Global Justice as Recognition: Dealing with Diversity in a Pluralised World
| Published date | 01 November 2013 |
| Author | Valentina Gentile |
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12090 |
Global Justice as Recognition: Dealing with
Diversity in a Pluralised World
Valentina Gentile
LUISS ‘Guido Carli’, Libera Universit
a Internazionale degli Studi Sociali, Rome
In spite of growing wealth and the increased opportunities
offered by the global market, an important scholarly
debate has emerged about how to make globalisation a
sustainable phenomenon. As we have shown in the first
cluster of this special section, the identification of new
boundaries, the definition of a new currency of justice and
the individuation of structural distortions in global powers
and markets have long characterized the current debate
on global justice, locating it primarily in the economic
arena. However, not only is globalisation an economic
phenomenon but it also has important cultural and socio-
political implications. New trends in global migration, the
emergence of new social transnational actors, and new
economic and political bonds have emerged among and
within nations; all these factors contribute to redesign and
alter the cultural and geographical contours of global soci-
ety. A form of ‘hyper-pluralism’(Ferrara, 2012) characteris-
es global and domestic institutions, where the comparison
between ways of life and cultures is intertwined with the
problem of distribution at multiple levels. Geographical
and social connotations of contemporary asymmetries
demonstrate that global problems of redistribution, such
as poverty and inequalities, are deeply intertwined with
the issue of identity and thus demand some form of recog-
nition (Fraser, 2001; Taylor, 1994). These changes call for a
notion of global justice that can acknowledge and accom-
modate specificities and differences.
Therefore, ‘global justice as recognition’is the subject
of this second cluster. Theoretical interest in the idea of
recognition can be traced back to the communitarian cri-
tique (Taylor, 1989; Sandel, 1982; Walzer, 1983) of some
versions of liberal egalitarianism (Rawls, Dworkin). By
enhancing the density of links and connections that bind
the individual to the surrounding reality, communitarian
scholars criticise the abstractness and opacity of this lib-
eral conception of the person and the implications that
this notion of individual identity has on theorisations of
justice. The answer of liberalism to these critiques
has been twofold. On the one hand, a purely political
liberalism has been formulated. In this view, the fact of
the pluralism of citizens’ways of life and moral doctrines
does not preclude the possibility for an ‘overlapping con-
sensus’among reasonable citizens on a ‘freestanding’
political conception of justice (Rawls, 1993). On the other
hand, the sense of community has been incorporated
within liberal frameworks provided that these communi-
ties adhere to core liberal principles, such as the principle
of liberal autonomy. Kymlicka’s (1995) liberal multicultur-
alism represents a version of this account.
However, the passage from the domestic to the global
level has raised further theoretical challenges. The debate
within liberal theory has broadly distinguished two views
about global distributive justice. A realist account tends
to recognise the limits of the scope of justice due to a
lack of legitimacy of global institutions. A second vision
extends the scope of justice beyond national borders;
this view ranges from moral to political versions of cos-
mopolitanism. The strategy adopted to deal with plural-
ism and cultural diversity has thus been articulated
around two different axes. Again, an account of political
justice has been employed to emphasise the need for
major global institutions to have a ‘freestanding’and plu-
ral nature; on the other hand, different versions of
‘rooted cosmopolitanism’associated with claims for a
‘common global culture’have been formulated in order
to accommodate cultural diversity in the global political
arena (Appiah, 2006; Tan, 2000; Miller, 2008).
In recent years, however, postcolonial and postmodern
critiques have added a further element to the debate
with the aim of deparochialising the discourse on global
justice. For these scholars, the (western) discourse on glo-
bal justice has widely reproduced old structures of colo-
nial power through a more sophisticated form of
ethnocentrism that is articulated in terms of universal
human rights and institutions. Western debate thus
addresses what is perceived as a ‘rhetoric’that emphasis-
es the moral worth of all human beings or the justice of
fair institutions while leaving the poor and the needy out
of any actual consideration. The three contributions
included in this cluster show how and to what extent
this critical approach can actually contribute to and
enrich contemporary debates on global justice.
Global Policy (2013) 4:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12090 ©2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 4 . November 2013 399
Special Section Article
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