At the Initial Conference “Justice in the XXI Century: New Challenges, New Directions of Inquiry”, organized by JUSTLA — Justice in the XXI Century: A Perspective from Latin America, Professor Raissa Ventura presented the paper “From Global Justice to Global Justice in the South: Normative Dislocations and Epistemological Challenges”, co-authored with Sebastián Rudas.
The conference took place from February 25 to 27, 2026, at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, Italy. The paper was presented on February 27 in Section 25, chaired by Tom Bailey.
The paper asks why contemporary theories of global justice, despite their centrality within normative political theory since the 1970s and 1980s, remain only weakly institutionalized as a research agenda in the Global South, with particular attention to Brazil.
Its core hypothesis is that mainstream global justice has been historically shaped by the positionality of Global North–based scholars, generating an epistemic problem with two main effects: it obscures forms of global injustice that are more readily visible from the empirical and historical horizons of the Global South; and it reinforces power asymmetries by naturalizing modernizing normative frames in which a privileged “we” deliberates about duties toward “others” cast primarily as passive recipients.
On this basis, the paper proposes the notion of Global Justice from the South, understood not simply as the inclusion of additional perspectives, but as a reorientation of the field’s subject and guiding questions. The presentation contributes to the broader aims of the Crossing Borders project by strengthening a normative agenda on global injustices attentive to the afterlives of slavery, coloniality, and their contemporary reconfigurations.