In the form of a dialogue, this piece explores the diverse and contested meanings of justice, and how these meanings shift when justice is understood as a collective and grassroots endeavour. It foregrounds the role of emotions in shaping concepts of justice, and frames people’s justice as a situated, relational practice that operates across multiple scales, drawing together different knowledges and ways of feeling.
This entry aims to shed light on inter-subaltern hierarchies as a conceptual framework for examining conflict-prone power relations within the postcolonial political space. While postcolonial and decolonial studies have revealed enduring colonial legacies in global polity formation, they have somewhat overlooked hierarchical power relations among historico-social groups and political entities. Inter-subaltern hierarchies disentangle the West/non-West dichotomy and provide insight into conflict-prone hierarchies stemming from colonial continuities in nation- and state-formation.
Beyond the state-centric categories of war/peace, the ongoing genocide against Indigenous and African-descendent populations on the continent which Lélia Gonzalez renamed ‘Améfrica Ladina’ – recognised neither as a civil war nor as an international conflict – calls for methods of analysis which respond to what and whom has been excluded from the debate as a condition of possibility for its reproduction. By means of transnational and diasporic perspectives – which neither begin nor end at state borders and limits, nor rely on universal or particular/relative decrees – it effectively repositions inherited Eurocentric categories for thinking about violence towards instead relational accounts of systems of conflictivity.
