Justice, Territorial Justice, and the Justification of Territorial Injustice

Professor Takashi Yamazaki (山崎孝史) 

Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences, Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka

The notion of justice is as old as human cultures and civilizations. Justice was connected to maintaining social order in ancient civilizations and linked to land ownership and obligations in the feudal ages. In near-modern times, justice was more closely tied to the principles of governance for its legitimacy. The principles of justice were developed and sophisticated by classical thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, followed by contemporary theorists such as Rawls, Nozick, and Sandel. Such principles can include distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative types of justice and can be applied to commutative, social, and environmental dimensions. Geographers have also contributed to developing the notion of justice theoretically and empirically. Emphasizing the relationship between urban space, capitalism, and inequality, Harvey successfully situated social justice as a spatial form in urban contexts. Based on Harvey and Lefebvre, Soja conceptualized spatial justice as a framework for understanding and addressing urban inequality. However, unlike these seminal works on socio-spatial justice, the notion of territorial justice seems insufficiently developed and narrowly conceptualized as distributive justice for sub-state public service provision. On the contrary, remarkable progress has been made in the (re-)theorization of territoriality by Sack, Raffistin, Agnew, Elden, and Steinberg. Following this trend in political geography and critical geopolitics, which has long been disconnected from the notion of spatial justice, this keynote will demonstrate how effectively the theories of territoriality can address territorial justice. Particular attention will be paid to an empirical case where a state has repeatedly justified its territorial injustice for its interests, that is, Okinawa (Prefecture) in Japan. Scrutinizing Okinawa’s colonial and post-colonial geo-history would reveal how territorial justice has been violated and could be promoted.