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22 Stellenbosch L. Rev. 452 (2011)
Social Exclusion, Global Poverty, and Scales of (In)Justice: Rethinking Law and Poverty in a Globalizing World

handle is hein.journals/stelblr22 and id is 462 raw text is: SOCIAL EXCLUSION, GLOBAL POVERTY, AND
SCALES OF (IN)JUSTICE: RETHINKING LAW
AND POVERTY IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD
Nancy Fraser
Henry A and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, New School for Social
Research; Einstein Fellow, Berlin; Holder of Chair in Social Justice, College d'6tudes
mondiales, Paris
1 Introduction
Most discussions of law and poverty are pitched at the national level. Tacitly
presuming what I call the Westphalian frame, they envision the arena for
addressing poverty as a modern territorial state. As a result, they imagine the
victims of poverty as citizens of a bounded political community. Likewise,
they picture the law that might help to rectify poverty as national law. Finally,
they see the agency that might effect redress as a modern national state with
sovereignty over a delimited territory.'
These assumptions are intuitively plausible. In the modern era, anti-
poverty activists have in fact chiefly sought redress within bounded political
communities that have been understood in Westphalian terms. And legal
advocates for the poor have mainly focused on whatever resources they
could find in the constitutions of such communities, especially resources for
realising the social rights of member citizens. To the extent that legal efforts
to mitigate poverty have achieved results, moreover, they have done so by
mobilising national law to compel action from national states on behalf of
national citizens. Thus, the Westphalian frame has a measure of real-world
traction. No wonder, then, that it is commonly used to frame discussions of
poverty and law.
Nevertheless, the Westphalian framing of poverty and law is problematic
in a globalizing world. Its constitutive assumptions are belied by the
increasingly salient fact of global poverty. That expression names modes of
impoverishment whose causes and manifestations cannot be located within a
single territorial state. Generated by transborder processes, the harms suffered
by the global poor largely escape the parameters of national law and the
control of national states. To locate them within the Westphalian frame is
in fact to misframe them. With the picture cropped to exclude transnational
vectors of domination, that framing obscures the offshore sources of the
poverty that currently afflicts many in the global South. Channelling the
claims of the global poor into the domestic legal arenas of states that lack the
capacity to redress them, it deprives them of the ability to challenge some
For a fuller account of the Westphalian frame see N Fraser Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World
(2005) 36 New Left Review 69 69-88, reprinted in N Fraser Scales ofJustice: Reimagining Political Space
in a Globalizing World (2008).

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