Professor Paliwala and Dr Rangnekar have recently attended the second Law and Social Sciences Research Network Conference, (LASSnet) 'Siting law' on 27-30th December 2010 at FLAME, Pune India.  Professor Paliwala' presented his paper  (jointly prepared with Professor Garton Kamchedzera University of Malawi)  entitled Justice Indicatorology: A new theatre for Justice? Dr Rangnekar chaired a session on intellectual property rights in South Asia. 

They will be returning to India in February (14-16) along with Ann Stewart and Dr Sam Adelmen from the Law School and colleagues in Politics to take part in a seminar with the University's strategic link partner Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Delhi. They hope to meet up with law school alumni while they are in Delhi.

Justice Indicatorology: A new theatre for Justice?

Abdul Paliwala and Garton Kamchedzera

Abstract

This paper interrogates the images of justice produced by justice indicators. These images become truths about the nature of justice and injustice in jurisdictions.

In 2008, a workshop of experts, academics, and practitioners on development work on justice noted that “the world today is swimming in indicators of justice, safety, and the rule of law.” The same workshop however expressed disappointment that available indicators focused “so much on rules and activities and not on people and experiences.”

Stephen Morse suggests that we may have a new science of indicatorology:

Indicators can be powerful and useful tools. They summarise complexity, not by accident, but by design, and speak with a quantitative and apparently objective authority which commands respect. But such power works both ways and can be used to support recommended action from all sorts of perspectives….…

Much depends on who selects…, the ways in which they are ‘measured’ and presented. The power held by those wielding indicators is rarely acknowledged, and instead the processes of creation and use are presented in benign, technical and, of course, objective language.

Thus underlying the construction of indicators and indicatorology may be forms of discipline and power implicated in what Mitchell terms ‘rule by experts’.

The task of this paper is therefore to analyse the sea of indicators of justice and consider ways in which they construct these new forms of discipline and power. The paper then suggests that more qualitative approaches to measuring justice, which have been recently favoured by the World Bank and UNDP among others, may not necessarily improve things as they ignore the wider realities of global injustice. It critiques the internal dynamics of indicatorology using the lens of alternative frameworks of global (in)justice as indicated in the work of Pogge, Baxi, Santos and Sen in order to suggest alternative ways of informing ourselves about justice and injustice.