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.
The world is assumed to be formally decolonised. But can one legitimately assume that the existing social, political, cultural, and economic power relations are completely free from their colonial past? If colonialism continues to shape the present day, to what extent does postcolonial intellectual and political discourse on subalternity relate to these colonial continuities? How would the replication of originally Western models such as the nation, the modern state, and nationalism shape the power hierarchies and resultant conflicts? What are the implications of these structures for building peace?
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.
