Social Justice : a utopian dream or dystopian nightmare?

Abstract

In its utopian ideal, social justice offers equitable access and entitlement to wealth, opportunities, and resources. It promises all people equal rights and responsibilities and indiscriminate treatment and access to goods and services. In its dystopian practice, social justice is nothing but a beautiful empty buzzword, an electoral catcher for politicians and policy makers and a long-sought dream, yet recurrent nightmare to social activists and visionaries. This paper aims to address the gap between the utopic vision of social justice and its dystopian practice by examining the processes through which the utopic vision of social justice is debased to dystopian practices. Processes, typified by prejudice, discrimination, inequalities and a myriad range of injustices, entrenched within widening disparities in poverty and exclusion, and oppressive and exploitative practices across both national and global agendas. These dystopian practices emerging from high-level superficial and contradictory narratives and policy processes constitute both a determinant factor and consequential outcome of deep-seated structural injustices embedded within the global rule of neo-liberal capitalism. Despite the dystopian hegemony of the neoliberal agenda spreading unbridled apathy and individualism, the utopic vision of social justice persists. This vision, embodied through micro-level grassroots everyday practices of justice, offers a glimpse of hope for the “dangers of a world indifferent to justice” (The International Forum for Social Development, 2006: p.80) by reappropriating the meaning and significance of social justice and making the dream somewhat closer to reality.