Clive Barnett (University of Exeter) - Geography and the Priority of Injustice

For more than 40 years, geographers have had a recurring difficulty with the universal register which justice-talk always brings with it. This follows from a persistent conflation of two distinct aspects of universalism: universalism as a figure of impartiality, and universalism as a figure of inclusion. There is a consistent worry that both the facts of geographical variation and intellectual trends undermine criteria of judgment that would allow us to determine whether some state of affairs actually qualifies as unjust.

Existing work on the geographies of justice on environmental justice movements or the right to the city draw into view two important issues for how to think about the relationship between justice and injustice: the idea that normative concepts of justice emerge from situated conflicts; and the idea that critical analysis starts from a shared abhorrence at some form of wrong. Nevertheless, geographers and other spatial theorists tend still to approach the analysis of injustice as an empirical index of the distance between reality and an ideal of justice. In this respect, they get the grammar of justice-claims the wrong way around.

Building on the argument in the forthcoming book The Priority of Injustice, I reconstruct an argument for conceptualizing injustice independently from a prior formulation of an ideal principle of justice. The conceptual priority of injustice involves the specification of a specific harm: arbitrary subjection to the will of others, or domination. I argue that analysis of claims of injustice requires a layered account of the situated contexts out of which any sense of injustice emerges, and the extensive spatialities of reach through which such claims are articulated, assessed, and acted upon.