Reconceptualising global justice: a critical cosmopolitan account of global structural injustices

Recent forms of globalisation have seen a revival of cosmopolitan thought, which, in part, attempts to grapple with what globalisation means for theories of justice. Despite the innumerable possibilities, debates about global justice are dominated by a cosmopolitanism indebted to a liberal ontological framework, one which places the individual at the centre of its analysis. In so doing, cosmopolitanism fails to unpack and examine the global social structures that reproduce a wide range of global injustices. Thus, there is a lacuna in the literature for a cosmopolitanism that is more structurally minded and able to examine, on a deeper level, the reasons why global injustices persist. However, when examining Iris Marion Young’s influential structural injustice framework for solutions, it is apparent that her understanding of structural injustices focusses on the widespread agential action that produces them and less on the ideational context that shapes agential action. In response, this thesis explicates a critical cosmopolitanism that places “individuals” within the social structures that most of us perpetuate and are subjected to, whilst also accounting for the broader ideational context that shapes and reproduces many observable structural injustices. This critical cosmopolitan alternative is most indebted to Marx’s theorisation of the abstract and the concrete. The thesis notes how the equivalence between social abstractions and the concrete social relations within Marx’s approach can provide us with a preferential structural injustice framework precisely because it can better account for the ideational milieu that shapes agential action and the structural injustices it produces as a result. Consequently, the grounding of a critical cosmopolitanism provides a greater insight into how structural injustices arise and are reproduced, which, in turn, shines a light on the transformative and emancipatory politics necessary to transcend them