Justice

Justice invokes notions of fairness, equity, and doing the “right” thing. It also evokes principles by which the benefits and burdens of society should be distributed among people. However, justice is a contested term, of which there are various notions and theorizations across disciplines. The definitional challenges of the notion of social justice are imbricated in the ways in which rights and democracy are understood and practiced. Geography’s relevance and contributions to justice have been in both theory and practice. Through theorizations around space, place, scale, neoliberalism, and capitalism, geographers have demonstrated the tensions between universalities and particularities across contexts and ideas. Historical legacies of colonialism and current politics over international development and geopolitics further demonstrate the ways in which we need to globalize, spatialize, and temporalize justice. Geographers have also made key contributions to debates on environmental justice and climate justice. Similarly, gender justice and race justice have been advanced by feminist and critical scholars, paving the way to understanding justice in more nuanced and intersectional ways.