Global justice, sovereignty, and the problem of perspective
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219852646 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| Author | Jennifer Szende |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219852646
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(1) 99 –116
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219852646
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Global justice, sovereignty,
and the problem of
perspective
Jennifer Szende
McMaster University, Canada
Abstract
This article argues that a state-centered theory of global justice exhibits an epistemic
problem of perspective, and that this worry exhibits a gendered character. Within a
liberal domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly
shown to be bad for women because it creates a domain for injustice that becomes
invisible to public policy and the law. This article argues that state-centered theories of
global justice create an analogous space that is cut off from questions of global justice.
The article therefore suggests that this way of framing questions of global justice is
problematic, and is problematic for women in particular. Just as the public/private
distinction in liberal domestic justice leaves cases of injustice outside the vision of the
law, the hard distinction between the domestic (state) sphere and the international
realm of justice leaves cases of injustice invisible to international law. For the question
of global justice, the privileging of sovereignty and non-intervention compromises the
ability of the theory to achieve its purported goal of universal justice.
Keywords
Global justice, injustice, multiculturalism, non-intervention, sovereignty
This article examines a problem in the epistemology of global injustice, which I call the
problem of perspective for a theory of global justice. I intend to invoke the idea of van-
tage point, and a familiar claim from feminist epistemology and standpoint theory. The
familiar point is this: different questions of justice are available from different vantage
points and available within different framings of the issue, and possible answers may be
highlighted or excluded from each such framing (Anderson, 1995; Collins, 1998; Jaggar,
Corresponding author:
Jennifer Szende, Department of Philosophy, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON
L8S 4K1, Canada.
Email: szendej@mcmaster.ca
852646IPT0010.1177/1755088219852646Journal of International Political TheorySzende
research-article2019
Article
100 Journal of International Political Theory 17(1)
1983: 353). In applying this insight to global justice debates, I highlight the way that
entire sets of framings of the issues may preclude the goal of “global” justice, and may,
indeed, protect and entrench existing global injustices.
I draw on an analogy between familial justice and state justice, and argue that just as
there are good reasons to worry about (and reject) taking justice in the family as a sepa-
rate and prior question to state justice, there are good reasons to worry about interpreting
domestic state justice as a settled or prior question to debates about global justice.
Moreover, many of these reasons are epistemic: interpreting idealized families or states
as the building blocks of justice creates an epistemic barrier to analyzing the values real-
ized through the existence of the family or state. That is, using the family or the state as
a building block within a wider theory of justice assumes and implies that the family or
state is inherently ‘just’ and therefore effectively makes it difficult to evaluate the actual
justice of a particular family or particular state.
I begin by presenting some background and preliminary definitions prior to laying out
the problem. Although the literature on global justice frequently invokes questions of
distributive justice—and global poverty in particular—I will rely on a broader range of
global justice debates inclusive of issues of human rights and their enforcement, justice
in international trade, just war, and humanitarian intervention. Of these, the requirement
of non-intervention is a paradigmatic example demonstrating the complexity of practical
reasoning in global justice: decisions regarding humanitarian intervention require
nuanced judgment about whether some wrong has reached or surpassed a threshold level
to constitute an “injustice,” and moreover, what type of response is merited by any par-
ticular “injustice.” In this sense, I employ a broad definition of “global justice” that
extends far beyond issues of distributive justice.
This broad understanding of “global justice” highlights certain epistemic features of
practical reason in global justice. In the context of examining the moral permissibility
(and, indeed, moral requirement) of humanitarian intervention, our judgments about jus-
tice have tangible and morally significant consequences. Many issues in global justice
require a judgment of whether a “bad” situation has reached or passed the evaluative
threshold of “injustice,” and, if so, what the morally appropriate response is. Yet some
talk of “global justice” implies that these are ideal theory debates, with few if any conse-
quences in our non-ideal world: to the extent that we fall short of the ideal of “justice,”
so much the worse for us. Defining “global justice” as including humanitarian interven-
tion reminds us that the line separating justice from injustice is tangible, and can repre-
sent “manifest failure” on the part of the state or global community of states (UN, 2014).
There is something interesting about epistemic barriers for particular forms of situated
reasoning, and this article examines some of these that arise in international relations.
Compounding the concern that the epistemic resources available within a theory of
global justice are deficient, this article goes on to argue that a statist theory of global jus-
tice has a particular blind spot for harms to women and otherwise marginalized groups.1
If statism is bad at identifying injustice from an outsider perspective, I will argue that it is
worse at identifying internal marginalization from an outsider perspective. Within a lib-
eral domestic theory of justice, the public/private distinction has been repeatedly shown
to be bad for women and marginalized groups because it enforces a domain for injustice
that becomes invisible to public policy and the law. I argue that state-centered theories of
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