Social Exclusion, Global Poverty, and Scales of (In)Justice: Rethinking Law and Poverty in a Globalizing World

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Pages: 452-462
• Published date: 16 August 2019
• Citation: (2011) 22 Stell LR 452
• Date: 16 August 2019
• Author: Nancy Fraser

452

SOCIAL EXCLUSION, GLOBAL POVERTY, AND

SCALES OF (IN)JUSTICE: RETHINKING LAW

AND POVERTY IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD

Nancy Fraser

Henry A and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, New School for Social

Research; Einstein Fellow, Berlin; Holder of Chair in Social Justice, College d’études

mondiales, Paris

1 Introduction

Most discussions of law and poverty are pitched at the national level. Tacitly

presuming what I call “the Westphalian frame”, they env ision the arena for

addressing povert y as a modern territorial state. As a resu lt, they imagine the

victims of poverty as citizens of a bounde d political com munity. Likewise,

they picture the law that might help to rectify poverty as national law. Finally,

they see the agency that might effect red ress as a modern n ational state with

sovereignty over a delimited ter ritory.1

These assu mptions are intuitively plausible. In the modern er a, anti-

poverty act ivists have in fact chiey sought redress within bounded political

communities that have been understood in Westphalian terms. And legal

advocates for the poor have mainly focused on whatever resources they

could nd i n the constitutions of such com munities, e specially resources for

realising the social rights of member citi zens. To the exte nt that legal efforts

to mitigate poverty have achieved results, moreover, they have done so by

mobilising national law to compel action f rom national states on behalf of

national citizens. Thus, the Westphalian frame has a measure of real-world

traction. No wonder, then, th at it is common ly used to frame discussions of

poverty and law.

Nevertheless, t he Westphalian fra ming of poverty and law is problematic

in a global izing world. Its con stitutive assumptions ar e belied by the

increasingly salient fact of “global poverty”. That expression names modes of

impoverishment whose cau ses and manifestations cannot be located withi n a

single territorial state. Generated by transborder processes, the harms suffered

by “ the global po or” largely esc ape the pa rameters of national law and the

control of national states. To locat e them within the Westphalian frame is

in fact to misframe them. With the picture cropped to exclude transnat ional

vectors of domination, that framing obscures the offshore sources of the

poverty that cur rently aficts many in the “global South”. Channelling the

claims of the global poor into t he domestic legal arenas of states that lack the

capacity to redress them, it deprives them of the ability to challenge some

1 For a fuller account of “the Westphal ian frame” see N Fraser “Ref raming Justice in a Globa lizing World”

(2005) 36 New Left Review 69 69-88, repr inted in N Fraser Scales of Justice: Reim agining Political Space

in a Globalizing World (2008)

(2011) 22 Stell LR 452

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