Journal of Global Ethics

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Postcolonialism and global justice

Margaret Kohn

To cite this article: Margaret Kohn (2013) Postcolonialism and global justice, Journal of Global
Ethics, 9:2, 187-200, DOI: 10.1080/17449626.2013.818459

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2013.818459

Published online: 16 Aug 2013.

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Journal of Global Ethics, 2013
Vol. 9, No. 2, 187 –200, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2013.818459

Postcolonialism and global justice

Margaret Kohn∗

Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

(Received 19 October 2012; accepted 13 June 2013)

This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on
postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and
power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and
advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns
are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that
separate the two scholarly communities. Despite these differences, I argue that bringing the
two literatures into conversation generates important benefits. Postcolonial theory draws
attention to the way that abstract concepts can function as metaphors that have the
unintended consequence of reinforcing power relations. Normative theory will be more
effective at promoting global justice if it pays more attention to the politics of representation.
Keywords: metaphor; postcolonialism; global justice; narrative; development

‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both . . . I took the one less
travelled by, and that made all the difference.’ Robert Frost’s poem says nothing explicit about
the uncertainty of choosing one type of life over another. He never uses a simile to suggest that a
road is like a path in life. Yet we recognize the poem as a reflection on the pathos of life rather
than a poor guide to survival in the wilderness (Lakoff 1993). According to Aristotle (1967), a
metaphor is ‘the application of an alien name by transference’ either from one category to
another or by analogy. Usually, we think of metaphors as images that help to illustrate more
abstract concepts, such as ‘burning anger’, which suggests that anger is like a fire, something
prone to destruction and liable to rage out of control. The reverse is also possible: abstract con-
cepts or principles can serve as metaphors for specific institutions, peoples, or cultural practices.
For example, in his book Our Enemies and US, Ido Oren argues that the concept ‘democratic’
has been used as a metaphor for ‘ally of the United States’ (2003). Similarly, in the colonial
context, freedom and rule of law were metaphors for European superiority and power. This
paper asks whether the concept ‘global justice’ could function in similar ways. The goal,
however, is not to dismiss normative theory but rather to argue that we will be better able to
advance global justice by incorporating insights drawn from postcolonial theory.
This paper is about postcolonial theory and global justice, but metaphor will play an impor-
tant role in my account of the difference between the two approaches. It is puzzling that post-
colonial theory plays almost no role in academic discussions of global justice.1 The two
literatures seem to have a number of shared concerns. Normative theorists who write about
global justice are critical of the persistence of global poverty. Their scholarship examines the
sources and extent of our obligations to combat global economic inequality and injustice. Post-
colonial theorists have also elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments
about how to overcome the legacies of domination. Why then is there so little intellectual

∗
Email: [email protected]

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

188 M. Kohn

engagement between scholars committed to these two approaches? In this paper, I will argue that
one of the reasons is that postcolonial critics see universal, abstract concepts as metaphors that
are embedded in problematic narratives. They suggest that these metaphors can have the unin-
tended consequence of undermining the practices that could help make the world more just:
metaphors can unintentionally evoke images of the Global South and its people as primitive,
stagnant, savage, corrupt, incapable, passive, and abject, thereby undermining solidarity and
respect and reinforcing rather than dismantling power relations (Mohanty 1991). This argument
is well known in development studies, but this paper explains its relevance for political theory
(Escobar 1995; Goulet 2006).
My goal is to focus our attention on the rhetorical dimension rather than the philosophical
coherence of normative arguments about global justice. Although I do not emphasize the
strengths of the philosophical approach in this paper, I think that there are considerable strengths.
The ‘global justice’ and ‘postcolonial’ approaches are more compatible than many scholars
realize. Normative theories of global justice have begun to incorporate postcolonial perspec-
tives. This article explains the reasons for drawing on these critical approaches. First, I will
briefly identify the core features of the global justice literature. Next, I will examine the cat-
egories ‘metaphor’ and ‘narrative’ in more detail in order to explain why rhetorical structure
is an important concern of postcolonial political theory. In the third section, I look at the way
that Thomas Pogge’s work has incorporated aspects of this line of critique. I argue that taking
the metaphoric structure of normative concepts seriously does not imply that we need to
reject normative theory altogether. By self-consciously challenging the narratives that enable
these metaphors to function, we can disrupt their unintended effects. Today the term ‘queer’
means something very different than it did a generation ago. In response to critiques advanced
in development studies, government agencies and NGOs have already begun to rethink their use
of images in fundraising campaigns and reports (Kristof 2011). In catalogs from charities such as
World Vision, you no longer see a white savior surrounded by abject Africans. Instead, people
from poor countries are shown administering vaccinations and building houses; they are
depicted as agents as well as beneficiaries of a collective struggle against deprivation. Normative
theory will be more effective at promoting global justice if it pays more attention to the politics
of representation.

Global justice
The global justice literature addresses the following question: what obligations do rich countries
and privileged individuals have toward poor people living in less affluent countries? In his influ-
ential article ‘Famine, Affluence, Morality’ Singer (1972) posed this question and sparked an
ongoing debate about charity, justice, and global poverty (Arneson 2009). In the scholarly lit-
erature on global justice, there are two primary lines of disagreement. The first debate centers
on the implications of moral universalism. Some scholars insist that the principles of universal-
ity and impartiality imply a duty to prevent suffering around the globe (Goodin 1998; Pogge
2008; Shue 1996; Unger 1996), whereas others conclude that justice is a feature of political
institutions and, therefore, is limited in scope (Miller 1995; Nagel 2005; Rawls 2002; Wenar
2003). The second debate explores the feasibility of ending world poverty. Drawing on the
empirical literature, a number of scholars have argued that decades of development aid and
humanitarian assistance have done little to improve the lives of the poorest and may even
have worsened their situation by providing resources to rapacious governments or undermining
local systems of production (Easterly 2006; Fuller 2005; de Waal 1996). Others, including
Singer, insist that the difficulty involved in solving the problem of global poverty is not a legit-
imate reason for ignoring our obligations: instead of giving up, we have to be more thoughtful
 Journal of Global Ethics 189

and creative in trying to overcome the significant barriers to ending deprivation. Pogge (2008)
has argued that there are viable mechanisms for redistributing resources, such as his idea of a
global resources dividend; the problem is the lack of normative commitment and political
will rather than logistical difficulties.
The global justice literature encompasses a wide range of theoretical positions, but there are
also a number of features that most of the works share. The first assumption is materialism or
developmentalism. There is a strong consensus that poverty is characterized by a lack of material
resources and that this lack is a bad thing. In his book Basic Rights, Shue acknowledges that
societies have different conceptions of the good and, therefore, may value things like family,
community, piety, freedom or esthetic excellence more than wealth, but he argues that certain
basic rights such as food, shelter, and physical safety are necessary preconditions for pursuing
any of these diverse goods (1996). Much of the literature on global justice focuses on the protec-
tion of basic rights, and these rights are based on claims about universal human needs such as
food security (Nagel 1979). This position justifies obligations to distant others by relying on a
kind of moral minimalism. It tries to avoid the potentially coercive implications of a more
robust human rights agenda that naturalizes culturally specific norms of behavior. Even the pro-
motion of economic development in order to secure basic material needs is not entirely uncon-
troversial (Escobar 1995). The traditional understanding of development rests on an implied
trajectory of progress from underdevelopment to affluence (Allen and Thomas 2000; Pieterse
2002). This view is hegemonic but by no means universal (Wiarda 1999); for example,
Gandhi criticized Western countries for promoting material prosperity at the expense of more
valuable things such as community, harmony and moral goodness. He argued that materialism,
far from being a universal human goal, is actually a distinctively Western value. According to
Gandhi, the British claimed to be helping India by building railroads and schools when in fact
these things functioned as markers of British superiority and contributed to political domination
rather than real improvement (Gandhi 1997; Nandy 2007).
The global justice literature is also embedded in an analytic normative framework. There two
major strands: utilitarianism (Singer) and Kantianism (Pogge). By a Kantian framework, I mean
to emphasize the central role of autonomous individuals who are capable of using reason to
identify universally binding obligations and acting on moral motivations. The third feature of
the global justice literature is its distinctive perspective. This perspective is quite explicit in
the title of Leif Wenar’s article ‘What We Owe to Distant Others?’ (Wenar 2003, see also
Risse 2005a) Wenar’s article does not explore the identity of the ‘we’ in depth, but it is clear
that ‘we’ has two components, one spatial and one economic. We are ‘the rich’, the people
whose affluence and privilege make it both possible and necessary to reflect on our obligations
to help others. ‘We’ are also defined in opposition to the distant others who are the beneficiaries
of our charity. Distant others are located in ‘the Third World’ and so presumably ‘we’ are people
living in the First World or the Global North. This spatially marked perspective might seem
ironic or even contradictory, since universality is the second defining characteristic of the
global justice literature, but there is no performative contradiction when members of groups,
or citizens of states, use the tools of moral universalism in order to better understand their
moral obligations to others. On one reading, the term, ‘we’ simply refers to the author and
other similarly situated people. Yet there is something troubling about the way that the dichot-
omy between us (the North) and them (the poor in the Third World) runs throughout this litera-
ture and risks naturalizing the categories. ‘The Third World’ is used to describe a place of abject
misery and need (Risse 2005b),2 undermining the intent of postcolonial leaders who coined the
term ‘Third World’ at the 1955 Bandung Conference in order to assert the ideological and pol-
itical independence of newly liberated countries. Many scholars and activists from ‘the Third
World’ avoid the term altogether, whereas others try to reassert its original meaning by
190 M. Kohn

describing it as a place where alternatives to global capitalism are articulated and new forms of
democracy are explored (de Sousa Santos 1998).
In many discussions of global justice, there is little to suggest that ‘we’ might also be the
agents of injustice rather than (potential) saviors. Westerners are also cast in the role of
savior in the central metaphor of the global justice literature, what Scott Wisor calls the
‘shallow pond’ metaphor (Miller 2008, 236; Wisor 2011). This metaphor is invoked repeatedly
by Singer who explained the obligation to combat global hunger in the following terms: ‘. . . if I
am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the
child out’ (1972, 231). This is a powerful rhetorical device, but, as Wisor points out, it is deeply
problematic because it paints a distorting and perhaps counterproductive picture of what ‘rescue’
entails. It also enables affluent people to imagine themselves as saviors who are not in any way
responsible for the child’s peril (2011).
There are, of course, notable exceptions to this way of framing the issue of global poverty.
The most prominent is Thomas Pogge’s influential argument that global poverty could be
reduced by eliminating institutional structures that are actively supported by Western govern-
ments. Pogge also explicitly acknowledges that colonialism played a crucial role in establishing
a global economic system that continues to reproduce rather than mitigate inequality. Many
other articles, however, treat the problem as if the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the
poor were themselves natural phenomena, so that the key moral issue is the extent to which
the rich should ‘sacrifice’ by giving away surplus wealth rather than the legitimacy of the exist-
ing distribution (Wenar 2003, 289– 297).
To summarize, global justice is best understood not as a single normative position but rather
as a debate about the extent of elites’ obligation to combat global poverty. The global justice
literature includes arguments for a range of strategies, including promotion of human rights,
provision of minimal humanitarian assistance, and robust institutional reform; its underlying
philosophical justifications are variously grounded in utilitarianism as well as Kantian thinking.

Metaphor and narrative

The term ‘postcolonial theory’ describes two related approaches to the legacy of colonialism. The
literary/humanist approach emphasizes the cultural legacies of colonialism and explores the
relationship between knowledge and power. The political/economic approach focuses on
the way that colonialism created an enduring global system of inequality (Gandhi 1998).
Young brings these two approaches together in the following definition:
. . . postcolonialism involves first of all the argument that the nations of the three non-western con-
tinents (Africa, Asia, Latin America) are largely in a situation of subordination to Europe and North
America, and in a position of economic inequality. Postcolonialism names a philosophy of activism
that contests that disparity, and so continues in a new way the anti-colonial struggles of the past. It
asserts not just the right of African, Asian, and Latin American peoples to access resources and
material well-being, but also the dynamic power of their cultures, cultures that are now intervening
in and transforming the societies of the west. (2001, 4)
This definition has three key dimensions: it is descriptive, political and normative. It identifies
the structure of inequality, advances political mobilization as the most effective remedy, and
asserts a right to material well-being and cultural recognition.
Many scholars have argued that global inequality is produced and sustained by economic
structures that benefitted early industrializers (Ghosh 2001; Leys 1996; Williams 1944). This
is an important argument and one that is relevant to the literature on global justice, but my
paper draws on the other strand of postcolonial political theory: the critique of moral universal-
ism. Fanon articulated this position in his characteristically vivid manner when he wrote ‘when
 Journal of Global Ethics 191

the native hears the word Western culture, he pulls out a knife’ (2004). For the colonized subjects
of Algeria, enlightenment theories of liberty and equality were not merely unrealized ideals; they
were also cultural markers used to distinguish civilized people from barbarians and to justify pol-
itical domination and economic exploitation. The concept ‘Western culture’ and its component
parts were used as a metaphor for European superiority. How was it possible to use the principle
of freedom to justify political domination or ‘the rule of law’ to justify arbitrary power and
denial of citizenship? In order to answer this question, we must understand ‘freedom’ and the
‘rule of law’ not in terms of their literal meaning but rather in terms of their metaphorical
meaning, which was European superiority. The literal content of freedom contradicts ‘foreign
domination’, but if freedom is a metaphor for European civilization then it becomes consistent.
In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi makes a similar argument. Hind Swaraj is a strident attack on Western
civilization. Not only does Gandhi criticize European domination of India, but he dismisses the
value of the things that the British brought to India, including modern medicine, railroads, and
law courts. Gandhi treats the railroad and the hospital synedochically – the part stands for the
whole and the whole is Western civilization. Gandhi recognizes that Western civilization is
another way of describing British superiority (1997).
According to the cognitive linguist Lakoff, the metaphor is a fairly broad category that is
not confined to linguistic expressions that substitute one image for another. He defines meta-
phor as a structured relationship between a source domain and a target domain (2002). His
early research focused on primary metaphors: in these metaphors, the source domain is some-
thing sensory that is used to describe or understand a target domain that is more conceptual.
Lakoff uses the following examples to illustrate how this works: a movie stinks (smell –
bad); a big night (size – importance); a close relationship (physical to emotion connection);
a clear idea (sight to cognition). Through repeated use, the metaphorical character of these
phrases is forgotten and we use them unconsciously and habitually. Lakoff and his collabor-
ators conclude that these primary metaphors are universal, but there are also more complex
metaphors made up of primary metaphors that are linked through unifying frames, and these
may exhibit a great deal of cultural variation. Love is not a journey in all times and places; it
may be a prison, a rollercoaster, a leap into the unknown (Lakoff and Johnson 2003).
This research shows how metaphors are created when concrete, sensory experience or
images from the source domain structure or describe the target domain. I want to suggest that
the reverse is also possible. Eventually metaphors become so familiar that they come to
appear as self-evident and stable and they can serve as the source domain for a new metaphor
(Derrida 1974). Take for example the use of the visual image of ‘cannibal’ to depict Africans:
this visual metaphor was frequently used in cartoons, magazine illustrations, and even advertis-
ing in the nineteenth century. The metaphor ‘cannibal’ implies a range of characteristics: violent,
bestial, subhuman, uncivilized. As a consequence, the sedimented history of past representations
has become attached to the concept ‘African’ (Mudimbe 1988; Pieterse 1992). Today when
someone uses the term underdeveloped, for example, it could function as a metaphor for
African and still evoke images of cannibalism, savagery, etc. In other words, the relationship
is reversed and the abstract term stands in for the more concrete image.
If these more complex metaphors do not come directly from sensory experience, where do
they come from? I want to suggest that they are produced through narratives. By narratives I
mean the implicit rules, conventions, assumptions, ideas and images that make it possible for
us to predict what will happen next in a story. Some people may find this definition unsatisfying
because it is such a broad term that seems to lack precision, but narrative structure is what
enables the experienced spectator to watch a film and predict what will happen next. For
example, if the spectator is watching an action film and there is a shot of the villain looking
at his adversary’s car and it cuts to the hero’s child leaving the house and walking to the car,
192 M. Kohn

then the spectator fears that there is a bomb in the car that will kill the child. How does the spec-
tator know? Drawing on a repertoire of stock characters and conventional plots, we need only the
faintest of hints to tell us how the story should unfold. Conventions such as the close-up shot are
clues that we have learned how to read. We also read political events similarly: based on the
knowledge acquired through reading of previous events, we expect certain types of characters
to act in certain ways. Of course these conventions can be violated and people can act in unex-
pected ways, but even the unexpected – perhaps particularly the events that deviate from the
script – remind us that there is a script.
Consider the reaction to an event that took place in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks.
Donations poured in from around the world and blood banks had to turn away donors who
wanted to use their own bodies to heal the injured. One act of generosity, however, received par-
ticular attention: the cows. A village of Masai in northern Kenya gave 14 cows to the people of
the USA (Lacey 2002). Why did this gesture set off a media frenzy? I suspect that there were two
distinct dynamics at work. On the one hand, Americans were genuinely touched that distant
others would be moved to help them in the aftermath of a terrible crisis. On the other hand,
the story was newsworthy because of its exceptional and even absurd character. It seemed
almost farcical because it reversed the established script in which Americans come to the aid
of Africans, the perennial victims of violence, famine, and natural disaster. Cows and Masai
together suggest ‘primitive society’, a place that receives help and does not give it (Wainaina
2005). The initiative was organized by Kimeli Naiyomah, a medical student from the Masai
village who had attended Stanford University on a scholarship. Was the gift a sly suggestion
that power relations could be reversed?
This story helps illustrate the postcolonial theory approach to global justice. Postcolonial
theory draws attention to the structures, histories, and power dynamics that are not always
apparent in abstract theories of justice. The story of the ‘9/11’ cows forces us to think about
the way that the meaning of events and actions is informed by familiar narratives. It reminded
me of the analysis advanced by Mutua in his provocative article ‘Savages, Victims and Saviors:
The Metaphor of Human Rights (2002, 10)’. Mutua argues that ‘the human rights movement is
marked by a damning metaphor. The grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext that
depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims and saviors, on
the other.’ According to Mutua, the narrative of human rights depicts Western countries and
non-governmental organizations as saviors. People living in less developed countries are cast
in one of two roles: passive, helpless victims who must be protected from their own pathologi-
cal culture, or barbaric savages who are responsible for violence and corruption. These meta-
phors are a way of framing contemporary politics that has the unintended consequence of
dehumanizing the victims by portraying them as not fully capable of agency. It is tempting
to read the story of the 9/11 cattle as a counterexample, a reminder that the positions of
donor and recipient, victim and savior, moral agent and object, are not immutable. I take a
more pessimistic view, however: I think that the reversal reveals the power of the underlying
metaphor.
In her essay ‘How Much Is Enough Mr. Thomas?’ Neera Chandhoke raises a similar concern
about the relationship between moral universalism and narrative subtext. Chandhoke points out
that Thomas Pogge’s goal of fostering global justice by convincing privileged people of their
moral obligation to distant others might be subverted by the way that he also reinforces the dis-
tinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, Western saviors and Third World victims (Chandhoke 2010).
This is another variant of the metaphor argument. Chandhoke suggests that Pogge’s analytic cat-
egories obscure the way that people in developing countries also have the obligation and
capacity to decrease poverty and deprivation. Chandhoke’s essay is one of the very few that
brings postcolonial theory into a dialog with normative political philosophy.
 Journal of Global Ethics 193

The ‘metaphor’ critique made by Mutua and echoed by Chandhoke is an iteration of the
strand of postcolonial theory that was introduced by Said in Orientalism (1979). This strand
focuses our attention on the discursive frame rather than the philosophical analysis of global
justice. Postcolonial critics do not deny that the privileged have a moral responsibility to mitigate
the deprivation of the underprivileged, but they are worried that the way of describing this obli-
gation has real political consequences. Some of these consequences became vividly clear to me
when the issue came up in a discussion with my seven-year-old son. I mentioned that I was think-
ing about going to South Africa for a conference and he said that I could not get there because
there were no roads in Africa and moreover I would be hungry because there was little food.
I asked how he had reached this conclusion, and he told me that a public television program
about famine in rural Africa and some discussion at school about raising money for UNICEF
had left him with the impression that Africa was a place of utter destitution and misery.
Unfortunately, we cannot simply dismiss this as childish naiveté. As Pieterse vividly demon-
strates in his book White on Black, these representations have a long history and circulate in mul-
tiple media including advertising, literature, film, news, government reports, and solicitations for
charitable donations (1992). Africa is typically depicted as either savage (wild animals, canni-
bals, tribal warriors) or abject (famine, disease). During the 1950s and 1960s, a new genre of
postcolonial satire emerged in which Africans were portrayed as savages who were incapable
of self-government and childishly wasteful of international aid. For example, one cartoon fea-
tures ‘Ministers of a newly independent African country (who have come) to spend a credit
of $20 million’. They are depicted buying lingerie, ski equipment, and record players while
showing no interest in agricultural tools (Pieterse 1992, 100). Other cartoons portrayed Africans
in newly independent countries as lazy, greedy, uncivilized, and ignorant of modern technology.
In a satirical essay entitled ‘How to Write About Africa’, the writer and playwright
Binyavanga Wainaina draws attention to the hegemonic character of these images. In the
essay, Binyavanga advises his audience
Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee
camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their
eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can
have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good . . . Also be
sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and cares for your well-
being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around
your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he
carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic inter-
national celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction). (Wainaina 2005, 93)
It is through these types of narratives that knowledge of Africa is produced.
The point is not only that these narratives and images are partial, inadequate, or distorted, but
also that they produce and reinforce relations of domination. They reinforce the identities of
Western saviors and Third World victims or savages. They harm efforts to achieve global
justice by delegitimizing local forms of knowledge in poor areas and undermining the mutual
respect necessary for collaboration and deliberation. Research in Development Studies is full
of examples of projects that failed because they did not take into account the needs, interests,
constraints and cultural practices of the people that they were meant to help. A program in
Zambia failed to build urban infrastructure because it expected already overworked women to
do arduous physical labor in exchange for food rations. A school nutrition program in
Armenia failed because many schools lacked running water, which was necessary in order to
turn powder into milk (Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1996; Narayan 2000, 139 – 140). What
these examples and many similar cases have in common is that they presume that outsiders
have superior expertise, which enables them to design programs without consulting the
194 M. Kohn

people that they are supposed to help. Some small-scale projects are merely ineffective but other
more ambitious projects may actually undermine viable existing systems of production, distri-
bution, and mutual aid (Scott 1998). These failures have multiple causes, but the dominant nar-
rative of Western saviors and hapless Third World beneficiaries makes it more difficult to find
solutions because it is delegitimizes the insights of the people who are most directly affected.
The normative argument that the rich have an obligation to help the global poor is convin-
cing, but the rhetorical structure reinforces a hierarchical relationship. In a society that values
economic development, the term ‘rich’ means more successful, more capable, more worthy.
This has consequences for the way in which aid is delivered. When this hierarchical approach
is unquestioned, it is more likely that NGOs will divert material and economic support from
more effective local strategies toward less effective paternalist ones. Exhorting the rich to ‘sacri-
fice’ for the poor positions the rich as rational, moral agents and the poor as passive, inert, and
lacking moral agency. A narrative which depicts the privileged as sacrificing their own prosper-
ity in order to save the underprivileged could function ideologically to support ideas about
Western superiority, thereby justifying more authoritarian forms of global governance and inter-
vention. In this last section of this paper, I want to consider whether this line of postcolonial cri-
tique is relevant to contemporary theories of global justice.

Postcolonial global justice

Thus far, this paper has described the broad outlines of two different approaches to global
inequality: those of mainstream, analytic global justice theory, and postcolonial theory. My
goal has been to identify and differentiate two rich and varied scholarly communities that
seldom engage one another. There are, of course, occasional exceptions. One of these exceptions
is Thomas Pogge’s ‘Response to the Critics’ which discusses several papers that draw on post-
colonial approaches. Responding to Chandhoke’s synoptic version of the metaphor argument
and to Charles Mills’ critique of the abstraction of ideal theory (Mills 2005), Pogge’s answer
to the postcolonial critique of global justice consists of four main arguments. First, he claims
that he does not make the achievement of global justice the exclusive responsibility of people
in affluent countries (Pogge 2010a, 208 – 209). His work is meant to address affluent people
everywhere (not just in affluent countries) and his solutions emphasize the importance of demo-
cratic institutions, which implies that the poor themselves must ultimately be the agents of
change. He stresses the responsibility of the rich and powerful because they constrain poor
people’s ability to secure a more fair distribution. Second, Pogge explains that he addresses
the affluent because he is an expert on the normative values that they profess to share,
whereas he feels uncomfortable speaking for the poor (2010a, 209). In response to Mills’ argu-
ment that he pays insufficient attention to ‘historical context’, Pogge responds that the history of
colonialism, slavery, genocide and conquest is the centerpiece of his argument that the affluent
have a negative duty not to profit from injustice (2010a, 207). The one element of the postcolo-
nial critique that he rejects is the suggestion that meaningful global justice would require deep
structural change that would fundamentally modify the world order. He insists that ‘minor modi-
fications of the global economic and political order’ would suffice to strengthen human rights but
acknowledges that mitigating global economic inequality would be a much bigger project.
Over the past decade, Pogge’s philosophical account of global responsibility has been fairly
consistent, but the narrative and rhetorical dimensions of his analysis have shifted in important
ways. In World Poverty and Human Rights Pogge assumes that terms like ‘universal justice’ and
‘democracy’ and are neutral categories and repeatedly describes the leaders of poor countries as
‘authoritarian predators’. Rich countries, despite their shared culpability for world poverty, are
not described as ‘predators’ (Pogge 2008, 159 – 171). But in the new introduction to a collection
 Journal of Global Ethics 195

of previously published essays, Pogge makes a startling comparison between Nazis and World
Bank officials: he suggests that the World Bank officials who revised the Millenium goals on
poverty reduction are similar to the German bureaucrats who planned the final solution at the
Wannsee Conference (2010b, 4). Moreover, Pogge argues that citizens of affluent countries,
like Germans in the Nazi period, are complicit in terrible injustice (Pogge 2010b, 2). He
notes that most people will not be convinced by these analogies. Unlike the Germans who
lost World War II and were forced to confront their own responsibility, citizens of the Global
North are winners, and winners are not forced to reconsider the narratives of progress, mutual
benefit, or desert that legitimize global inequalities. Pogge makes an even more startling
point, one that hints at the legitimizing function of moral reason itself: ‘The central lie, the foun-
dation of the others, is that we are moral people, who care about our moral responsibilities’
(2010b, 3). Is he endorsing the postcolonial critique of universal, normative theory? The text
is ambivalent. The subsequent sentences emphasize the contradiction between our theories of
moral responsibility and our actions which are utterly indifferent to these moral demands.
This is the familiar idea that the theory is correct, but the practice falls short. Pogge’s initial
claim, however, can be read in a somewhat different way. He argues that the moral superiority
of the privileged is not only ‘the central lie’ but also ‘the foundation of the other (lies)’. This is
the heart of what I am calling the postcolonial critique. Normative theories of global justice, even
ones that are philosophically convincing, may reinforce this sense of moral superiority, which in
turn legitimates potentially oppressive political power.3
Scholars want to believe that political philosophy is the last place to find demeaning descrip-
tions of non-Western cultures. Far from reinforcing dominant representations of Africa by
depicting a rich array of stock characters – the warm hearted mother, the starving refugee,
the evil militia member – analytic political philosophy contains no characters at all. Other
than occasional passing references to figures such as ‘cotton farmers in Mali’ or statistics
about life in sub-Saharan Africa, there is little imagery or narration (Risse 2005b, 349). Norma-
tive theorists see this as the strength of the abstract approach. Today ‘we’ (the wealthy) may be
living in North America and Europe but in the future the wealthy may be in China and the struc-
ture of the argument remains exactly the same.
Some works of political philosophy do explicitly evoke stereotypical representations of
savages, victims or saviors, but these are more the exception than the rule.4 In ‘Welfare and
Wealth, Poverty and Justice in Today’s World’, Narveson writes,
The governments there (in Africa) see government as an opportunity to maximize the number or size
of palaces, possession by the elites of Mercedes Benzes, size and lethality of armies, and torture
chambers in the hands of the governors, with any thought of the welfare of their citizens entirely
at the level of the rhetoric employed in the speeches they occasionally make at solemn international
gatherings in which they make a plea for still more handouts from the wealthy countries. (2005, 337)
The contemptuous tone, the stock imagery, and the hasty generalization about a wide range of
different countries are characteristic of ‘the imagery of Eurocentrism’ (Pieterse 1992). But the
point is not the accuracy or inaccuracy, since it may be true of some governments in places
like Somalia and Burundi and not true of others like Botswana and Mauritius, but rather the
way that this description seems familiar and plausible because it is part of a broader narrative
(Grovogui 2001).
The problem is not only depictions that explicitly pathologize Africa and African govern-
ments, but rather the way that other essays that present reasonable reservations about the effec-
tiveness of aid and prevalence of corruption end up unintentionally evoking the same images.5
When African governments appropriate foreign aid it is figured as corruption, but when NGOs
spend half of their considerable incomes on fundraising and high administrative salaries it is con-
sidered legitimate (Silverstein 2011). In the abstract to his article, Shmuel Nili summarizes his
196 M. Kohn

argument like this: ‘We, the citizens of liberal democracies through our elected governments,
ought to boycott severely oppressive regimes for the sake of our own moral integrity simply
in order to stop being complicit in what is effectively massive scale armed robbery’ (Nili
2011, 103). Even if the conclusion is correct, the rhetoric is troubling. In the context of a litera-
ture structured by the opposition between rich-liberal-democracies and poor countries, the term
‘armed robbery’ implies that the leaders of poor countries are violent criminals. International
mining companies are not described as armed robbers, despite considerable evidence that
they use violence to gain control over natural resources.6 Moreover, this narrative positions
the governments of wealthy countries such as the USA, as ‘world police’, which in turn legiti-
mizes the violence undertaken to carry out this role. Second, the term ‘complicit’ suggests that
the primary responsibility lies with ‘oppressive regimes’ when often multinational companies
are driving resource extraction and the local governments are induced to cooperate.
The problem with this strand of postcolonial critique is that is seems to provide no solution to
the problem of global poverty and injustice. Moreover, by problematizing arguments that urge
rich people to fulfill their obligations to the global poor, it seems ‘de-moralizing’ and paralyzing,
hardly an appealing result, given the urgency of the problem. Following Young (2007), I believe
that it is legitimate to address the privileged and demand that they (we) take responsibility for
injustice. Is it possible to advance a philosophical argument that seeks to convince the privileged
of their obligations without invoking a rhetoric that demeans or dehumanizes the poor? I think it
is, but it requires greater attention to the power of metaphor and narrative. First, scholars can
explicitly challenge dominant representations and complicate conventional wisdom. For
example, in her article ‘Duties of Justice, Duties of Material Aid’ Nussbaum opens with the fam-
iliar statistics about the disparity between life expectancy in rich and poor countries, but then she
notes that literacy rates in some developing countries are extremely high even in comparison
with wealthy countries (2000, 176). This short caveat helps ensure that poor countries and
poor people are not depicted as utterly abject, childlike, and dysfunctional. If every article
about global justice included some reference to local initiatives to combat poverty or used
some examples that complicated the story of predatory governments and dependent victims,
then a very different picture would gradually emerge.
Another, more robust way of rewriting the narrative subtext of the global justice literature
would be to think about moral obligation as an obligation to support political mobilization by
the underprivileged (Deveaux 2013). Nancy Fraser and Carol Gould have defended this
approach (Gould 2004; Fraser 2010). These political activities include attempts to form labor
unions, to pass living wage laws, to organize fair-trade co-ops, and to use international tribunals
to hold multinational corporations accountable for labor conditions, environmental costs, and
outright violence. Instead of asking what ‘we’ should sacrifice for distant others, we could
ask whether our very privilege might itself be a product of injustice. Pogge has done this by
drawing attention to the role that international institutions play in reinforcing global inequalities,
but it is possible to go even farther. He rightly criticizes international institutions for recognizing
illegitimate regimes that maintain power by borrowing money and controlling the natural
resources of their territories. The problem is that this still identifies rapacious indigenous gov-
ernments as the primary agents of exploitation and faults the international community primarily
for acquiescing. A very different picture emerges if we emphasize the way that multinational
corporations such as mining companies use violence and intimidation to gain concessions and
disrupt labor organization (Forst 2005). Not only are these companies not sanctioned in their
home countries, places like the USA and Canada, but they are actively supported by the govern-
ment and their income is taxed in order to support welfare programs in wealthy countries. Some-
times wealthy countries such as the USA intervene in the domestic politics of poor countries in
order to advance the interests of their multinational corporations. For example, documents
 Journal of Global Ethics 197

released through Wikileaks seem to show that the USA pressured Haiti to reverse legislation
increasing the minimum wage for garment workers, even though the existing minimum was
not a subsistence wage (Coughlin and Ives 2011). These stories paint a very different picture
of the predators. ‘We’ are no longer innocent bystanders who happen upon a drowning child.
Narratives exert their power through repetition. When you see a film that begins with ‘boy
meets girl’ and develops through ‘boy loses girl’, there is a strong expectation that the boy will
get the girl in the end. Yet storytellers sometimes challenge and subvert these conventions by
changing perspective or disrupting the narrative arc. When done well, this allows us to see
things that we take for granted and think about them in new ways. The global justice literature
could do more to confound the narrative structure of victims, predators, and saviors. One alterna-
tive is the language of international solidarity, which is employed by the World Social Forum
(WSF). The WSF endorses the normative claim that moral concern extends beyond national
borders and implies obligations to distant others. Yet, in their reworking of this obligation,
distant others do not remain both distant and other. Solidarity connotes common responsibility
among members of a group. At least at the rhetorical level, it suggests a relationship of mutuality
and reciprocity rather than a hierarchical relationship of donor and beneficiary. In practice this
translates into demands for more democratic control over international financial institutions,
regulation of multinational corporations, social rights and environmental sustainability (Steger
and Wilson 2012).
Pogge has moved in this direction by suggesting that the privileged contribute to global
inequality, but the next step involves greater consideration of the perspectives and agency of
the underprivileged (Deveaux 2013). Normative theorists might respond that the line of postco-
lonial critique advanced in this paper is not really a criticism at all since it is fully compatible
with their own approach to global justice. In fact there is more common ground than scholars
from both camps usually realize, which means that more interaction could be beneficial for
both sides. If language is deeply and inevitably metaphoric, then there is no stable, absolute div-
ision between abstract analytic philosophy and historical, contextual critical theories. Of course,
there are different writing genres, strategies, and conventions and these have yielded distinctive
insights into global poverty. Each traveler may have taken a different road, but if her goal is to
understand the wood, then she should learn from the insights gained on different paths.

Notes on contributor
Margaret Kohn is a professor of political theory at the University of Toronto. Her main research interests
are urbanism, critical theory, the history of political thought, and colonialism. She is the author of three
books, including the prize winning Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Cornell, 2003)
and Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (Routledge, 2004). Her most recent
book Political Theories of Decolonization (with Keally McBride) was published by Oxford University
Press in 2011. She has also published scholarly articles in journals such as Political Theory, Journal of Poli-
tics, Theory & Event, Polity, Constellations, Perspectives on Politics and Dissent.

Notes
1. Some exceptions include Edkins (1996), Jaggar (2005), Dallmayr (2003) and Tully (2009).
2. For example Risse argues, ‘The global order should be credited with advances over the historically
normal state of misery . . .’ (2005b, 349 –376).
3. For example, Martha Nussbaum suggests that the mechanisms for promoting global justice include
‘global economic policies, agencies and agreements, including the World Bank, the IMF, and various
trade agreements’ and ‘multinational corporations, to which we shall assign certain responsibilities
for promoting human capabilities for promoting human capabilities in the nations in which they do
198 M. Kohn

business’. Ironically, many of the institutions that are most responsible for exacerbating global inequal-
ities are assigned the task of dismantling them (Nussbaum 2006, 314, see also Rao 2010, 53).
4. Nili explains that indigenous elites ‘use their augmented riches, power and brutality to further secure
their control over a population kept in abject conditions’ (2011). Maurice Cranston argues that govern-
ments in Asia, Africa, and South America cannot be expected to provide social security because the
people in those places ‘multiply so swiftly’ (Cranston 1983, 13).
5. For example, in his article Magnus Reitburger mentions ‘corrupt regimes’ (in poor countries) five times.
He also emphasizes the culpability of ‘corrupt politicians in the Third World’ (2008, 381).
6. For an overview of dozens of disputes between Canadian mining companies and indigenous commu-
nities, see www.miningwatch.ca. Some recent conflicts include repression of protestors at the Marlin
Mine in Guatemala (owned by the Canadian company Goldwatch); on Christmas Eve (2011) Indonesian
police attacked citizens who were protesting against a mining concession given to the Australian
company Arc Exploration. Thirty people were shot and three killed. http://www.abc.net.au/news/
2012-01-04/indon-mining-protesters/3757390?section=business.

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