Decolonising Justice: Vernacular Justice Cultures Beyond the Liberal Order

‘Justice’ serves as a key mobilising frame for a range of historical and contemporary struggles against inequality, violence, exploitation, and dispossession across the globe. While justice calls and claims are increasingly clamorous and ubiquitous, the realisation of justice remains elusive, not least for those placed at the intersections of multiple marginalities across the globe. In recent decades, scholarship has shown that not only is access to justice for the subaltern severely compromised, but often, justice mechanisms serve to buttress the very oppressive systems and logics from which marginal subjects seek refuge. The disproportionate incarceration of racialised communities and the licensing of violent, extractive and oppressive capital and political forces by formal justice systems make clear the urgent need for a fundamental reformatting of our understanding of and approach to justice. This project offers ‘vernacular justice cultures’ as a starting point for this crucial undertaking.
Abolition scholarship has established that the solution to justice failures does not lie in incremental or even substantive reform. Changes to and within the structures/strictures of the existing justice order simply entrench its power and legitimacy, ultimately expanding its capacity to inflict harm on the most marginal. Instead, abolitionists call for a set of intellectual and political tools with which to imagine and enact justice otherwise. Despite the dominance and seeming inevitability of the contemporary justice order, subaltern communities have long histories and rich cultures of thinking and doing justice in ways that exceed/disrupt/displace this order. Nyay samitis in India, healing justice practices in South Africa, and transformative justice efforts in the UK are just some examples of thinking and doing justice differently, drawing on and responding to context-specific epistemologies and ontologies. These justice-alternatives that I call ‘vernacular justice cultures’ employ diverse conceptual and literal vocabularies to offer fundamentally distinct ways of imagining and enacting justice.
Vernacular justice cultures, however, encounter powerful forces of erasure and delegitimisation, and are systematically sidelined and maligned in cementing the hegemony of the dominant justice order. Under conditions of accelerating authoritarianism, de-democratisation, colonial occupation and extermination across the globe, it is ever more important to access, protect, and strengthen these banished, dissident justice knowledges and cultures. In response, this project seeks to produce a transnational empirical and conceptual account of vernacular justice cultures, studying, amplifying and strengthening subaltern approaches to justice beyond the dominant (liberal) imaginary.
Working with movements and researchers from subaltern communities in India, South Africa and the UK, the project offers a transnational synthesis of vernacular justice cultures through the translation of literal and conceptual justice vocabularies across diverse contexts, towards the transformation of dominant justice ideas, processes and practices. Focusing on three distinct but related registers of justice – (i) gender and sexual justice (ii) caste/racial justice and (iii) economic and ecological justice- the project insists on an intersectional approach to decolonizing justice. Building a transnational Community of Knowledge and Practice (CoKP) to connect, strengthen, and amplify the claims of subaltern movements and enabling cross-learning on frameworks of and approaches to justice across three diverse contexts, as well as through the active engagement of policymakers and multilateral networks, the project will help create the conditions for justice to be meaningfully defined, accessed and realised by some of those most excluded from its contemporary institutions and practices.