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Sen’s Realization-Focused Notion of Justice and the Burden of Democratic Governance in African Societies |
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O.A. Oyeshile |
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To what extent and in what ways can our conception of justice enhance democratic
governance
in Africa? In this disquisition, we took as our foil two dominant conceptions of
justice, namely:
(1) the contractarian/arrangement-based, and (2) the comparative/realization-
focused. We
examined these two broad conceptions, particularly Amartya Sen’s critique of the
former and
his defence of the latter in his seminal work, The Idea of Justice (2010). We
argued that Sen’s
comparative/realization-focused notion of justice is not an alternative but a
complement to the
arrangement-based conception.
We noted that transcendental institutionalization of justice based on the
establishment of
perfect institutions and rules has not had firm routes in African body polity,
thereby making it
very difficult to talk about the realization–focused notion of justice with its
plural demands of
justice.
We concluded that African societies must appropriate these two complementary
notions of
justice in order to witness any sustainable development in the twenty-first
century. |
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