Power and the politics of difference: oppression, empowerment, and transnational justice.

This paper examines Young's conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete, in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of 'oppression' and 'domination'. Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. Allen concludes by considering one way in which Young's analysis of power needs to be extended or perhaps modified in order to do justice to questions of transnational justice.

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Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) was a watershed text in social and political theory that presented a bold challenge to contemporary theorizing about justice. Perhaps the most striking, and, in my view, fruitful, aspect of this remarkable book is Young's decision, announced in the introduction, to analyze justice first and foremost in terms of injustice. With this simple move, Young turned existing accounts of justice on their heads, and, in the process, revealed what makes them woefully inadequate: their lack of attention to extant injustices, a lack that results in their inability successfully to envision how such injustices can be ameliorated. Throughout Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young argues convincingly that our thinking about justice must begin with reflection on injustice, which she conceptualizes primarily in terms of the notions of domination and oppression.

Thus it turns out that power, even more than justice, is the central concept in this landmark book. And yet as I argue in what follows, Young's account of power remains incomplete in at least two ways. To be sure, Young constructs an extremely insightful and productive analysis of oppression--grounded in a phenomenological account of the experience of the oppressed--and she carefully and helpfully distinguishes this notion from domination, which she understands in social-structural terms. However, throughout Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young tends to equate the term 'power' with these narrower notions of 'domination' or 'oppression'. Thus what is missing is an analysis of other, more positive or enabling modes of power, in particular, individual and collective empowerment. Although Young mentions these concepts in justice and the Politics of Difference and discusses them briefly in a later essay (1997), she does so without considering in any detail how these concepts might be integrated into a broader conceptualization of power, alongside the notions of oppression and domination that she articulates. However, as I shall argue in this paper, these modes of power--oppression, domination, and individual and collective empowerment--cannot be properly understood in isolation from one another, particularly if one adopts the relational conception of power that Young herself endorses. Moreover, inasmuch as Young's own analysis of the politics of difference relies implicitly on the concepts of individual and collective empowerment, a broader conceptualization of power would greatly enhance and enrich her own account of how injustice can be fought and, ultimately, overcome.

In addition, as Young herself admits in the epilogue to justice and the Politics of Difference, it is not obvious whether the analysis of power developed in that book can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. Questions of transnational justice are, as Young rightly realizes, crucial for political theorists to address; indeed, Young's relatively early concern with these questions precedes and prefigures the waves of discussions of globalization and cosmopolitanism that have since followed. Interestingly enough, at the same time that transnational justice has become a hot topic in political theory, there has been a resurgence of interest in power theory, and yet, power theory has yet to be rethought in the context of globalization. It is high time we take up the challenge that Young issues in her epilogue to think through how to conceptualize oppression and domination (and, in line with my first criticism of Young's account of power, I would suggest, individual and collective empowerment as well) in the context of transnational justice. Although a complete account of this is obviously beyond the scope of a single paper, I conclude by considering one way in which Young's analysis of power needs to be modified, or, at the very least, extended in order to do justice to questions of transnational justice.

As Young makes clear in the first chapter of Justice and the Politics of Difference, one of her central arguments is that "the concepts of domination and oppression, rather than the concept of distribution, should be the starting point for a conception of social justice" (16). Young opens the book with a devastating critique of the distributive paradigm of justice: this paradigm, she argues, inappropriately restricts the scope of justice by failing to consider social structures and institutional contexts relevant to questions of justice (20). (1) In particular, Young isolates three contexts relevant for our thinking about justice that the distributive model leaves out of consideration: decision-making structures and procedures, division of labor, and culture. Decision-making structures and procedures encompass "the corporate and legal structures and procedures that give some persons the power to make decisions about investment, production, marketing, employment, interest rates, and wages that affect millions of other people" (23). The division of labor is a matter not just of how given jobs or tasks are divided up among individuals or groups (which is, as Young is happy to admit, primarily a distributive issue), but also of "the range of tasks performed in a given position, the definition of the nature, meaning and value of those tasks, and the relations of cooperation, conflict, and authority among positions" (23). Finally, the domain of culture "includes the symbols, images, meanings, habitual comportments, stories, and so on through which people express their experience and communicate with one another," insofar as these "significantly affect the social standing of persons and their opportunities" (23). All three of these contexts are key venues for the maintenance and reproduction of existing structures of domination and subordination, hence Young's argument for their relevance to thinking about justice.

A further criticism of the distributive model of justice is that it leads, almost inexorably, to conceiving of power in distributive terms as well. Young argues convincingly that this is a mistake, and her argument against the distributive model of power allows her to formulate some of the key components of her own conception. The main problem with thinking of power in distributive terms is that it "means implicitly or explicitly conceiving power as a kind of stuff possessed by individual agents in greater or lesser amounts" (31). Young articulates four problems with conceiving of power as a kind of stuff that can be possessed and more or less fairly distributed. First, she argues that power is properly understood as a relation rather than as a thing. As she puts it, "while the exercise of power may sometimes depend on the possession of certain resources-money, military equipment, and so on-such resources should not be confused with power itself" (31). Second, even when the distributive model recognizes the relational nature of ...