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Injustice at Intersecting Scales: On 'Social Exclusion' and the 'Global Poor'

Nancy Fraser European Journal of Social Theory 2010 13: 363 DOI: 10.1177/1368431010371758 The online version of this article can be found at: http://est.sagepub.com/content/13/3/363 Published by:
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Injustice at Intersecting Scales: On Social Exclusion and the Global Poor

Nancy Fraser New School for Social Research, New York

European Journal of Social Theory 13(3) 363371 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1368431010371758 est.sagepub.com

Abstract It is widely appreciated today that injustices can arise on different scales some are national, some regional, some global. Thus, the notion of a plurality of scales of justice is intuitively plausible. What may be less evident is the idea that some important injustices are best located not on any one single scale but rather at the intersection of several scales. This article argues that this is the case for one of the core characteristic injustices of the present era: namely, the social exclusion of the global poor. Keywords global poor, intersecting scales, scales of justice, social exclusion

I have recently published a book called Scales of Justice (2008), whose title suggests two images. The first is very familiar, almost a cliche : the moral balance in which an impartial judge weighs the relative merits of competing claims. Although that image plays a substantial role in the book, it will not be front and center in the present article. More central here is a second, less obvious image my title evokes: the geographers metric for representing spatial relationships. At first sight, this second image may seem removed from the problem of justice. But my central aim in the reflections that follow is to forge a link between scale in the map-making sense and social justice. More strongly, I shall maintain that sensitivity to scale in this second sense is a sine qua non for understanding, let alone overcoming, core injustices in the twenty-first century.

Corresponding author: New School for Social Research, Politics Department, 6 E, 16th St., Suite 711, New York 10003 USA Email: frasern@earthlink.net

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For this argument, the plural form, scales of justice, makes all the difference. In our time, injustices are routinely mapped in a plurality of different scales. Some injustices, such as the US governments abdication of its responsibilities to the (largely non-white) victims of Hurricane Katrina, are situated squarely on the national scale. Others, such as that same governments practice of extra-legal rendition, whereby suspected terrorists are kidnapped and flown secretly to foreign locations for interrogation (read torture), are more plausibly located on a broader, transnational scale. Still others, such as the rise throughout the Global South of mega-slums utterly cut off from formal work, are credibly imagined even more broadly, on a global scale. Thus, the notion of a plurality of scales of justice is intuitively plausible. What may be less so, at least at first sight, is the idea that some important injustices are best located not on any one single scale but rather at the intersection of several scales. This, I will argue here, is the case for one of the core characteristic injustices of the present era: namely, the social exclusion of the global poor.

Social Exclusion: A Preliminary Terminological Note

I begin with a terminological note. The phrase social exclusion is becoming a keyword of our age. This expression is now widely used in many countries and regions throughout the world though not in the United States. And there exists a large body of policy-oriented literature on this subject. The British government has established a Unit on Social Exclusion in the Deputy Prime Ministers Office. The European Union has adopted a policy aimed at eradicating poverty and social exclusion by 2010. The Inter-American Development Bank has published a mission statement on social exclusion. UNESCO has held a major conference on the theme, From Social Exclusion to Social Cohesion. The London School of Economics has established a Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE). Nevertheless, the literature sheds little light on what social exclusion actually means. In some accounts, social exclusion is assigned to the same general field as concepts such as poverty and inequality. In others, it belongs rather with denial of recognition and disrespect. In still others, social exclusion is part of a discourse about social disintegration and the rupturing of social bonds. As yet, there exists no authoritative survey of the relative merits of those perspectives. As a result, there are major conceptual deficits in our understanding of an expression that is playing an increasingly important role in political life. At the risk of muddying the waters still further, I want to introduce yet another way of thinking about social exclusion. In the view I will elaborate here, social exclusion is a species of injustice, but it is reducible neither to economic deprivation, on the one hand, nor to cultural disrespect, on the other. In the case of the global poor, rather, social exclusion arises from the intersection of three distinct genres of social injustice, which operate at several scales. To understand this phenomenon requires attention to multiple crosscutting scales and dimensions of justice.

Social Exclusion: A Three-Dimensional Account

I have already said that social exclusion belongs to the family of social injustices. But what sort of injustice is it? Is social exclusion an especially severe case of distributive
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injustice? Or is it a case of culturally constructed disrespect? Or is it something else altogether? How one answers these questions depends, of course, on how one understands justice. In what follows, I shall rely on the view of justice, which I have elaborated elsewhere, as parity of participation (Fraser, 2003). According to this norm, justice requires social arrangements that permit all members of society to interact with one another as peers. For participatory parity to be possible, however, at least three conditions must be met. First, the distribution of material resources must be such as to ensure participants independence and voice. This condition precludes economic structures that institutionalize deprivation, exploitation, and gross disparities in wealth, income, labor and leisure time, which prevent some people from participating as full partners in social interaction. Second, the social status order must express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem. This condition precludes institutionalized patterns of cultural value that systematically depreciate some categories of people and the qualities associated with them, thus denying them the status of full partners in social interaction. Finally, the political constitution of society must be such as to accord roughly equal political voice to all social actors. This condition rules out electoral decision rules and media structures that systematically deprive some people of their fair chance to influence decisions that affect them. All three conditions are necessary for participatory parity. None alone is sufficient. The first brings into focus concerns traditionally associated with the theory of distributive justice. The second stresses concerns recently highlighted in the philosophy of recognition. The third emphasizes concerns that have long been central to the theory of democratic representation. This view of justice is three-dimensional. Encompassing economic, cultural and political considerations, it treats redistribution, recognition, and representation as three analytically distinct facets of justice, none of which can be reduced to the others, although they are practically intertwined. Given the view of justice as participatory parity, how should we understand social exclusion?1 Consider, first, that this view of justice is very demanding. It holds that social arrangements that institutionalize obstacles to parity of participation are unjust. But anyone who is structurally excluded from participation in social interaction is eo ipso denied the possibility of participating as a peer. On this account, therefore, social exclusion is an injustice because it represents a denial of participatory parity. As denials of parity go, moreover, it is very severe. Being excluded, after all, is considerably worse than being included but marginalized or being included in a subordinate way. Those who are marginalized or subordinated can still participate with others in social interaction, although they cannot do so as peers. Those who are excluded, by contrast, are not even in the game. On the view of justice as participatory parity, therefore, social exclusion is a grave moral wrong. But what exactly are the excluded excluded from? As I understand it, the norm of parity of participation applies broadly, across all major arenas of social interaction, including family and personal life, employment and markets, formal and informal politics, and voluntary associations in civil society.2 In principle, one can be excluded from some of these arenas and not from others. Thus, social exclusion can take a plurality of different forms, depending on which arenas are affected. Historically, many women
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have lacked the standing and resources to participate in official politics, while enjoying the cultural and material prerequisites for participating meaningfully (if not fully equally) in family life. Homosexuals, in contrast, have until very recently lacked the standing to participate openly in sexual relations and family life, even in contexts where some of them have had access to decently remunerated work. In such cases, exclusion remains contained within a given sphere or subset of spheres and does not spill over into others. In other cases, however, exclusion is highly convertible, spreading freely from sphere to sphere. We need only recall the Nazi treatment of Jews to appreciate the possibility of total and radical exclusion. In such cases, a class of persons is systematically stripped of participation rights in sphere after sphere until they are denied the right to have any rights at all, including the right to exist. Such cases attest to the possibility of extreme and wholesale exclusion, a possibility that contrasts sharply with more ordinary sphere-specific exclusions, whose convertibility is far more limited.3 If exclusion can take a variety of forms, it can also be effected by a variety of means. I can envision at least five possibilities. In one scenario, exclusion is grounded in political economy, as when economic structures deny some categories of social actors even the minimal economic resources that are needed for marginalized or subordinated interaction. This, I take it, is what Hegel had in mind when he wrote in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the rabble. In a second scenario, exclusion is rooted in the status order, as when the institutionalization of a hierarchical pattern of cultural value denies some the chance even for second-class participation in some arenas. This is how Max Weber understood the situation of ethnically constituted pariah groups (Weber, 1958: 399). In a third scenario, exclusion is grounded in the political constitution of society, as when the architecture of political space denies some people the chance to have even a marginal say in disputes about justice. This is the situation of undocumented immigrants in many countries. In a fourth scenario, exclusion arises from the combined operation of culture and political economy, as when class differentials map onto status hierarchies to prevent some actors from participating at all in mainstream arenas of social interaction. This, I submit, is the situation of some indigenous peoples in settler societies, as well as of Romany people in East/Central Europe. In a fifth scenario, exclusion is rooted jointly in all three dimensions of social ordering, as when economic, cultural, and political structures work together to obstruct participation. This, I shall argue next, is the situation of todays global poor.

Scales of Exclusion: An Intersectional Approach

My general thesis is that the three-dimensional framework of redistribution, recognition, and representation affords an illuminating account of the situation of the global poor. But it can only do so after it has been modified to take account for the question of scale. Let me explain. So far, I have discussed social exclusion without explicit attention to the problem of scale. As a result, I have glossed over a crucial question: parity of participation among whom? Who exactly is entitled to participate on a par with whom in which social interactions? By not raising this question explicitly, I have conveyed the impression that we already know and agree upon the answer. The effect, however unwitting, is to ratify an
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answer that goes by default: the appropriate frame for thinking about justice is the modern territorial state. The scale of justice, let us say, is Westphalian. This answer is problematic, however. It forecloses consideration of the situation of the global poor as a matter of injustice. If the subjects of justice are by definition fellow citizens, then the very idea of transborder injustice is inconceivable. The most disadvantaged citizens of a very poor country may well have valid justice claims against their own government and their own better-off fellow citizens. But by definition they can have no such claims against offshore actors or transnational social structures hence no such claims that implicate us. On this view, rather, social exclusion is exclusively a domestic problem, internal to a Westphalian state. There can be no such thing as transnational social exclusion. Strictly speaking, the very expression the global poor is an oxymoron. This result itself is patently unjust. The foreclosure by definition of the very possibility of transborder social exclusion is itself a form of social exclusion: namely, the exclusion of the global poor from the universe of those who can press justice claims against us. The point can also be put like this: by presupposing that the Westphalian frame is the only legitimate framing of questions of justice, we commit a special kind of metainjustice, in which we misframe first-order injustices, wrongly excluding some who deserve inclusion.4 Assuming an inappropriate Westphalian frame, we airbrush away all actors, processes, and mechanisms that operate at the global or transnational scale. How can we avoid this sort of meta-injustice? The strategy I propose draws on a distinctive conception of the political dimension. So far, I have considered this dimension in the usual way, as concerned exclusively with injustices of ordinary-political misrepresentation. These are political injustices that arise within a political community whose boundaries and membership are widely assumed to be settled when, for example, the politys decision rules deny some who are counted in principle as members the chance to participate fully, as peers. Important as such matters are, they represent only half the story. In addition to ordinary-political injustice, which arises within the frame of a bounded polity, we can also conceptualize a second level, of meta-political injustice, which arises as a result of the division of political space into bounded polities. This second level comprehends injustices of misframing. Such injustices occur when a politys boundaries are drawn in such a way as to wrongly deny some people the chance to participate at all in its authorized contests over justice. In such cases, those who are constituted as nonmembers are wrongly excluded from the universe of those entitled to consideration within the polity in matters of distribution, recognition, and ordinarypolitical representation. The injustice remains, moreover, even when those excluded from one polity are included as subjects of justice in another as long as the effect of the political division is to put some relevant aspects of justice beyond their reach. An example is the way in which the international system of supposedly equal sovereign states gerrymanders political space at the expense of the global poor, channeling their claims into the domestic political arenas of weak or failed states, and shielding more powerful predator states and transnational private powers from the reach of justice. The introduction of this second level of meta-political injustice can be used to clarify the social exclusion of the global poor. Oriented to the possibility that first-order framings of justice may themselves be unjust, this level grasps the question of the frame as a question of justice. As a result, it provides the sort of sensitivity to questions of scale that
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we need to understand social exclusions that arise transnationally, when processes that operate at different scales intersect as, for example, when global economic forces converge with local status hierarchies, on the one hand, and with national political structures, on the other. With its sensitivity to frames and to questions of scale, this framework illuminates such exclusions.5 One example is the sexual enslavement of girls sold by impoverished parents to middlemen who proceed to sell them to Thai brothels, a case in which gender status hierarchies intersect with the collapse of rural farming economies in the wake of a regional banking crisis sparked by a global speculative currency run, as well as with a shift in transnational sex tourism toward child prostitution in the wake of the global HIV-AIDS epidemic (Bond et al., 1997). Another example, documented in the film, Darwins Nightmare, is the devastation of Tanzanian shore communities as a result of the introduction of large-scale, transnational-corporate perch fishing in Lake Victoria, a case in which post-Cold War structural adjustment policies, forcing developmental states to open their economies to foreign direct investment on terms dictated by transnational capital, intersect with ethno-racial stigmatization and political voicelessness.6 The result, in both cases, is a vicious circle of transnationally rooted exclusions, which spread unhindered from one arena of social interaction to another. Other cases, in contrast, belie the model of free-spreading social exclusion. In such cases, the existence of multiple scales affords some protection against total allenveloping exclusion. Thus, those who suffer from globally caused poverty may retain capacities for (subordinated) participation in some nationally defined arenas of social interaction. An example is the situation of former copper miners in Zambia who, despite having been disconnected involuntarily from the official production circuits of the global economy, as a result of the collapse of world copper prices, still manage to exercise political voice at the national level (Ferguson, 1999). What none of the transnationally excluded can do, however, is make efficacious claims against the offshore architects of their dispossession. That option is foreclosed by the Westphalian gerrymandering of political space, which misframes disputes about justice and insulates transnational malefactors from critique and control. Among those shielded from the reach of justice are foreign investors and creditors, international currency speculators, and transnational corporations. Also protected are the governance structures of the global economy, which set exploitative terms of interaction and then exempt them from democratic control. Finally, the Westphalian frame is selfinsulating, as the architecture of the interstate system excludes democratic decisionmaking on framing questions.

Contesting Social Exclusion on Multiple Scales

But the absence of formal-institutional channels of democratic transnational politics does not mean the absence of all contestation. Rather, some segments of the global poor have organized resistance to transnationally rooted exclusions. Consider the case of the Zapatistas. Mobilizing impoverished peasants and indigenous people, their movement linked claims against despotic local elites and a corrupt, authoritarian federal government to claims against transnational corporate predation, the
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US-dominated North American Free Trade Area pact, and the non-democratic governance structures of global capitalism. The result was a powerful strategy for contesting multiple sources and scales of exclusion. Thus, the Zapatistas combined a redistributive struggle against dispossession from communal lands, a recognition struggle against a neocolonial ethno-racial hierarchy, and a representation struggle against exclusion from political decision-making at several different scales. At the local scale, they sought to replace quasi-feudal subjection with communal self-government. At the national scale, they contested the effective exclusion of indigenous peasant communities from Mexican citizenship. At the regional scale, they protested popular exclusion from the design and control of NAFTA. At the global scale, they contested meta-injustices of misframing and convened a transnational public conversation about how to frame questions of justice in a globalizing world a discussion that since been continued in the meetings of the World Social Forum (La Botz, 1995; Nash, 2001). With its several dimensions and multiple scales, the Zapatista movement offers a textbook illustration of the sorts of injustices, and struggles against them, that I have been considering here under the rubric of the social exclusion of the global poor. It also demonstrates the merits of a three-dimensional theory of justice that is sensitive to scale for understanding these injustices and struggles. I have been arguing that this theory affords a good account of the various dimensions and scales of exclusion that afflict the global poor. Encompassing first-order exclusions from domestic arenas of social interaction, it also conceptualizes meta-exclusions that result from the misframing of first-order harms. Clarifying as well exclusions that are rooted transnationally, at the intersection of multi-scaled processes, it illuminates the moral stakes and political strategies of contemporary struggles over globalization.

The Global Poor: A Concluding Terminological Note

I began with some terminological reflection on the expression social exclusion. I want to end with some thoughts on the expression the global poor. Although I have used this phrase repeatedly, I consider it ideological. To speak of the poor (global or otherwise) is, after all, to cast the people in question as passive victims instead of agents and potential political actors. It is also to see them in a free-standing, decontextualized way, in abstraction from the social relations and processes that have generated their poverty. To name their plight poverty, finally, is to suggest that they simply, inexplicably lack the means of subsistence, whereas in fact they have been deprived of those means. For all these reasons, the expression the global poor fails to convey that the issue in question is one of injustice. Their struggles for justice would be better served by an expression that forthrightly names the injustice, focusing attention on the forces that generate it and on the agency of those who experience it. Phrases like the globally exploited and the globally excluded strike me as better than the global poor, although they are still not entirely satisfactory. Better still, I believe is the global precariat. This expression has the virtue of encompassing varying degrees and forms of inclusion/exclusion, including formal workers, informal workers, and unpaid workers, while stressing the vulnerability they share and the ease with which those in the favored categories can slip back into the disfavored ones.
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In addition, the modifier global is, strictly speaking, problematic. It suggests that the only scale of justice implicated here is the global. In fact, however, as I hope I have shown, the forms of exclusion at issue here arise from the convergence of multiscaled processes, as when global economic structures intersect with local status hierarchies and national political structures. To speak of those who experience such injustices as if they existed on one plane alone is to reduce them to a global abstraction, stripped of the particularities in and through which sociality is lived. Once again, they would be better served by an expression that recognizes the full complexity of their humanity, by situating them in the context of such multiple intersecting scales of justice. Although it may not itself be fully satisfactory, the modifier transnational strikes me better than the adjective global at signaling such complexity. I propose, therefore, to replace the expression the global poor with the transnational precariat. Notes
1. The following account draws on Fraser (2007). 2. Because access to these arenas is so fundamental for peoples well-being, I construe all of them as spheres of justice in which the requirement of participatory parity applies. Here I break with the common view that focuses exclusively on political participation, often understood very narrowly in terms of voting. For me, in contrast, the requirement of participatory parity applies broadly, in all the major arenas of social life. 3. Whether exclusion from one sphere converts into exclusion from others is in the end an empirical question, which depends on the character of the society in question. 4. For a fuller account of misframing, see Fraser (2005: 6988, reprinted in Fraser, 2008). 5. The following account, too, draws on Fraser (2007). 6. Darwins Nightmare. Dir. Hubert Sauper. Film. Celluloid Dreams/International Film Circuit, 2004.

References
Bond, Katherine, Celentano, David D., Phonsophakul, Sukanya and Vaddhanaphuti, Chayan (1997) Mobility and Migration: Female Commercial Sex Work and the HIV Epidemic in Northern Thailand, in Gilbert Herdt (ed.) Sexual Cultures and Migration in the Era of AIDS: Anthropological and Demographic Perspectives, pp. 185215. New York: Oxford University Press. Ferguson, James (1999) Global Disconnect: Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism, in James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, pp. 23454. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fraser, Nancy (2003) Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics, in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, trans. Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke. London: Verso. (2005) Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World, New Left Review 36(NovemberDecember): 6988. (2007) Identity, Exclusion, and Critique: A Response to Four Critics, European Journal of Political Theory 6(3): 30538. 370

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(2008) Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press and Polity Press. La Botz, Dan (1995) Democracy in Mexico: Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Nash, June (2001) Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization. London: Routledge. Weber, Max (1958) Class, Status, Party, in Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 18890. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bio
Nancy Fraser is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, New York. Her research focuses on social and political theory, feminist theory, contemporary French and German thought. Recent publications include Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (2008); Nancy Fraser, Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics, ed. Kevin Olson (Verso, 2008); and Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (2003), co-authored with Axel Honneth.

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