Description
This paper discusses the value of African ubuntu thought for the global justice debate. As one of the major fields of discussion in political philosophy, political theory and IR, global justice lacks engagement with thinkers and texts outside of Europe and North America. While global justice is a field with an explicit global outlook, it is in no way a global debate: scholars at the centre of disciplinary theoretical debates do not hear or centre non-Western voices. Prevailing views about the ethics and politics of global justice reflect and continue to reinforce problematic ontological assumptions and unquestioned epistemic privileges aligned with knowledge- and norm-entrepreneurs in the Global North.
As a relational understanding of human existence, ubuntu calls attention to the importance of collective practices of care, community, and solidarity building, and unsettles Western ontological certainties about, for example, personhood and linear time. In contrast to the liberal individualism underlying the mainstream Rawlsian approaches to global justice, ubuntu’s relational view of personhood can capture different aspects of what is at stake when thinking about global justice issues like global poverty, gender inequality, ecological justice, thus offering a particularly promising starting point for de-centring and pluralizing the dominant Western ontological framework underlying the debate.
