Plenty to be done to create a just world

Maybe the speakers addressing the Is a Just World Possible? session on the opening day of the World Social Science Forum 2015 didn’t all strictly suggest an answer, but they certainly painted a picture of what has to be fixed.

Elisa Reis, professor of political sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pondered on “the usefulness” of social scientists in that pursuit. Among other things, they would be needed to redefine concepts such as the nation state, and also chronicle the changing relationship between humans and nature.

Professor Ruth Fincher of the University of Melbourne, Australia, reflected on the session title from a geographer’s perspective: “The question is an interesting one conceptually and empirically – how can one make a judgement that the whole world is just or unjust?” she noted. “In contemporary geography, the world is rarely conceived as a unitary place or a common social enterprise.”

Presenting in relay fashion, regular collaborators Professor Ashwin Desai of the University of Johannesburg and Professor Patrick Bond of the University of KwaZulu-Natal posed a few questions of their own – particularly about BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as an association. Of interest to them – as expressed in some recent publications – is whether BRICS is anti-imperialist, as is often suggested; or sub-imperialist, seen perhaps in its exploitation of other developing nations, and in the perhaps unseemly collaborations among each other. “I would argue in Africa every road that is being taken in our histories…we’ve all ended up in the same place – in neoliberalism,” said Desai.

But it was in starting the session – sponsored by the International Union of Psychological Science – that Professor Thomas Reuter, of the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, made a bold suggestion. He proposed a “new spirit of compassion” as the principle that would underlie the building of “not a new world order for a few, but a new world for all”.

“We must ask of our leaders that they work hard to dispel fear in the face of crisis,” Reuters said,“and to work tirelessly to instil in us all the trust and compassion needed to shape our shared histories.”

For more information about WSSF, go to http://www.wssf2015.org/

Author: Sarah Van Der Ahee from HIPPO Communications.

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