Organising for global justice

Global Justice is a philosophy, a belief, and an active pursuit, seeking to challenge the powerful to create a more just and equal world. It is based on the idea that poverty is not inevitable, but is a political choice and exercise of power that oppresses specific groups.

Injustices on the global stage include trafficking, colonisation, the theft of land and resources by hostile countries, war, and disaster capitalism. Whole groups are deliberately marginalised through techniques of financial deprivation (poverty), identity politics, division and hatred. Global justice extends to all human, non-human and more-than human entities.

In the context of climate justice, certain geo-political groupings, for example, the Global North, have sought to exploit other groups, for example, The Global South for their 'natural resources', solely to maximise profits. A variety of entangled anthropogenic events flow from these climate injustices, including the degradation of land and sea, global pandemics, deforestation and the destruction of habitats, pollution, drought, floods, forest fires, rising tides, food insecurity and species extinction. The global environmental planetary crises are still not seen by societies and organisations as a central priority, let alone urgent, and insufficient action has been taken to prevent this growing catastrophe.

There is significant debate in and around organisations about the ‘best’ ways to organise in response to the climate crisis, but these endeavours are influenced by financial and other interests. Demands for climate justice and the end of fossil fuel usage have been made by social movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, while other concerns include increasing poverty, infertile lands and homeless (migrant) populations on the move. The Global South are the first to bear the brunt of this crisis, despite their least negative impact in terms of mass consumption and industrialisation. These issues translate into a need for urgent strategies of organising, including alternative practices, leadership, and activism.

Of relevance within this theme are three conceptual areas:

1. Work in this area focuses on contemporary organisational practices that enable and sustain global injustices, including the global environmental crisis and its multifaceted implications for organisations and leadership. Another is our relationships with animals, predicated on anthropocentric organisational practices such as industrial farming that facilitate pandemics.
2. Work in this area can help us investigate practices of resistance to corporations and mainstream organisations, reliant on and profiting from a) the fossil fuel economy b) the animal-industrial complex c) big pharma d) big agriculture and e) the military-industrial complex. Included are activist movements, and more broadly civil society organisations challenging fossil fuel capitalism. Also of interest, are organisational ‘greenwashing’ practices and the development of other problematic forms of corporate environmentalism.
3. Strategies of ignorance feed into our third area of conceptual concerns because they foreclose the need for, and engagement with, alternative organisational practices and alternative leadership, that seek to combine both social and environmental justice. These alternative forms of organisations can be located in the private sector, the voluntary sector or the public sector.