This article’s ambition is to critically analyse the resistance of the Greek people to the country’s custody under the Troika that has led to a severe financial and social crisis. Emphasis is given to the ‘Outraged’ of Syntagma Square and their daily protests during the summer of 2011; a movement that has remained underreported in relation to other similar phenomena, despite the huge number of participants, and the intensity of its clash with the state. In addition, besides the empirical investigation of the Greek case, the article argues that it is of particular importance to note the movement’s cultural resources, as well as the inner class and ideological divisions. Also, the study attempts to fit the case of Greece within the global capitalist crisis and the struggles that have arisen as a response.
Faced with the apologetic and exclusionary tendencies of liberal normativism, there is a marked trend in political theory to recover a more critical conception of justice, which does not adopt the dismissive attitude of traditional Marxism. In this context, the legacy of post-structuralism has been ambivalent. On the one hand, the work of thinkers such as Jacque Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze has helped to shape the direction of the relevant discourse. On the other hand, post-structuralist critiques of political normativism have been often accused of leading to a subsumption of justice to power. Contributing to the ongoing discussion, my article explores the insights of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze and assembles them into a coherent line of analysis. The main argument advanced is that post-structuralist thought provides a fertile basis for a critical concept of justice, which foregrounds the notion’s material texture without forfeiting its normative and ethical traits.
This article focuses on the concept of “spatial justice” and argues for its analytical significance in a critical comprehension of a series of phenomena, from processes of neoliberalisation, socio‐geographic composition and the production of urban space to how space and justice are conceived. Being an expression of social theory’s spatial turn, the concept has served to enrich apperceptions of social justice. Nonetheless, the article adopts the contention that neither the concept’s more disturbing implications nor its radical potential have been fully attended. After contextualising the relevant theoretical problematic through an analysis of neoliberal urbanism, this radical potency is foregrounded by a Deleuzian‐inspired conceptualisation, which conceives spatial justice as a contentious process of territorialising and deterritorialising assemblages that operate and unfold diagrammatically. This conceptualisation, it will be argued, allows theory to move beyond the distributive paradigm and its anthropocentric bias, which continue to prevail in the relevant theoretical and political discourses.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.