reading of relationality and difference, suggesting an alternative reading of both concepts, one that is keeping with a more open, plural and therefore critical understanding.

Critical global citizenship: Foucault as a complexity thinker, social justice and the challenges of higher education in the era of neo-liberal globalization – A conversation with Mark Olssen

This article presents a remarkable conversation on critical global citizenship education (GCE) between Mark Olssen, emeritus professor of political theory and higher education policy in the Department of Politics at the University of Surrey, and Emiliano Bosio, guest-editor of Citizenship Teaching & Learning. In developing the concept for this dialogue, we thought it necessary to frame GCE within a critical perspective that examines the political, economic, ideological and cultural conditions of super-complex societies, particularly in relation to notions of neo-liberal globalization and global justice. Olssen’s copious work has complemented postmodern philosophy by drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and it has brought him high regard in Europe, the United Kingdom and worldwide; his insights, perspectives, concerns and outlooks bring to the centre of international educational debates on critical GCE relevant thoughts through which we can better understand the complex roots and history of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism particularly in relation to notions of democracy, equity, ethics and social responsibility.

Linking global citizenship education and critical pedagogy: Women’s leadership and power

Global citizenship education (GCE) as a global social justice practice centres on a pedagogy that is responsive to the needs of learners and provides for the reimagining of an educator’s role, and the learner/educator relationship. While the literature on GCE emerged from a western perspective and tended to ignore gender, through gendered GCE, the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, social class and gender reveals the complexity of the influence of these factors and a need for action. This article presents critical pedagogy (CP) as an approach for learner-centred education that activates a GCE process for learners to be co-designers of their learning experience. The defining principles of CP, along with the qualities of an educator within a critical pedagogical practice will feature the tandem relationship of educator and learner. The results are an emerging process of dynamic self-awareness, cultivating a questioning mind and empowering praxis. Disrupting the understanding of leadership, agency and power allows for the emergence of an empowering approach to one’s identity as a leader and social change agent. This provides a new perspective for positioning women’s leadership and power within GCE. This case study reveals that when students connect to a palpable sense of agency, they become learners that know too much to revert to passive receptacles of information. New opportunities await in the development of leadership, social change and GCE when learners bear witness to lived experiences through a critical lens.

Investors versus Workers: A Class‐Based Critique of International Investment Treaties

ABSTRACTBilateral investment treaties constitute an important instrument to facilitate global investment. Recent discussions in political theory have highlighted several normative concerns raised by bilateral investment treaties. One worry is that investment treaties undermine national self‐determination as they grant investors far‐reaching protections that can be legally enforced. Another worry is that the benefits and burdens entailed in bilateral investment treaties are distributed unfairly in a way that benefits investors at the expense of states and disadvantaged groups within states. Instead of critiquing bilateral investment treaties from a perspective of global (distributive) justice, in this article I develop a class‐based critique. This involves a twofold departure. First, the article shifts the focus from distributions to the power relations that are built into the global capitalist economy and that come into sharp relief in the practice of global investment. Second, rather than focusing on the relation between states and investors, I claim that in a class‐based critique the relation between workers and investors should take centre stage. I argue that bilateral investment treaties are effectively an instrument of class domination, insofar as they reproduce and increase the power of transnational corporations while at the same time decreasing the power of workers.