President's Dream Colloquium on Justice Beyond National Boundaries

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Recorded on March 7, 2013

Lecture Abstract

If there is such a thing as global justice, it demands two things of us: first, that we advance the real protection of human rights; and second, that we redress unjustifiable inequalities in the global distribution of wealth and opportunities. In general, philosophic perspectives on the problem of global justice (all of which are rooted in Western philosophic traditions) enjoin us to understand human rights as universal and distributive justice as contextual, that is, mediated by our membership in bounded political communities.

But we might also adopt the perspective of the “glocal” citizen-activist who is trying to advance human rights and distributive justice in the context of a globalized capitalist economy and networked transnational public space. If we do, we find a dynamic process of democratic translation taking place in which the polarities of human rights and social justice, universalism and contextualism, are reversed.

Human rights now appear as contextual, and social justice appears as (immanently) universal. Combining these perspectives opens up new pathways for understanding multiple sites and scales of activism as complementary contributions to a global system of human rights and social justice.