Abstract
Brooke Ackerly’s Just Responsibility offers a guide to how and why people should take political responsibility for injustice. She provides a penetrating discussion of injustice itself, explains how common epistemological habits and mistakes can impede its recognition, and develops an account of just responsibility informed by the praxis of human rights activists in Bangladesh and around the world to show us what we can do about it. The shape of the argument powerfully illustrates Ackerly’s grounded normative theory (GNT) approach, which is the source of both the book’s core strengths and its central ambiguity.
The book begins with a bold and succinct statement of this approach: “If we want to learn what to do about injustice and how to do it, we should learn from those who are doing something about it” (1). What we should learn from them, Ackerly maintains, is how to take responsibility in an “intentionally just way,” one that is mindful not to reproduce or reify injustice through the actions we undertake to address its effects (5). The book is divided into three parts: The first identifies “injustice itself” as the core concern; the second lays out a methodology of knowing what we should do about injustice, a feminist critical approach that revises and extends Ackerly’s previous work on third world feminist social criticism (2000, 2008); and the final part offers a guide to what we should do about injustice and how we should do it, developing five “principles in practice” distilled from activist praxis. 1 This structure is complemented and complicated by two introductory chapters, nearly 70 pages in length, which set up and summarize—really, prefigure—the approach and argument that follow, in part through an extended and illuminating discussion of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity (BCWS).
Ackerly worries that too often we focus on the effects of injustice without recognizing or addressing what she calls, following Mill, “injustice itself.” Injustice itself is variously defined as “injustices for which no simple causal narrative of liability is sufficient” (30); as a “web of intersecting power inequalities” (37); as “unjust power inequalities” (39); as consisting or inhering in “structural processes, power inequalities, and norms” (38); and as having three dimensions: complex causality, power inequalities, and normalization (74). At the center of this kaleidoscopic picture of injustice itself is the exploitation of power inequalities, which are instantiated, formally and informally, in structures, hierarchies, and all relations of dependence and interdependence (87). Ackerly insists that the mere existence of power inequalities is not unjust: “The problem of injustice itself rests in the exploited inequality” and not in the power relations that constitute it (87, my emphasis). Later the formulation changes again to include exploitable power inequalities (110, 125), consistent with her sense that human rights guard against potential exploitation.
The complex causality of injustice itself—unforeseeable and interaction effects and contingencies (107)—makes the epistemological requirements of familiar accounts of personal (moral) responsibility too stringent for an account of political responsibility, Ackerly argues. These accounts set a high bar for assigning responsibility based on awareness, intention, and causal implication in injustice. “Taking political responsibility for injustice itself requires relaxing the cognitive and voluntary conditions” while applying skeptical scrutiny to harms, always attentive to the possibility of injustice itself behind them (120–21).
Crucial to Ackerly’s account of injustice itself is normalization, through which injustice is rendered invisible. Normalization can occur in various guises: “familiarity through habituation,” “misinterpretation of common patterns” of injustice, and “marginalization through fragmentation”—in which seemingly isolated harms become illegible as injustices because of their diffuse manifestation and effects (88–98). Normalization is facilitated through “social epistemologies,” assessments based in shared social understandings about what counts as unjust (vs. unfortunate, unlucky, personal responsibility, etc.; 9). Ackerly’s concern with normalization both reflects and informs her approach: She recognizes it as a key obstacle to just responsibility and designs her methodological approach explicitly to overcome it.
This focus on normalization is welcome, but I worry that the related discussion of social epistemologies obscures more than it clarifies. Ackerly sometimes treats social epistemology as something like hegemony—common sense, the “things that are known without argument in a community” (73). Sometimes she treats it as something altogether less comprehensive—an interpretive framework (88n53, 213), a habit of thought (134), or political imagination (230n32 and surrounding text). The difference matters, because it shapes our evaluation of how normalization can be overcome: Changing habits of thinking and countering hegemony are significantly different (albeit related) epistemological and political projects.
In developing a methodology that can cope with complex causality and normalization, Ackerly looks to feminist activists engaged in transformative political practices with the aim of “thinking what they are doing” (134). A theory that tells us how to take responsibility in the right way has to be empirically informed, she argues; it requires a methodology rooted in experience (146, 135). This is, in Ackerly’s view, the essence of grounded normative theorizing, “a dynamic and multidimensional process of theorizing through engagement with struggle” (145). A theory of responsibility needs to “[respect] the observed reality of the consequences of injustice itself, while focusing on the relationship between these and the underlying forces of power inequalities and normalization” (147). She recommends a “feminist critical methodology grounded in Third World feminist social criticism,” because it “provides experience-based, normatively-informed” guidance for scholarship and activism (147). This approach broadens the empirical bases of political theory, pays better attention to marginalization and silencing, and improves our interpretation and analysis in confronting the limits of our thinking (150). It helps us to reveal, analyze, and circumvent norms and power dynamics that saturate our world—and our thinking about it (158).
Ackerly is at her best in these chapters on methodology. In a brilliant demonstration of her GNT approach, she draws on her extensive experience as a researcher, consultant, and ally in Bangladesh, undertaking a portfolio analysis of the activist groups supported by the Global Fund for Women (GFW). She identifies ten core strategies used by a range of organizations and initiatives, arguing that they are widely adopted because of their utility in taking on injustice itself (179). This meta-analysis is supplemented with interviews with activists and with discussions with the staffs of the funded organizations and of GFW as well as with comparative analysis undertaken with various collaborators. Ackerly teases out the normative dimensions of activist practice disclosed through this study, which become the basis of five “principles-in-practice” for taking responsibility in ways that challenge hierarchy and privilege: utilizing intersectional analysis, making cross-issue connections, building capacity for self-advocacy and group advocacy, building community through connected activism, and learning and ongoing commitment to political responsibility (183–85, 193–205). The five principles-in-practice are, again, distilled from what Ackerly calls the human rights politics of the activists she studies and with whom she works. Many theorists have human rights theories that show us why we have responsibility for global justice; hers is a human rights theory of how to discharge that responsibility (205). Put differently, she argues that understanding human rights as a political process shows us how to take responsibility justly: “Human rights are a guide to how to bring about transformation in local, national, and global systems such that there can be greater enjoyment of [human rights]” (206).
I wish Ackerly had done more to show how human rights actually inform and get used in the work of the activists she studies. Most of her discussion of their approach illustrates how they implement the five principles-in-practice. So when she declares that these “are part of a normative political theory of human rights,” it’s unclear whether this statement reflects the activists’ self-understanding of their work or Ackerly’s characterization of it (though she does indicate that activists appeal to human rights to affirm the moral and political legitimacy of their claims; 207). Most of her discussion of human rights illustrates how a political or practice-based understanding of them helps to correct the principal deficiencies of familiar legal and ideal human rights theories. In any case, it’s clear that for Ackerly the five principles-in-practice animate a human rights theory of justice that takes up the challenge of political transformation by taking on injustice itself (220–21).
These chapters on methodology and on the theory distilled from activist practice are wonderful—fresh, insightful, moving, and provocative. They demonstrate what makes Ackerly such a distinctive scholar and also what makes GNT such an appealing approach. We have much to learn from activist praxis and equally as much to learn from Ackerly’s innovative techniques for studying it.
In the final chapter, she turns her attention to what she calls four “sites” where people can and should take political responsibility by adopting the principles-in-practice: consumerism, philanthropy and foreign aid, advocacy and corporate responsibility, and activism (222). In speaking to the roles people play as consumers, donors, workers, and citizens, she hopes to make her approach relevant for people outside the academy, whom she believes can and should take responsibility for injustice itself in their daily lives. It’s a laudable goal, but for me this conclusion seemed inadequate to the book’s bold and rather sweeping claims about political transformation, mainly because it lends the impression that individual actions—ethical shopping, thoughtful support for charities, conscientious behavior in the workplace, and reflective engagement with activist causes—can overcome domination and structural injustice.
That characterization of her argument is a little unfair: Ackerly insists that we go beyond merely socially conscious consumerism, for instance, by “being accountable to those directly experiencing the consequences of injustice itself” (229), and she argues that we have to step out “of the roles prescribed by the global political economy and into a new politics of political community as a web of networks” (237). This must be an intentional, inclusive political community anchored in accountability and committed to developing the leadership capacity of groups and individuals within it (238–45). It’s not that I disagree. It’s rather that who or what is on the other side of those power inequalities has to be considered: capital, patriarchy, whiteness, and other structures of privilege are fearsome and enduring foes. I simply wanted to know more about the transformational politics Ackerly envisions growing out of just responsibility—more about how it will work and about how the upsurge in “connected activism” informed by the principles-in-practice will get to grips with injustice itself.
My other major question concerns the normativity of Ackerly’s account—and here I come back to the ambiguity of GNT. Just Responsibility provides an intriguing and often compelling prescription for taking political responsibility for injustice itself but offers little argument for why we should do so. Ackerly makes clear from the outset that this is not her question: She’s concerned with what we should do and how we should do it. Yet I’m doubtful that these questions can be easily walled off from questions about why. Part of my doubt arises from the text itself, which frequently suggests that we have a moral obligation to take political responsibility—without explaining the origins or nature of that obligation (17n37, 121, 222n9, 249). Ackerly, like Iris Young, views political responsibility as the modality in which we discharge moral responsibility we (somehow) already have (10, 17n37). Indeed, her account seems at times to assume such a moral foundation, an assumption that would explain the should-claims that proliferate throughout.
Like others working in GNT, Ackerly sometimes seems to imagine that a theory anchored in activist practices can sidestep difficult questions about normativity simply by appealing to that practice. In other words, she wants to locate the normativity of the account in the praxis of the activists. It’s impossible to bootstrap to validity in this way, however; one already has to share their values and commitments to identify theirs as the praxis to which we should look when tackling injustice.
I think, however, that Ackerly is actually committed—or should be—to a different view, one that recognizes the willingness to take political responsibility as contingent, a kind of “democratic impulse” born of the value (some) people put on the integrity, dignity, freedom, and humanity of people (21). Such contingency also seems consistent with, even implicit in, the idea that we design our methodologies in light of the normative commitments we hold (152). Read this way, Just Responsibility is not a book for everyone but rather a handbook for those who already share Ackerly’s feminist democratic commitments. As one of them, my concern is about those who don’t already agree. What might Ackerly say to persuade them? How can grounded normative theory handle deep normative disagreement? At this political moment, these are questions we can’t ignore.