This paper engages with dialectical critical realism to reflect on the problems and limitations regarding our contemporary justice practices and understandings. Our starting point is the idea that contemporary approaches to justice in liberal democratic settings are predominantly hostile; they are overly focused on episodic injustices, and dominant forms of addressing these injustices are pervaded with punitive logics. This pathological character of contemporary justice is linked to how it is so…
Read moreThis paper engages with dialectical critical realism to reflect on the problems and limitations regarding our contemporary justice practices and understandings. Our starting point is the idea that contemporary approaches to justice in liberal democratic settings are predominantly hostile; they are overly focused on episodic injustices, and dominant forms of addressing these injustices are pervaded with punitive logics. This pathological character of contemporary justice is linked to how it is socially experienced, imagined and reproduced as an absent presence: something that is already ‘there’, taken for granted, and only relevant when it is seen to be violated. Against this, we argue that concrete justice is mostly lacking in our social world, and that to tackle this lack, we need to reimagine and re-experience justice as a present absence. The paper then suggests that this alternative, lived sense of justice can be pursued through an engagement with the dialectics of belonging.
