“Social justice” is frequently invoked as a goal by most progressive social movements, but its concrete definition varies with the specificity of the context. Broadly, social justice can be understood as “a commitment to welfare grounded in respect for the dignity of persons and the common good. (…) [It] includes a broad commitment to alleviating poverty, improving the quality of life, labor and health care, and diminishing violence”. The emphasis on welfare has also led to using the term “economic justice” instead, while the focus on alleviating violence has paved the way to including the issue of gender equality in demands for social justice.
Historically, political demands framed as “social justice” claims appeared during the modern period as a reaction to the excesses of industrialization especially in urban areas across Europe. In the 19th century, “social justice” became a trope in socialist labor discourse, and its strongest association continues to be with socialist and social-democratic politics. The term is frequently discussed with reference to a set of social rights that were inscribed in UN Covenants since the end of the Second World War and during the Cold War. Specifically, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes several articles on welfare rights such as: the right to social security (art. 22), equal pay for equal work, the right to join trade unions (art. 23), the right to rest, leisure, and to paid holidays (art. 24), the right to an adequate standard of living, special protection for motherhood and childhood (art. 25), and compulsory free-of-charge elementary education (art. 26). In the immediate post Second World War period, social development was in fact the main aim of UN institutions, and UN bodies dealing specifically with individual human rights had a more marginal status than they do today.
Importantly, clashing Cold War governments in the 1960s enacted a separation between individual human rights on the one hand and social rights on the other. By that decade, “social rights” and the right to social development had come to be seen as the political platform of the Soviet Union and aligned “Third World” countries as well as “non-aligned” Arab states such as Syria and Egypt, with representatives of liberal democracies arguing for guaranteeing individual rights and freedom from government interference on the other. Further, some states have used the term as a way for redressing inequalities among nations and outlining the need for a global redistribution of wealth. Whereas human rights customarily take the individual as their scale, social rights are aimed at reorganizing inequality at the level of societies, which is a crucial difference that has led US-dominated international institutions to regard the concept of social rights with suspicion. Since the 1990s, preoccupation with social justice has been replaced with attention to the issue of development within and outside the UN (see also NGOization), with significant monetary aid allocated for market-friendly economic development (rather than redistribution) and minimal welfare goals (such as the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger) now topping the international social agenda.
Feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser has outlined a conceptualization of “social justice” that grants “social recognition” and “social redistribution” equal importance. She argues that identity politics claims need to be placed on an equal footing with claims for redistribution. This would lead to theorizing “an overarching conception of justice that can accommodate both defensible claims for equality and defensible claims for the recognition of difference.” In her view, misrecognition – caused by societal attribution of a lower status to certain groups of people because of sexism, racism and/or heteronormativity – is as important as maldistribution (or unequal distribution). In other words, human self-realization cannot be achieved without advocating simultaneously for egalitarian resource redistribution and the recognition of human diversity. Her stance can be considered a feminist position on social justice, especially through her emphasis on understanding and celebrating difference.
Demands for social justice have been clearly articulated in the 2011 wave of the Arab revolts. Aside from the central aim to end the regimes’ excessive authoritarian power, economic wellbeing was at the core of the demands as illustrated by the large workers’ protests taking place in Egypt in the events leading to the Tahrir revolution, as well as years of revolts in poor mining areas in Tunisia. In Lebanon, the most recent wave of protests and social mobilization in 2015 has made very clear demands for social, political, economic, and environmental justice: the resignation of corrupted officials, providing basic services such as electricity and accessible water, end to patriarchal domination, and an end to the environmental trash disaster gripping Beirut. As such, social justice is a core principle in current regional and local activism and social movements.
