Glossary of Terms

Global Justice Terminology

Global Justice: Principles and practices aimed at creating fair conditions for all people regardless of nationality, addressing transnational structures of power, wealth, and opportunity.
Distributive Justice: Concerned with the fair allocation of resources, opportunities, and burdens across society.
Procedural Justice: Focuses on the fairness of processes by which decisions are made.
Recognition Justice: Acknowledges and respects the dignity, identities, and cultural differences of individuals and groups.
Non-Domination: Freedom from arbitrary interference by other agents or institutions; a central concept in republican political theory.

Development Discourse

Development: Contested term referring to processes of social, economic, and political change, often associated with Western notions of progress.
Global South/Global North: Terms used to describe broad socioeconomic and political divisions, replacing outdated terms like “Third World” and “First World.”
Majority World: Alternative term for Global South, highlighting that most of the world’s population lives in these regions.
Structural Adjustment Programs: Economic policies imposed on countries by international financial institutions as conditions for loans, often leading to austerity.
Human Development Index (HDI): Measure developed by the UN to assess country development through health, education, and income indicators rather than economic growth alone.

Environmental Justice Concepts

Environmental Racism: The disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on communities of color.
Climate Justice: Framework addressing climate change as an ethical and political issue, not just an environmental one.
Extractivism: Economic model based on intensive resource extraction, typically benefiting external actors at the expense of local communities.
Just Transition: Approach ensuring that the shift to low-carbon economies is fair to workers and communities currently dependent on fossil fuel industries.
Ecological Debt: Concept describing the responsibility of industrialized countries to compensate less industrialized nations for environmental damages.

Anti-Racist and Decolonial Language

Antiracism: Active process of identifying and eliminating racism by changing systems, organizational structures, policies, practices, and attitudes.
Coloniality: The persistent power structures that emerged during colonialism and continue to shape knowledge, culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and more.
White Supremacy: Socio-political economic system of domination based on racial categories that benefits those defined as white.
Intersectionality: Analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s identities combine to create different modes of discrimination or privilege.
Epistemic Justice: Fair treatment in respect to knowledge, understanding, and participation in knowledge practices.

Ethical Frameworks

Capabilities Approach: Evaluates well-being in terms of people’s actual abilities to achieve various functionings they value.
Cosmopolitanism: Ethical perspective that all human beings are members of a single moral community, regardless of national, cultural, or political affiliations.
Ethics of Care: Moral theory that emphasizes the importance of response to others in their particular circumstances.
Utilitarianism: Ethical theory that determines right action by focusing on outcomes and holds that the best action maximizes overall “happiness” or “utility.”
Deontology: Ethical approach focusing on the rightness or wrongness of actions themselves rather than the consequences.