Enduring Injustice

Governments today often apologize for past injustices and scholars increasingly debate the issue, with many calling for apologies and reparations. Others suggest that what matters is victims of injustice today, not injustices in the past. Spinner-Halev argues that the problem facing some peoples is not only the injustice of the past, but that they still suffer from injustice today. They experience what he calls enduring injustices, and it is likely that these will persist without action to address them. The history of these injustices matters, not as a way to assign responsibility or because we need to remember more, but in order to understand the nature of the injustice and to help us think of possible ways to overcome it. Suggesting that enduring injustices fall outside the framework of liberal theory, Spinner-Halev spells out the implications of his arguments for conceptions of liberal justice and progress, reparations, apologies, state legitimacy, and post-nationalism.

1. Radical injustice; 2. Which injustices? What groups?; 3. Enduring injustice; 4. Apology and acknowledgement; 5. Legitimacy and the cast of history; 6. Elusive justice; 7. A chastened liberalism.

Jeff Spinner-Halev is the Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (1994) and Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship (2000) and co-editor of Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Right and Diversity (Cambridge University Press, 2005).