Domination and Global Political Justice

Conceptual, Historical and Institutional Perspectives

Barbara Buckinx, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, Timothy Waligore, Barbara Buckinx, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, Timothy Waligore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138796966
• eBook ISBN: 9781317633365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Domination consists in subjection to the will of others and manifests itself both as a personal relation and a structural phenomenon serving as the context for relations of power. Domination has again become a central political concern through the revival of the republican tradition of political thought (not to be confused with the US political party). However, normative debates about domination have mostly remained limited to the context of domestic politics. Also, the republican debate has not taken into account alternative ways of conceptualizing domination. Critical theorists, liberals, feminists, critical race theorists, and postcolonial writers have discussed domination in different ways, focusing on such problems as imperialism, racism, and the subjection of indigenous peoples. This volume extends debates about domination to the global level and considers how other streams in political theory and nearby disciplines enrich, expand upon, and critique the republican tradition's contributions to the debate. This volume brings together, for the first time, mostly original pieces on domination and global political justice by some of this generation's most prominent scholars, including Philip Pettit, James Bohman, Rainer Forst, Amy Allen, John McCormick, Thomas McCarthy, Charles Mills, Duncan Ivison, John Maynor, Terry Macdonald, Stefan Gosepath, and Hauke Brunkhorst.

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Domination Across Borders

An Introduction

Barbara Buckinx, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, and Timothy Waligore

The starting point for this volume is that domination consists in subjection to the will of another or others; it manifests itself both as a personal relation and as a structural phenomenon serving as the context for relations of power. A person who is dominated is vulnerable in a profound way: she is constrained in her choices, unable to freely form life plans, and denied equal, autonomous standing with others in a political community or shared social structures. The paradigmatic example of the dominated person is the slave. Even if she does not actually suffer any ill—because the master is benevolent—she is subjected to the master’s whim. More recently, scholars have lamented the status of the undocumented immigrant, who is vulnerable to deportation, the struggles of indigenous peoples who are ruled by the settler states that colonized them, and the predicament of the global poor who live (or die) at the discretion of others.

These are not just examples of misery, deprivation, poor health, or relative inequality. These people are subject to the whims of others, even if they are not actually interfered with. They often lack the status, the voice, or the standing to challenge the laws, institutions, and dominating structures to which they are subject. The question of whether or not they receive a fair distribution of goods and resources is primarily a topic for global distributive justice. However, the focus of this volume is on domination and global political justice. Global political justice examines the creation and reform of institutions and the fairness of background contexts in which decisions are made.¹ As several of our contributors emphasize, the question of distribution is not the only, or even the first, question of justice: justice is focused on the prior question of power, which asks how decisions are made and who has the standing to make them, rather than simply whether these decisions are correct. On this view, injustice is human produced, and refers first, or also, to relations of domination between human beings and not just to distributional inequity.²

Of course, distributive justice and domination are often connected in practice. In order for agents to be sufficiently empowered to withstand domination, or to demand to exercise the power that they are formally granted, they may require certain resources, such as health care or shelter. Ensuring that such agents are granted access to those resources might then serve distributive justice as well as help safeguard their freedom. However, while distributive concerns often follow from concerns of domination, the two can pull in different directions. A just global distribution may result through the benevolent intentions of a dominating agent, for instance, just as the slave may receive goods and resources from a benevolent slave master. And, as some of our contributors emphasize, a lack caused by nature might not be a concern of justice at all, or less so than deprivation caused by relations of domination.³ Domination across borders remains a problem so long as there is global political injustice.

This volume addresses domination across borders in its conceptual, historical, and institutional aspects. Such domination can take various forms. The victims may be individuals or collectivities such as peoples or states, and the dominating agents may be other states, global institutions, non-state actors such as global corporations and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or structural elements of the global order. Finally, domination across borders may affect different domains of life—economic, social, or cultural—and its scope may be global, international, or transnational.⁴

Global justice can have a few meanings with reference to justice and non-domination across borders. Global justice can be used as a generic term referring to justice at the global level, leaving open what relations of domination should be focused on to formulate the best theory of non-domination across borders. Global justice can also refer to the idea that there are principles or duties of justice with a global scope, or a single global context of justice, at least given today’s interdependent world. It can be used to refer to specifically “cosmopolitan” theories of justice, which focus on achieving non-domination for all individuals. In contrast, international justice focuses on non-domination between states (or nations or peoples), without directly focusing on the domination of individuals. Transnational justice focuses on multiple forms of domination.⁵ Relations of domination include non-state actors. Transnational actors such as multinational corporations are less affected by state boundaries in their operation and membership, and “pass right through” those boundaries. Domination need not result from any single (individual or collective) agent, as victims can suffer from structural forms of oppression across borders, resulting from the possibly unintentional and overlapping effects of a number of different agents.⁶

Domination of course also occurs within states. A person may be at the mercy of an unelected government, she may suffer from the effects of corporate malfeasance and be unable to obtain redress, or she may be subject to the influence of unaccountable cultural and religious organizations. Indeed, many of the political movements of the day crystallize around issues of perceived, actual, or potential domination. Popular outrage about an unaccountable police force, a wealthy and rapacious elite (“the 1%”) and a lack of control over immigration, healthcare, or climate change policy can be explained as expressions of concern with domination, both within and across borders. However, the purpose of this volume is to extend the focus of these debates about domination to the global level.

In the current world order, with its multitude of disparate supra-state organizations, private organizations, and states, domination across borders is a matter of serious concern. A person may be dominated when her country of citizenship is invaded by another state. She may be dominated by a global corporation that uses the disproportionate resources that it has at its disposal to disobey domestic labor laws. A global institution or nongovernmental organization may dominate a community by imposing a culturally inappropriate program of assistance and evading accountability to the recipients. Domination across borders may entail the destitution of individuals through ill-conceived aid programs that favor the interests of global capital over those of the affected populations. It may be located in the structural conditions that increase global economic inequality or accelerate climate change, leading to impoverishment or displacement. More diffuse forms of structural injustice may lead to the global subordination of women.⁷ Domination may also involve racial injustice through a structure of global white supremacy, operating not necessarily through a centralized, organized agent, but through transnational relations.⁸

Our contributors write from the perspectives of, and discuss insights from, critical theory, liberalism, republicanism, power theory, feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial thought, global governance, and international law. We take as our point of departure the concept of non-domination as it appears in neo-Roman republicanism and ask how this might be criticized and how different conceptions of domination could be developed and theorized. What is domination and how does it relate to injustice? What can different conceptions of domination and non-domination explain and, conversely, what do they fail to explain?

A subsequent set of questions pertains to the role of history and context in domination and theorizing about domination across borders. To what extent does non-domination correct existing power relations and to what extent does it take them for granted? To what extent should theorizing about justice begin from the history of domination across borders rather than abstract from it?

Finally, there are questions of global institutional design, which ask how global domination can or should be countered. What role, if any, should non-state actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play? Should our focus be on founding new institutions rather than reforming existing ones? And is an institutional solution even possible, or must we draw on additional, cultural and other, resources?

The chapters in our volume address these three sets of questions—conceptual, historical, and institutional—in three different sections.

1 Domination and Non-Domination: Conceptual Issues

Since the revival of the republican tradition of thought, which began with J.G.A. Pocock in 1975,⁹ domination has once again become a central concern within political theory.¹⁰ The Roman or neo-Roman republican tradition that this volume draws on, and reacts to, is not to be confused with the Republican political party in the United States. Nor is it to be confused with the Greek republican tradition that is inspired by Aristotle and emphasizes the importance of civic virtue and political participation as an essential component of the good life.¹¹

In the contemporary literature on neo-Roman republicanism, the work of Philip Pettit has been especially influential. Pettit argues that freedom is best contrasted with domination rather than with interference. A person is free from interference when no obstacles are placed in her way, and no option is forcibly removed from consideration.¹² Freedom from domination is both more and less demanding. Not all interference is considered normatively objectionable: in a republic or democracy, laws restrict choice, but those laws are not imposed on the citizenry without their exercising control over that process. Interference thus need not be dominating. However, conversely, there can be domination in the absence of interference. An early definition of this focused on freedom as ‘antipower’; that is, the capacity to emancipate from power. Pettit has since moved away from this term, emphasizing instead that the hallmark of a free person is “not being subject to the arbitrary power of another.”¹³ A person lacks freedom when another agent interferes arbitrarily in her decision-making, or when that agent has the capacity to interfere in this way. Pettit, in the lead chapter of part I of this volume, says that a person is dominated when under the (active, virtual, or reserve) control of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Domination Across Borders: An Introduction
• PART I Domination and Non-Domination: Conceptual Issues
• PART II History, Imperialism, and Race
• PART III Global Governance, Institutions, and Normative Theory
• Contributors
• Index