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Review Essay – Fuyuki Kurasawa's, The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (2007) - [Fuyuki Kurasawa, The Work of Global Justice – Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2007); ISBN: 9780521673914; 256 pp.; $31.99 Paperback]

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Abstract

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This is a book review of Fuyuki Kurasawa's, The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices. Fuyuki Kurasawa is an associate professor of sociology, political science and social and political thought at York University in Toronto. Professor Kurasawa has a particular interest in human rights and global justice through the exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of global justice projects. Kurasawa proposes a theoretical model that strikes a balance between normative universalism and empiricism. This leads to a vision of an alternative globalization marked by radical redistribution of economic and political power. The work of global justice is largely the emancipation of those who are systemically barred from justice, through five modes of ethico-political practice: bearing witness, forgiveness, foresight, aid and solidarity. This book review is a critical look at this theoretical model and his vision of an alternative globalization.

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Developments
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Fuyuki Kurasawa, Fragments Around Critical Cosmopolitanism, available at: http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Fuyuki%20research%20socio-political%201.htm, last accessed 29 March 2010.Google Scholar

2 Fuyuki Kurasawa, The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (2007).Google Scholar

3 Id., abstract found on book jacket.Google Scholar

4 Id., 10.Google Scholar

5 Id., 9.Google Scholar

6 Id., 9, 12, 16, 17.Google Scholar

7 Id., 22.Google Scholar

8 Fuyuki Kurasawa, Fragments Around Critical Cosmopolitanism, available at: http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Fuyuki%20home.htm, last accessed 5 April 2010: “The title of the website, ‘Fragments’ “express[es] a productive tension between the fact that its different components are woven together relatively loosely and the existence of a common thread running through most of them.”Google Scholar

9 Kurasawa (note 2), 42.Google Scholar

10 Id., 53.Google Scholar

11 Id., 56.Google Scholar

12 Id., 92.Google Scholar

13 Id., 93.Google Scholar

14 Id., 19.Google Scholar

15 Id., 125.Google Scholar

16 Id., 130.Google Scholar

17 Id., 131.Google Scholar

18 Id., 155.Google Scholar

19 Id., 163.Google Scholar

20 Id., 192.Google Scholar

21 Id., 195, 196.Google Scholar

22 Fuyuki Kurasawa, Fragments Around Critical Cosmopolitanism, available at: http://www.yorku.ca/kurasawa/Fuyuki%20research%20socio-political%201.htm, last accessed 29 March 2010.Google Scholar

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24 This has also been noted of Kurasawa's writing style in a review of another of one of his books, The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity: Neil Gross, Book Review: The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity 111 American Journal of Sociology 940 (2005).Google Scholar

25 As a paradigmatic example, see Kurasawa (note 2), 47: “‘assassins of memory’ (Vidal-Naquet 1992).” This reference is left unexplained.Google Scholar

26 As a paradigmatic example, see id., 73: “On the contrary, interpretive pluralism and reasonable disagreement are signs of democratic robustness, for citizens ought to retain and exercise their right to dissent as well as contest official versions of history that risk congealing into new and supposedly self-evident dogmas (Gutman and Thompson 2000).” What is unclear to the reader is whether this sentence is intended to be an encapsulation of the entire work.Google Scholar

27 Elaine Coburn, Book Review: The Work of Global Justice Human Rights as Practices 5 Journal of the Society for Socialist Studies 154, 156 (2009).Google Scholar

28 Id., 156.Google Scholar

29 Id., 156.Google Scholar

30 Kurasawa (note 2), 205.Google Scholar

31 For more on this ongoing debate, see Nico Krisch, Benedict Kingsbury and Richard B. Stewart, The Emergence of Global Administrative Law, 68 Law and Contemporary Problems 15 (2005); Carol Harlow, Global Administrative Law: The Quest for Principles and Values, 17 European Journal of International Law 187 (2006); B.S. Chimni, Cooption and Resistance: Two Faces of Global Administrative Law, Institute for International Law and Justice: International Law and Justice Working Papers 2005/16 (2005); Nico Krisch, Global Administrative Law and the Constitutional Ambition, Law, Society and Economy Working Papers 10/2009 (2009), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1344788, last accessed 9 April 2010; Alec Stone Sweet, Constitutionalism, Legal Pluralism, and International Regimes, 16 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 621 (2009).Google Scholar

32 See Susan Marks, The Riddle of All Constitutions: International Law, Democracy, and the Critique of Ideology (2000), and Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2005).Google Scholar

33 See Robert M. Cover, Violence and the Word, 95 Yale Law Journal 1601 (1986), Sally Engle Merry, New Legal Realism and the Ethnography of Transnational Law, 31 Law and Social Inquiry 975 (2006), and The Practice of Human Rights. Tracking Law Between the Local and the Global (Mark Goodale & Sally Engle Merry eds., 2007).Google Scholar

34 See, for example, Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa (2009), Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics (2007), and Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes (2007).Google Scholar

35 Kurasawa (note 2), 208.Google Scholar

36 This is illustrated in a diagram found on id.,197.Google Scholar

37 Id., 210.Google Scholar

38 In this context, see an important work: Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community (Jeffrey Flynn transl.) (2005). Also see, Pogge, Thomas, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd ed. (2008)/Google Scholar