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This essay argues that access to water, and the right to water in India is subject to legal pluralism in India: the plurality of state law and the normative order of the caste system in India. While the Constitution of India prohibits discrimination against or exploitation of the Scheduled Castes, society is also subject to a parallel set of social rules set forth by caste hierarchies. The Dalit community has been historically subject to exploitation and limited access to resources, with the use of religious and social sanction, this essay focuses particularly on the right to water, which is an essential part of the constitutional right to the environment is subject to plural legal systems, of state law and caste-based normative orders. Ethnographic social science research, particularly in anthropology and sociology has produced extensive findings on how the caste system limits access to natural resources and particularly water, owing to ideas of purity and impurity associated with water use, and the status of water as a common public good. This essay explores how lawyers must consider legal pluralities when understanding access and management of natural resources. The essay analyses John Griffiths’ idea of legal pluralism which describes a scenario in which not all law is administered by the State or its institutions, and there exists de facto law, beyond the boundaries of the State. This paper expands Griffiths’ model of pluralism to explain how the right to water is subject to both caste order and state law and how the lived reality of Dalits when accessing water is subject to a constant pluralism.
Fair Trade is under fire. Some critics argue, for instance, that there is no obligation to purchase Fair Trade certified products and that doing so may even be counter-productive. Others worry that well-justified conceptions of what makes trade fair can conflict. Yet others suggest that the common arguments for Fair Trade cannot justify purchasing Fair Trade certified goods, in particular. This paper starts by sketching one common argument for Fair Trade and defends it against this last line of criticism. In particular, it argues that we should purchase Fair Trade certified goods because doing so benefits the poor even though there are other ways to alleviate poverty. It then considers how other common arguments for Fair Trade fare in light of similar criticism and concludes that they may well succeed.
The topic of global trade has become central to debates on global justice and on duties to the global poor, two important concerns of contemporary political theory. However, the leading approaches fail to directly address the participants in trade and provide them with normative guidance for making choices in non-ideal circumstances. This paper contributes an account of individuals’ responsibilities for global problems in general, an account of individuals’ responsibilities as market actors, and an explanation of how these responsibilities coexist. The argument is developed through an extended case study of a consumer’s choice between conventional and fair trade coffee. My argument is that the coffee consumer’s choice requires consideration of two distinct responsibilities. First, she has responsibilities to help meet foreigners’ claims for assistance. Second, she has moral responsibilities to ensure that trades, such as between herself and a coffee farmer, are fair rather than exploitative.
If Third World women form ‘the bedrock of a certain kind of global exploitation of labour,’ as Chandra Mohanty argues, how can our theoretical definitions of exploitation account for this? This paper argues that liberal theories of exploitation are insufficiently structural and that Marxian accounts are structural but are insufficiently intersectional. What we need is a structural and intersectional definition of exploitation in order to correctly identify global structural exploitation. Drawing on feminist, critical race/post-colonial and post-Fordist critiques of the Marxist definition and the intersectional accounts of Maria Mies and Iris Marion Young, this paper offers the following definition of structural exploitation: structural exploitation refers to the forced transfer of the productive powers of groups positioned as socially inferior to the advantage of groups positioned as socially superior. Global structural exploitation is a form of global injustice because it is a form of oppression.
Imperialism is the domination of one state by another. This paper sketches a nonrepublican account of domination that buttresses this definition of imperialism. It then defends the following claims. First, there is a useful and defensible distinction between colonial and liberal imperialism, which maps on to a distinction between what I will call coercive and liberal domination. Second, the main institutions of contemporary globalization, such as the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, etc., are largely the instruments of liberal imperialism; they are a reincarnation of what Karl Kautsky once called ‘ultraimperialism’. Third, resistance to imperialism can no longer be founded on a fundamental right to national self-determination. Such a right is conditional upon and derivative of a more general right to resist domination.