Working Papers

The Specter of Statelessness

Abstract

Political theorists often appeal to the dangers of statelessness to justify acquiescence to state injustice. To avoid the “state of nature,” they say, we must establish states, obey them, and help maintain their power—even if they are not fully just. That is, they invoke the specter of statelessness to justify a general obligation to obey and maintain the state. But rarely do these invocations consider the condition of actually stateless people. If a state’s citizens may obey it and bolster its power—even if it sometimes wields that power unjustly—to lessen their already minuscule risk of statelessness, what may actually stateless people do to oppose the systems that make them so? With this in mind, here I aim to re-center stateless people to generate a new perspective on the ethics of resistance. I propose that we see statelessness as a product of the state system. Moreover, the state system maintains itself (at least in part) by channeling political activity through statist institutions, thus reinforcing the impression that states should be the world’s primary political authorities. If, as I argue, statelessness is a product of the state system and the state system maintains itself by channeling political activity through statist institutions, then we cannot remedy the disenfranchisement and injustice stateless people face via statist institutions. I conclude that, far from recommending obedience to or exaltation of the state as a political form, understanding the dangers of statelessness—including the ways in which they are produced and reproduced by the state system itself—recommends some amount of resistance against the state system. In essence, statelessness as it occurs in our world is a product of state power, not of its absence. Therefore, the remedy is not more state power, but the development of alternate channels by which stateless people can secure for themselves the important goods the state system denies them.

Resistance Culture as a Remedy for Epistemic Injustice

Abstract

This paper theorizes a distinctive kind of oppression I call “epistemic subjection,” which occurs when people are governed by formal political institutions designed to peremptorily reject their understandings of important social concepts (justice, cooperation, etc.) by excluding them, rendering them unintelligible, or declaring them inadmissible. I argue epistemic subjection both constitutes epistemic injustice and can create epistemic injustice as a downstream effect. Next, I examine how these injustices could be remedied. I argue that solutions internal to the very institutions that cause epistemic subjection—such as increasing epistemically subjected people’s participation in them, reforming them to encourage institutional epistemic virtue, or recruiting more epistemically virtuous officials—won’t eliminate epistemic subjection or its attendant injustices. I therefore propose an alternate remedy: cultivating spaces and practices of resistance among epistemically subjected people via which they can develop, preserve, and communicate the very ideas their governing institutions are designed to peremptorily reject. Such resistance can mitigate both the intrinsic and downstream epistemic injustices that epistemic subjection produces. Thus, cultivating a “resistance culture” among epistemically subjected people may be necessary to remedy the epistemic injustices they face. Finally, I examine my view’s implications for the ethics of resistance. If my arguments are correct, it may be permissible for epistemically subjected people to engage in resistance (even law-breaking resistance) as a first resort—not only after having staked their claims unsuccessfully via mainstream governing institutions. Importantly, my arguments apply equally well to nearly just institutions and significantly unjust ones. Thus, we have reason to reject the common liberal view that people in nearly just societies should only engage in law-breaking resistance as a last resort.

Political Obligations Toward NGOs (invited contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Political Obligation, George Klosko ed.)

Abstract

Governance is no longer—if it ever was—the exclusive purview of states. As Rubenstein has persuasively argued, NGOs often perform governance and other political functions. They may provide public goods and services, make decisions about resource allocation that affect the collective lives of the people they claim to serve, influence local politics in the communities where they work, and shape nascent global governance norms. This raises the question: if NGOs perform political and even governance functions, do people have political obligations toward them as we are often thought to have toward states? This chapter will survey several possible grounds for political obligations toward NGOs and several possible complications for theories of political obligations toward NGOs. For example, political obligations toward NGOs might be justified based on the natural duty of justice, the so-called “humanitarian imperative,” people’s responsibilities to oppose structural injustice, or the mere fact that NGOs perform governance functions. However, there are significant obstacles to founding political obligations to NGOs on each of these grounds. I will explore these complications, ultimately arguing that people have a fairly circumscribed and very positionally-dependent set of obligations toward NGOs.