Unequal relations of power along classed, racialized and gendered lines are central to the functioning of the global political economy (GPE). Beginning with this understanding this work centers some of the empirical and conceptual margins of GPE and highlights the interplay of ideas, social hierarchies and the everyday in order to shed light on some of the most important but often neglected aspects of GPE: gender, race, and everyday life. The work discusses the role of ideas in establishing and legitimizing different patterns of authority and power, social hierarchies, and the ways in which they are upheld by dominant ideals and power dynamics, and centers the experiences of the‘globally governed’ to better understand how everyday people experience the GPE and exercise agency, power, and resistance..
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4. Ideas, Social Hierarchies, and the Everyday
Erin Hannah and Lucy Hinton
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2. Feminist and Activist Approaches to Human Rights
Ackerly Brooke
This chapter explores the theoretical and political history of human rights that emerges out of the struggles that have been waged by feminists and other non-elites. It first considers the bases for the moral legitimacy of human rights and challenges to those arguments before discussing three aspects of feminist approaches to human rights: their criticism of some aspects of the theory and practice of human rights, their rights claims, and their conceptual contributions to a theory of human rights. It then examines the ways in which feminists and other activists for marginalized groups have used human rights in their struggles and how such struggles have in turn shaped human rights theory. It also analyses theoretical and historical objections to the universality of human rights based on cultural relativism. Finally, it shows that women’s rights advocates want rights enjoyment and not merely entitlements.
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32. John Rawls
Maeve Mckeown
This chapter examines the significance of A Theory of Justice (1971) written by John Rawls in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. It examines the basic contours of Rawls’ theory and addresses the Rawlsian self in what he calls ‘the original position’. Feminists and critical race theorists disagree over the potential of self that Rawls proposed to generate a non-sexist, anti-racist society, and philosophers of disability highlight its ableist assumptions. The chapter looks at the idea of a Rawlsian society being governed by a ‘just basic structure’. It highlights three issues: (1) the ambiguity of the concept of a basic structure separate from individual behaviour and other institutions; (2) the concern that focusing on the basic structure fails to address power relations between groups; and (3) that it limits the scope of justice to the nation state. While acknowledging the profound contributions of Rawls, the chapter concludes that Rawlsian ideal theory is not the best approach from the perspective of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-ableist philosophy.
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38. Donna Haraway
Claire Colebrook
This chapter explores the various disciplinary and political dimensions of Donna Haraway’s work revolving around the negotiation of the interdisciplinary problem of the Anthropocene. It considers Haraway’s works which range between feminist interventions in science studies, animal studies, and environmental criticism. Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) offers a feminist response to broadly Marxist accounts of the relationship between technology and history while also reconfiguring and responding to feminist forms of socialism. After briefly introducing Haraway’s contributions to standpoint theory and posthumanism, this chapter turns to an examination of her critique of science and her alternative way of considering the world in which the boundaries between the human and non-human disappear. Haraway outlines various ways to think about planetary change and develops a conception of the Chthulucene that captures the complexity of the present, including the transformation of nature through human histories.
