Justice Beyond Rights

The twentieth-century consolidation of the nation-state as the dominant political institution has meant that political theorists have conceptualised justice primarily through the provision of statist rights. The author shows that the concept of haqq allows us to recognise and move past some limitations of justice as statist rights. Focussing on critical theory, given its sympathetic substantive focus on oppression and liberatory struggles, and methodological emphasis on combining empirical detail with theoretical insight, she argues that dominant strands are locked in a circular debate due to their investment in statist visions of justice. This renders their theorising irrelevant to the concerns of many especially in the Global South, and importantly, truncates imagination of alternatives. Building upon oral histories of refugees from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan and their articulation of haqq, the author argues for approaching haqq as enabling actually existing non-statist justice that foregrounds the agency of the oppressed.