Talking Global Justice: The Importance of Critical Social Theory in the African Business Paradigm

Cultural diversity is tacitly regarded nowadays as the bane of efforts to internationalise criminal law (Thomas Nagel, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33: 113–147, 2005) or to globalize even the most rudimentary principles of corporate social responsibility [CSR]. In this essay it is proposed, to the contrary, that cultural diversity is best regarded as a vehicle for discovering fundamental convictions about the possibilities for a trans-national meaning of economic justice rather than the main obstacle to its realisation. Guidance is taken from principles of indigenous models of good governance and diplomacy that characterise contemporary West Africa’s rich cultural diversity and which alleviate the severe economic pressures of its many histories. The possibility of global economic justice requires a conceptual change: from defining global justice as a fixed system of uniform procedures and implacable rules applied impartially and universally, to regarding the very idea of justice as the outcome of moral contestation. Global economic justice as an ideal is treated here as a collective and necessarily incompletable work in progress, emerging by ongoing rigorous analytic confrontation internationally between divergent traditions and contrary value systems. Focus will be on correcting shortfalls in the assumptions sustaining the recent history of international human rights documents, and proposals offered in the discourse of transnational corporate social responsibility theorists. Since cultural diversity obtains within social hierarchies just as aggressively as it does across nations, testimonies are required early in the process of treating global justice as an ongoing deliberative project, so that judicial interpreters come to know something about underclass experience and conditions prevailing in the informal economic sector as it expands worldwide.