Justice in the age of globalization
Globalization is changing the way we argue about justice, Professor Nancy Fraser claims. Last week she gave the lecture ”Reframing justice in a globalizing world" at ISF. The lecture was part of this year’s Vilhelm Aubert Memorial Lecture.
Nancy Fraser is a professor of political and social science at the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. She is by many regarded as one of the most prominent political philosophers of our time. She has also played an important part in international feminist theory.
Reframing justice
Fraser’s lecture was based on her latest book project, titled Scales of justice. Here, she claims that most theorists have assumed the modern territorial state as the frame for the way they think and argue about justice. The accelleration of globalization has altered the scale of social interaction, Fraser said. Her main point is that questions regarding what justice is, who are those entitled to justice, and last, but not least, how to improve the conditions for justice?
Questions of current interest, concerning issues such as territorial boundaries, migration, global warming, unemployment, gay marriage etc. are all questions of justice, Fraser claimed. These questions cannot be answered unless we ask: Who are the stakeholders in these questions? Which matters are genuinely national, which local, which regional, and which global? Who should decide such questions, and by what decision-making processes? According to Fraser, these questions must be addressed by theorizing the relations among three fundamental dimensions of justice: distribution, recognition and representation.
A central point to Fraser was that redistribution and recognition are closely interwoven with questions regarding representation. Fraser argued that that questions of distribution and recognition are today inextricably imbricated with questions of representation. This implies that justice concerns democtratic deliberation. Thus, a politics of redistribution and recognition must be joined to a politics of representation, oriented to decision-making processes and governance structures. Put differently, the theory of social justice must become a theory of democratic justice, Fraser concluded.
Read Fraser's article "Reframing justice in a globalizing world" [pdf]
Nancy Fraser's home page