Transnationalism

Abstract

This chapter examines a transnational conception of global justice. Transnationalism is distinctive in that it recognizes a plurality of contexts of justice¹ beyond the state and holds that genuinely traranational² relations — that is, relations beyond the state that involve at least one public or private non-state agent — may constitute such contexts. Theorists of transnationalist justice include those like Forst (2001,2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2011, 2012) and Fraser (2007, 2008), who explicitly adopt the label ‘transnational justice’, as well as R. Miller (2010) and perhaps O’Neill (1991, 2000, 2004) and Young (2007). All these political thinkers pay great attention to the particularities of the fact of political and economic globalization when theorizing about global justice. They emphasize the plurality of distinct types of contexts of justice within and beyond the state, ranging from the traditionally theorized relations between states and their citizens to those among transnational corporations and those between supranational institutions and states. A theory of global justice, they argue, must express sensitivity to these several kinds of social relations by allowing for a plurality of context-specific principles of justice.