‘Epistemic Injustice’ and the ‘Right Not to Be Poor’: Bringing Recognition into the Debate on Global Justice
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12089 |
| Published date | 01 November 2013 |
| Author | Valentina Gentile |
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
‘Epistemic Injustice’and the ‘Right Not to Be
Poor’: Bringing Recognition into the Debate
on Global Justice
Valentina Gentile
LUISS ‘Guido Carli’, Libera Universit
a Internazionale degli Studi Sociali, Rome
A response to ‘Overcoming the Epistemic Injus-
tice of Colonialism’
Rajeev Bhargava
and ‘The Great Global Poverty Debate: Is Some-
thing Missing?’
Neera Chandhoke*
Poverty and inequality are not the sole sources of (glo-
bal) injustices, and inequality is not only a matter of fair
distribution. Identity and cultural asymmetries, often
articulated along political and economic lines, relocate
and reshape the struggle against subordination to
include new areas of contestation such as gender, race,
ethnicity, sexuality, culture, religion and nationality. The
reconciliation of an idea of redistribution with a notion
of recognition is a major theoretical challenge in the
elaboration of contemporary notions of global justice.
Closing this special section, I reconceptualise the argu-
ments raised by both Rajeev Bhargava and Neera Chand-
hoke as part of a broader struggle for recognition in the
contemporary debate on global justice.
I understand the idea of recognition as being deeply
indebted to Hegelian philosophy. For Hegel (1977), politi-
cal justice must be understood as entailing a strong ele-
ment of mutual recognition, which is secured when
persons accept and engage with one another on equal
terms. Accordingly, recognition is deeply intertwined with
equality or equal standing (Taylor, 1994; Fraser, 2001),
whether ‘epistemic’or ‘substantive equality’, and is more
likely to grasp the fundamental relational asymmetries in
the realm of political justice. Therefore, the claim for rec-
ognition asks that existing global institutions are able to
guarantee the basis for self-esteem and self-respect to
equal persons.
Can the notion of ‘epistemic injustice’, understood as
part of what appears as an ‘unjust’global order, contrib-
ute to the debate on global justice? The nexus between
Bhargava’s idea of ‘epistemic injustice’and the problem
of recognition is undeniable: it is nonetheless urgent to
elaborate on possible ways to frame it within the broader
debate on global justice. Miranda Fricker (1999, 2007)
suggested a first formulation of ‘epistemic injustice’;as
linked to the conferral of credibility. The process of credi-
bility assessment is inherently unjust because it is prone
to favour those groups who are already powerful and
privileged in society. In this account, the fact that a per-
son who is male, upper-class and white is likely to be per-
ceived as a more credible person than one who is female,
poor and black depends on the reproduction of dominat-
ing hierarchies of power through fundamental economic,
political and cultural institutions. In his article, Bhargava
links the notion of ‘epistemic injustice’to the case of post-
colonial societies. For him, ‘epistemic injustice’is a specific
form of cultural injustice perpetrated by western modern
colonialism that ‘replaced or adversely affected’the vari-
ety of colonised societies’intellectual and cultural experi-
ences. Colonial forms of cultural control ranged from
processes of ‘inferiorisation of indigenous cultures’to the
‘enforced marginalisation’of specific indigenous cultural
features, to the ‘transformation’and hybridisation of ‘basic
epistemic frameworks’.
The issue of ‘epistemic injustice’becomes a problem
of recognition if existing institutions disregard or fail to
protect those who are not part of the group of the pow-
erful and privileged (McConkey, 2004). This idea has
important implications on the theorisation of justice:
beyond the traditional focus on distribution, the new task
is to remove or reshape those institutional conditions
that constitute an obstacle to the inclusion and the free
exercise of individual capacities. Restating Bhargava’s
*Bhargava, R. (2013) ‘Overcoming the Epistemic Injustice of Colonialism’,
Global Policy, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 413–417. DOI: 10.1111/1758-5899.12093.
Chandhoke, N. (2013) ‘The Great Global Poverty Debate: Is Something Miss-
ing?’, Global Policy, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 420–424. DOI: 10.1111/1758-5899.12091.
Global Policy (2013) 4:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12089 ©2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 4 . November 2013 425
Special Section Article
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