For critical geographies of human rights1

Viable is what can be walked, which is passable, or offers no obstacles. Affirming the viability of something requires the use of a synonymous expression: "executable". That is, of something that can be accomplished. I consider, at the outset, that the definition of the frameworks of a world government, structured by means of a Constitution that embraces the universal-singular, in multicultural-national pluralism, based on this form of Greater Law on the dignity of the person and on the principle of maintaining the planetary quality of life, is both a utopian reference in the condition of none at all and, at least, salutary exercise of a philosophical-conceptual nature of something that may materialize, at least partially, as a translation and fulfillment of the desire for the existence of an effective integrated cosmopolitanism to the reality of an earthly republic of peaceful coexistence between extreme differences and maximum equality, in an environment of harmonious Gaia where the functioning of a World Constitutional Court would be one of the central requirements. Concretely, the realization of the "minimum possible" for the tenuous configuration of a formally constitutionalized world government would demand the solution of the most complex of questions of an ethical-legal nature: would humanity be able to form a consensus on the need for a pact that faces the needs for institutional solutions that affirm the preponderance of human dignity, a founding value of a global legal-constitutional order and of a State model that, we conjecture, would surpass or even deny the traditional notions of the concept to present itself as a stable planetary political-legal unit and geocratically organized? TRANSLATION

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019

The term critical geographies of human rights refers to the idea that law, society, geography, and injustice are mutually constitutive. This article proposes one possible theoretical framework for analyzing critical geographies of human rights, drawing from scholarship in critical human geography, sociolegal studies, and public international law. The article uses a case study regarding the Rohingya population of Myanmar to analyze how this theoretical approach works in practice, asking how narratives about the term Rohingya are built into, and reinforced by, legal definitions of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship. It argues that the situation of the Rohingya illustrates the international legal dimensions of material injustice while showing how human rights discourse is part of ongoing geopolitical dynamics. Examining the situation of the Rohingya thus provides a way to understand how critical geographies of human rights can be used to analyze the relationship between law, geography, and injustice.

Progress in Human Geography, 2023

This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justifying why actions are right or wrong often relies on appeals to high-order principles, such as the common good. But this is not always the case, as this report shows by identifying an ethics of anti-oppression that relies instead on struggles against individual and social harms and the conditions that generate them. Through resistance, ethics of anti-oppression also shift the terms of normative justification across a range of considerations within geography and beyond it, from refugees and asylum seekers to food production and blockades against extractive infrastructure.

Geography Compass, 2022

Justice has long been central to geographic research but attention to the concept itself has been less explicitly theorized within the discipline. This article specifically traces the ways in which justice has been theorized within human geography. The review identifies commonalities among justice applications within geography, suggesting a shift beyond distributive and ideal theories of justice toward those explicating injustices coming more from bottom‐up approaches. At the same time, it identifies the tendency of geographers to approach the concept of justice through normative‐political approaches rather than normative‐analytical justifications of socio‐spatial phenomena. The paper illustrates the value of both approaches to justice theorizing but cautions that geographers should continue to justify the use of the concept within their work to avoid attenuating it. In ending, the paper illustrates how justice‐oriented geographers can continue to identify why justice is central to ...

Abstract: The human rights vocabulary is indeed a potent power in political life but it is also deeply contested. From claims to the effect that human rights are alien to certain cultures to allegations that they reflect hegemonic imposition of values, human rights are fraught with conflict. There is hence a need to join in advancing the cause of human rights by making the case for them as intellectually compelling as one can.

Progress in Human Geography, 2002

This paper addresses the dilemma of how easy it is to talk and write about human geographies of ethics and justice compared to the difficulties of living out those geographies in our everyday life practices. If radical ideas and radical practices are to go hand in hand, we need to address the apparent inability to retain a critical political edge in human geography. The paper comments on new readings of moral and ethical geographies, noting Marc Augé's distinction between a sense of the other and a sense for the other, and arguing that any goal in human geography for developing an emotional, connected and committed sense for the other may necessitate a prompting of the moral imagination which includes political/ethical/spiritual constellations of issues such as charity, agape and evil. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Melissa Orlie, the paper emphasizes imaginations of power that recognize 'evil', the crisis of the citizen-subject, and the recovery of political enthusiasms for 'invisible powers'. It envisions a human geography in which living ethically and acting politically can be essentially intertwined with a sense for the other in a sensitive, committed and active approach to the subject. This entails both a continuing engagement in collective political action against ordered evil, and taking responsibility for what we have been made to be and for who we are becoming.

Antipode, 2009

This paper throws down a challenge to radical geography and invites a selection of leading geographers to respond. It proposes that radical or critical geography cannot escape normative foundations in terms of some conception of the human good or flourishing, and that this is not necessarily at odds with the descriptive and explanatory aims of social science. Various attempts to define and justify critical thought without such a conception are shown to be deficient, and incapable of distinguishing oppression from well-being. Objections that such a project will be subjective, ethnocentric, essentialist and implicitly authoritarian are discussed and rejected. Normative thinking needs to go beyond liberal concern with freedom, to address what Sen and Nussbaum term "capabilities"-the range of things people need to be able to have and do to flourish. The power of this kind of normative thinking is illustrated by reference to examples from development studies. The paper concludes with some basic questions for radical geographers.

This paper throws down a challenge to radical geography and invites a selection of leading geographers to respond. It proposes that radical or critical geography cannot escape normative foundations in terms of some conception of the human good or flourishing, and that this is not necessarily at odds with the descriptive and explanatory aims of social science. Various attempts to define and justify critical thought without such a conception are shown to be deficient, and incapable of distinguishing oppression from well-being. Objections that such a project will be subjective, ethnocentric, essentialist and implicitly authoritarian are discussed and rejected. Normative thinking needs to go beyond liberal concern with freedom, to address what Sen and Nussbaum term " capabilities " —the range of things people need to be able to have and do to flourish. The power of this kind of normative thinking is illustrated by reference to examples from development studies. The paper concludes with some basic questions for radical geographers.

Environment and Planning A, 2007

Investigating the geographies of justice movements The papers presented in this theme issue of Environment and Planning A investigate the geographies of justice movements in theory and practice. The aim is to provide readers with (1) new insights, in general, into the spatial constitution of social movements, and (2) more specifically an attempt to link traditional interest in social and spatial justice among geographers with the recent wave of research on new social movements. The collection offers a foundation for further theoretical and empirical enquiry at the creative interface between geography, social and spatial justice, and social movement scholarship. The papers have their origins in special sessions of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Denver (2005). Geographers have long displayed an interest in issues concerning social and spatial justice, while conspicuous in their relative absence are systematic attempts among geographers to grapple with social movements. Following the radical turn of the 1970s, under the intellectual leadership of David Harvey after Social Justice and the City (1973), geographers have sought research agendas that centralize questions of social, spatial, economic, and environmental justice (and as a consequence injustice). Rooted primarily but not exclusively in structuralist and, in some cases, historicalmaterialist epistemologies, a long tradition that survives today among a broad array of poststructuralist approaches has emphasized structuralist explanations of injustices that play down the explanatory power of agency. The relative lack of attention within geography to political agency of social movements in tackling injustices at a variety of scales rests partly on the continuing influence of structural perspectives. More specifically, work on the political economy of neoliberalization and the structuration of scale in contemporary neostructural human geography (eg Brenner, 2004; Brenner and Theodore, 2002) has originally been associated with conceptions of social movements placed in the context of political-economic and institutional terrains that are socially structured and reproduced by patterned, bounded, and more constrained forms of political agency. It is only more recently that some geographers have begun to work across the analytical registers of political-economy and social-movement approaches. Recent geographical inroads into the social-movement literature herald a mounting challenge to this impasse in the context of globalization and transnational political action. Over the last decade or so, various contributions to the geographical literature have assessed the role of space within collective political mobilization by flirting with poststructural theories. Some of the most important examples include Barnett and Low's (2004) efforts to spatialize questions of citizenship, the state, and democracy, and how spatial concepts of territoriality, public space, and the city make democratic polities possible in the wider frame of globalization. Sharp et al (2000) and Herod and Wright (2002) analyze processes of power and resistance from a novel confrontation of political economy and poststructuralism, while Herod (1998; 2001) focuses on the geographical dilemmas facing trade unions in the globalizing economy. Routledge's (1993) book is the first substantial attempt to link the geographical and sociological literatures on social movements, integrating poststructural theory, place analysis, and new social-movement theory to analyze nonviolent social movements in India. Miller (2000; 2004) presents the first comprehensive attempt to bring together the spatial constitution of social movements and in turn how Guest editorial

2008

7 Résumé L'applicabilité locale des droits humains: une approche méthodologique 7