MASARYK UNIVERSITY
Faculty of Social Sciences Department of Political Science
Epistemic Injustice and Security
Master Thesis
David Rypel
Supervisor: Mgr. Pavel Dufek, Ph.D. UČO: 415064 Field of Study: Security and Strategic Studies Matriculation Year: 2015 Brno, 2018
Declaration of Originality and Compliance of Academic Ethics
I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work. I have identified all material in this text which is not my own work through appropriate referencing and acknowledgement. Where I have quoted from the work of others, I have included the source in the references.
Signed: Date: May 30, 2018
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank:
- Pavel Dufek, supervisor of my thesis, that he trusted me that the topic I selected makes sense. - Debbie Lisle for kindly opening the abyss of critical security studies for me. Without her introduction to margins of international relations, I would have taken the path which led to this thesis much later or never at all. - My parents who allowed me to focus on my studies rather than survival without ever questioning what I do. (I think they do not know that I wrote a bachelor thesis on morality of terrorism.) - My partner for being around and helping me with the list of figures in this thesis. - EU taxpayers and Masaryk University scholarship policy which allowed me to spend almost two years of my studies abroad.
Abstract This thesis is concerned with potential benefits of application of the theory of epistemic injustice on cases pertinent to security studies. Its goal was twofold: First, to present the theory of epistemic injustice in the way that will be easily understandable for readers with no background in epistemology. Second, to demonstrate how the theory is relevant to the field of security studies. Towards the fulfilment of the first goal, the author of the thesis presented and explained working of three possible kinds of epistemic injustice, i.e. testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory. As far as the second goal is concerned, the author briefly presented five already existing applications of the concept of epistemic injustice on cases pertinent to security studies and then proposed his own contribution in the form of integration of epistemic injustice apparatus into securitisation theory. As a result, he offered a version of securitisation framework which is sensitive to epistemic injustice while itself does not contribute to epistemic injustice.
Key Words: epistemic injustice, virtue epistemology, social epistemology, securitisation theory, security, ethics
Anotace Tato práce se zabývá možnými přínosy aplikace teorie epistemické nespravedlnosti na případy spadající do oboru bezpečnostních studií. Má dva cíle: Zaprvé, představit teorii epistemické nespravedlnosti způsobem snadno pochopitelným pro čtenáře, kteří se v oblasti epistemologie neorientují, a zadruhé, ukázat, čím je tato teorie relevantní pro obor bezpečnostních studií. Za účelem naplnění prvního cíle je v práci představeno a vysvětleno fungování tří možných druhů epistemické nespravedlnosti, tj. “svědectví”, “hermeneutické” a “kontribuční”. Co se týče naplnění druhého cíle, autor nejprve stručně představuje pět existujících aplikací konceptu epistemické nespravedlnosti v oblasti bezpečnostních studií, a poté navrhuje integrovat aparátu epistemické nespravedlnosti do teorie sekuritizace. Vlastním přínosem je návrh sekuritizačního rámce, který bere v potaz epistemickou nespravedlnost, a zároveň k ní sám nepřispívá.
Klíčová slova: epistemická nespravedlnost, epistemologie ctnosti, sociální epistemologie, sekuritizační teorie, bezpečnost, etika
Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 2
1 Epistemic Injustice: A Proposition ...... 5
1.1 Testimonial Injustice ...... 8
1.2 Hermeneutical Injustice ...... 14
2 Epistemic Injustice: Replies ...... 20
2.1 Distribution of Credibility and Structural Testimonial Injustice ...... 21
2.2 Epistemic Objectification and Derivatization ...... 26
2.3 Being Insensitive to Insensitivity: Wilful Ignorance and Contributory Injustice .... 30
3 Security and Epistemic Injustice ...... 39
3.1 Securitisation Theory and Silent Jury ...... 43
3.2 From Illocution to Perlocution and Audience with Agency ...... 46
3.3 Epistemic Injustice of Securitization Theory ...... 52
3.4 Epistemic Injustice in Securitisation and Desecuritisation ...... 58
Conclusion ...... 67
Bibliography ...... 70
List of Figures
Table 1: Four Basic Cases of Epistemic Injustice in Securitisation and Desecuritisation and Their Variants ...... 61
Character count: 180 103
1
Introduction A young man who escaped from a war-torn country which used to be his home yet fails to convince people that horrors he experienced are real. A woman who is regularly sexually assaulted by her husband yet struggles to find appropriate words to explain to others what is happening to her. A researcher who tries to prove that radical ideas cannot be dealt with brute force yet is treated with ridicule by people who think they know better. These are moments of powerlessness wherein one tries to convey what she or he knows, believes or opines, but for some reason fails.
Slightly more than ten years ago, British philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007) published a book in which she asserted that situations like these are not mere accidents. There is a pattern behind them, which correlates with inequalities in power relations. Scholars coming from feminist, postcolonial or critical race theory circles had noticed these moments of distrust and failure in communication before, but Fricker demonstrated that they are not limited to the experience of women or minorities. To the contrary, these situations take place everywhere around us – they are normal. But normal does not mean right. Indeed, situations such as outlined above are unjust and are instances of what Fricker calls epistemic injustice.
Her book generated a wave of interest: A number of articles and at least two books (Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus Jr. 2017; Medina 2013) followed. This interest led to the evolution of the theory, sometimes in unforeseen ways as Fricker (2017, 59) herself admits. It is thus no longer a project of one author but a theory shaped by valuable insights of scholars with diverse backgrounds, which already lives on its own. It did not raise only theoretical discussion though – it was already applied to cases in settings as diverse as medicine and healthcare, digital environment, the law or cultural heritage1, and often brought interesting observations.
Since this thesis is submitted towards the fulfilment of one of the requirements for the Master’s degree in Security and Strategic Studies, you may rightly ask how is this relevant to our field. This is the question I want to pursue in this text. I believe – it is my hypothesis if you will – security studies scholars could benefit from attention to the theory of
1 See, for instance, case studies in Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus Jr. (2017)
2 epistemic injustice too. When I started working on this thesis, I did not know how exactly and what my argument will be. Indeed, I approached the task as an “exploratory enterprise”: At the beginning, I had an idea how the theory could be relevant, and it evolved as I proceeded and learnt more. Many things were completely new for me: I am neither a student of philosophy, nor epistemology and I share Ann J. Cahill’s confession that “I am swimming in unfamiliar waters!” (2014, 66). At the same time, I do not write this text for philosophers either. I want to address political scientists, to show them what can we learn from work done in other disciplines, and so to approach our research in a more multidisciplinary way. I thus want to invite you to understand this thesis as a “study trip” to the field of epistemology and ethics. What I present here is what I learnt during this process and what I propose to think about.
I, therefore, set two goals that I wish to fulfil in this thesis. First, I want to present Fricker’s formulation of the theory of epistemic injustice and some contributions to it by other authors in the way that will be easily understandable to readers who are not cognizant of epistemological literature. I do so because I want potential readers of this thesis to be able to use it as an analytical and normative lens in their own inquiries into security matters and to allow them to find their own ways how to integrate it to security studies.
Second, I aim to answer the question “How can the theory of epistemic injustice be useful for security studies?” or “What is the relevance of the theory of epistemic injustice for security studies?” I believe that the short examples at the beginning of this introduction already suggested some ways in which it can be relevant. I, nonetheless, want to do more than that. I want to demonstrate, that the concept of epistemic injustice can be integrated into one of the major theories which can be found in the field of security studies. Namely, the theory of securitisation. I do not also aim to apply it – that is the task for future research. Instead, what this thesis should ideally “produce” is that the theory of epistemic injustice merits attention and can improve our understanding of issues located in our field of study.
The thesis proceeds as follows: I start with an introduction to the theory of epistemic injustice as formulated by Miranda Fricker. She identified two kinds of epistemic injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical, and so I follow this distinction in the structure of the
3 chapter. The second chapter is dedicated to the critiques, adjustments and extensions of the original formulation I consider the most important. In three sections or sub-chapters, I first present relational understanding of credibility assessments. Next, I move to a reconceptualisation of the primary harm of testimonial injustice as “epistemic derivatisation”. Finally, I introduce contributory injustice as the third kind of epistemic injustice. These two chapters, which constitute roughly half of the thesis, aim to fulfil my first goal. The third one then answers the question how exactly can the concept of epistemic injustice be useful for research into security issues. I first present some of the already existing applications of the concept and then move to securitisation theory. This part is divided into four sections: In the first, I briefly introduce securitisation theory, while in the second I present some adjustments which make it better compatible with the concept of epistemic injustice. In the third, I argue that securitisation theory itself, in its original formulation, can be seen as an instrument of epistemic injustice. Finally, in the fourth section, I combine theories of securitisation and epistemic injustice to identify four basic cases of epistemic injustice in securitisation and desecuritisation: unfairly failed securitisation, unfairly successful securitisation, unfairly successful desecuritisation, and unfairly failed desecuritisation.
4
1 Epistemic Injustice: A Proposition Justice and injustice manifest themselves in many forms. However, until recently, it was perhaps not so obvious that injustice could also concern knowing – that there may be a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice, i.e., a situation in which a subject is wronged in her capacity as a knower (Fricker 2007, 20). The change came around the year 2007 when Miranda Fricker’s (2007) book with a telling title Epistemic Injustice: The Ethics and Power of Knowing was published, followed ten years later by a comprehensive handbook (Kidd, Medina, and Pohlhaus Jr. 2017) comprising thirty-seven essays by a diverse selection of authors.
Of course, Fricker was not the first philosopher who dedicated her work to exposing ethically pernicious aspects of the ways we relate to each other epistemically. This subject matter has prevailed especially among authors with post-colonial and other, in some sense, non-privileged or marginalised social backgrounds2. Remember, for instance, Edward Said’s (2003) ground-breaking inquiry into the West’s representations of “the Orient”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) fundamental question whether the Subaltern can speak or W. E. B. Du Bois’ (2008) experience with what he described as “double consciousness”. Also, feminist and liberatory epistemologists preceded her, asking questions very similar to her own: e.g. “what kind of subject one must be in order to be (seen as) a knowing subject?” (Tuana 2017, 126). So, to avoid potentially epistemically oppressive “rhetoric of beginnings” (Dotson 2014b, 3), I should at least in this way point out that Fricker did not develop her theory from scratch3. This does not mean, however, that her contribution is insignificant and reducible only to the popularization of the issue. Quite contrary, by following up work done in fields of feminist philosophy and social theory, social epistemology and virtue ethics and by contributing with her own original insights, she managed to develop a coherent theoretical and
2 Indeed, this is not a coincidence. José Medina calls our attention to the interesting fact that oppressed or marginalised subjects may have some distinctive epistemic advantages, and so they can be able to see things that privileged subjects cannot (Medina 2013, 45). I will return to this point in section 2.3. 3 She does not even pretend to. But being author of this text, it is now me who holds a certain amount of epistemic power over the reader, because I can choose what knowledge to convey and what to suppress – even though it is almost insignificant amount since this text is a diploma thesis written by a master student, not a paper by an influential philosopher.
5 conceptual framework that enables one to understand the subject matter from its causes to its effects and what kind of remedies are at our disposal.
Let me first introduce a few presuppositions that form the basis of Fricker’s reasoning. First, and perhaps most importantly, abstracted, generic accounts of our epistemic practices obscure the very problem lying in the centre of the subject matter. That is, reasoning based on a generic “liberal” subject A endowed with cold instrumental rationality and free from effects of social structure lacks theoretical and methodological tools necessary for seeing and understanding the epistemic injustice itself. The idea that we are equally socially unconstrained to transmit and receive knowledge as well as participate in its making and remaking is a normative ideal or a description far from being true to the everyday reality. Our account of epistemic – or social, in general – practices must be socially situated, that is “such that the participants [of epistemic practices] are conceived not in abstraction from relations of social power ... but as operating as social types who stand in relations of power to one another” (Fricker 2007, 3). That leads us to the second point: Fricker uses the Foucauldian account of power4 as a source of inspiration for her understanding of the concept. Accordingly, she defines social power as
“a practically socially situated capacity to control others’ actions, where this capacity may be exercised (actively or passively) by particular social agents, or alternatively, it may operate purely structurally.” (Fricker 2007, 13)5
Operation of power does not have to necessarily negative or harmful to involved subjects. But at the same time, it is the social power’s entanglement with our epistemic practices what in some cases leads to epistemic injustices.
Now we can finally turn to epistemic injustice itself. The term refers to a situation in which someone is wronged in her capacity as a knower (Fricker 2007, 20). Two questions may emerge: What is so epistemic about it? And what makes it unjust? To answer the first
4 Nonetheless, she does not follow Foucault and his adherents in all aspects. For instance, in contrast to Foucault, she believes that power exists even when it is not realized (Fricker 2007, 10). Also, she accuses postmodernist account of the relation between reason and power of being too reductionist. In her words, “it eradicates, or at least obscures, the distinction between what we have a reason to think and what mere relations of power are doing to our thinking” (Fricker 2007, 3). However, Amy Allen argues that Fricker could have been too hasty in her conclusions and that Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge regimes “offers a richer picture of hermeneutical injustices than that provided by Fricker” (Allen 2017, 187). 5 See (Fricker 2007, 9–14) for further elaboration.
6 question, let me turn to Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., who identified three senses in which epistemic injustices can be understood as epistemic. First, they wrong knowers as knowers. Second, they cause epistemic dysfunction. And last, it is “a wrong that a knower perpetrates as a knower and that an epistemic institution causes in its capacity as an epistemic institution”, that is, the wrongs are committed “within, and sometimes through the use of, our epistemic practices and institutions” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2017, 13–14). A simple example may illustrate all three dimensions: A man does not believe his wife that she has been sexually harassed at her workplace and accuses her of exaggerating. First, the women’s ability to know things (that she had been harassed) was questioned, second, the man missed an important piece of knowledge, and third, it happened during a conversation that was supposed to transmit knowledge from one person to another. As regards the second question, the injustice lies in the fact that the subject is treated unfairly, on a discriminatory basis and, most importantly, is wronged in capacity – to know – essential to human value, and thus suffers an intrinsic injustice (Fricker 2007, 44). Epistemic injustice is thus both an epistemological and ethical failure and harm.
Interestingly, all this happens inadvertently. There needs not to be a bad intention involved at all – and a perpetrator can even act against his interest as I tried to show in my example above. Indeed, Fricker (2017, 54) considers the absence of deliberate manipulation to be a definining part of the concept. Agents committing epistemic injustice do not do so on purpose – they are subjects to social power too, even though their predicament differs considerably from victims of the injustice. However, inadvertence does not guarantee exculpation. To the contrary, according to Fricker one is only rarely – when having epistemic bad luck6 – seen as not culpable in such situations. Nonetheless, what is important to note now is the related observation that injustice is very normal and not an aberration from a norm. Fricker follows Judith Shklar who brought our attention to the fact that injustice is “a normal social baseline, while active cries of resentment and demands for rectification are the precious exception” (Fricker 2007, 39). It is not
6 I will return to this point later in this chapter and also in section 2.3 because this exculpating moment proved to be unacceptable for some authors oriented on epistemologies of ignorance. Some went even so far to accuse Fricker herself of perpetrating epistemic oppression (Dotson 2012, 25). The reason I am mentioning this here is only to underline that it is deemed very easy to be guilty of committing epistemic injustice.
7 something difficult to encounter in one’s life – smaller or bigger injustices happen all the time. The same is true for epistemic injustice and especially for its testimonial variant.
As I have already suggested, Fricker distinguishes two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical. The former occurs in testimonial transactions when a speaker’s credibility is unfairly deflated due to a prejudicial judgement on the part of her hearer. The latter takes place before such exchanges when a subject is unable to make sense of her social experience due to lacking or insufficient hermeneutical resources. In the sections that follow, I will now turn to a description of each of the epistemic injustices and give this somewhat abstract outline above a more explicit content.
1.1 Testimonial Injustice Every time we find ourselves in a testimonial exchange, we must attribute some level of credibility to a speaker trying to convey something to us. That is, we must decide to what extent we can rely on the offered testimony7 by assessing the speaker’s competence and sincerity (Fricker 2007, 44) in what she is saying. To speed up this process, we often turn to use of stereotypes, i.e. “widely held attributions between a given social group and one or more attributes” (Fricker 2007, 30). There is nothing wrong about using them, insofar these associations are empirically reliable: They serve as heuristics, so we do not have to engage in laborious investigations into a speaker’s credibility each time we listen to someone. Imagine, for example, a female expert on early childhood education explaining what difference it makes – or does not make – when children are taught by men. If there is no extraordinary intervening factor – e.g. that she is a proven liar –, there is no strong reason not to believe stereotypes indicating that she can be trusted. She is considered to be an expert, which implicates education or rich experience in the field, and a woman, who, in our current social context, usually takes care of children, and so can be expected to have extra insights into the subject matter. So, as Fricker argues, insofar a stereotype “embodies an empirically reliable generalization ... it is epistemically desirable
7 Fricker understands testimony in testimonial injustice “in an extended sense to include not only all cases of telling but also cases of the expression to an interlocutor of judgements, views, and opinions” (2007, 50n22).
8 that the stereotype should help shape the credibility judgements we make” (Fricker 2007, 32).
The problem emerges when a stereotype is built upon prejudice rather than an empirically reliable generalisation. Fricker characterises prejudices as
“judgements, which may have a positive or a negative valence, and which display some (typically, epistemically culpable) resistance to counter-evidence owing to some affective investment on the part of the subject.” (Fricker 2007, 35)
Let us return to my example but imagine this time that the expert is a gay man – a person whose social identity is burdened with many prejudicial stereotypes, including outrageous beliefs such as that gay people have a natural propensity to child molestation. Several questions may suddenly emerge: Is he able to separate his expertise from affect? Is he trying to promote his “gay interests”? Does he have any expertise at all? And so on. Consequently, his credibility may in the eyes of his hearer shrink or implode completely – despite the absence of any good piece of evidence suggesting that he should not be trusted. This is an instance of what Fricker calls testimonial injustice.
Fricker describes testimonial injustice as a situation in which “prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word” (Fricker 2007, 1). By deflated8 Fricker (2007, 19) means lower than one is supposed to get according to evidence offered that she is saying truth. Nonetheless, she cautions against understanding the injustice involved simply as receiving less than what is fair, because that would imply that it is a problem reducible to the distributive model of justice, which she rejects for two reasons9. First, in contrast to goods such as wealth, “there is no puzzle about the fair distribution of credibility” (ibid.). And second, what makes goods such as wealth so well suited for the distributional model is their finitude and potential scarcity. Credibility, on
8 Although they may be disadvantageous in some ways, Fricker (2007, 20) does not consider situations in which credibility is unfairly inflated to be epistemically unjust because they do not undermine one as a subject of knowledge. 9 Later, in response to David Coady’s (2010) observations, she revised her position slightly. Now she distinguishes “discriminatory” epistemic injustice from a “distributive” kind (Fricker 2013, 1318). While the former she uses as a label for what she hitherto understood as epistemic injustice in general, the latter is “primarily a distributive injustice”, which covers cases in which someone is “receiving less than their fair share of an epistemic good, such as education” (Fricker 2017, 53). Nonetheless, as I will show with Coady (2017) in the following chapter, this distinction is unhelpful because “discriminatory” epistemic injustice may be still understood as distributive.
9 the other hand, “is not generally finite in this way” (Fricker 2007, 20), and so there needs not to arise a competition to get one’s share. Accordingly, she reiterates that in cases of epistemic injustice one is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower (ibid.), or, in cases of testimonial injustice, as a giver of knowledge.
Such situation may occur either in the form of a localised, incidental episode or as an instance of something deeper and systematic. The former case stands aside of Fricker’s interest10: these are situations in which audience is sceptical towards the speaker’s words because she is, for instance, a proponent of a new theoretical approach that is supposed to function as an alternative to dominant thinking. Such incident is localised in the sense that the prejudicial judgement does not track the speaker – it is just the novelty or alternativeness of her approach what makes the specific audience to distrust her unfairly. Now, it is the latter case which Fricker considers to be central to the concept of testimonial injustice. As we could see in my example with the gay expert, his testimony was questioned specifically for who he is, and this is probably not the only context in which he finds his credibility unfairly deflated. If this is true, we can say that the prejudice “tracks” the person (Fricker 2007, 27): he finds himself being exposed to prejudice in various spheres – political, economic, professional, etc. – of social life, for it is his social identity what attracts injustice – and not only the epistemic kind. Therefore, we may say that he faces systematic identity prejudicial credibility deficit which Fricker (2007, 28) highlights as the central case of testimonial injustice. Or, in the terms already described, he has been subjected to negative identity-prejudicial stereotype, which Fricker defines as
“[a] widely held disparaging association between a social group and one or more attributes, where this association embodies a generalization that displays some (typically, epistemically culpable) resistance to counter-evidence owing to an ethically bad affective investment.” (Fricker 2007, 35)
This brings us back to social power mentioned earlier, because who can convey knowledge to whom11 and who can gain knowledge from whom depends on power
10 She does not question its wrongfulness though and adds that if such incidental instances are persistent, they may have disastrous effects too (Fricker 2007, 29). 11 It is also the hearer’s identity what affects the transaction. The situation will look different in a conversation between two members of a marginalised social group and between members of two
10 relations (Fricker 2007, 90). More specifically, what we witnessed in my example with the gay expert was an operation of identity power, which is a form of social power12 “directly dependent upon shared social-imaginative conceptions of social identities” (Fricker 2007, 4). The hearer13 exploited asymmetry in power relations to silence the speaker, to epistemically objectivize him14. As the term suggests, objectification occurs when a subject is reduced to an object; or in Edward Craig’s (2002, 35–36) epistemological terms, when an informant, an epistemic agent who conveys information, is reduced to a source of information, a passive state of affairs from which information can be gleaned but itself can neither speak nor know. That practically means that the speaker – the gay expert – is “saying” something, but not really actively conveying any information. It is up to the hearer to extract and distil the information, to decide what is relevant and what is only noise – as if the speaker was nothing more than a grouping of clouds on the sky from which we can try to deduce whether it is going to rain or not. Following Kant, Fricker admits that it is perfectly fine to treat others as epistemic objects sometimes – e.g. “when the fact that one’s guest arrives bedraggled and shaking her umbrella may allow one to infer that it has been raining” (2007, 132). The problem arises when we treat others as mere epistemic objects, that is when we deny their subjectivity and wrongfully exclude them from participation in sharing of information – the practice “that defines the core of the very concept of knowledge” (Fricker 2007, 145).
We can now identify two kinds and two levels of harms involved in cases of testimonial injustice: ethical and epistemological (ibid.), and primary and secondary. A speaker is ethically harmed, or harmed as a human because she is wronged in a capacity essential to human value and ontologically reduced from a subject to an object15. And she is epistemically harmed, or harmed as a knower because she is excluded from the practice
differently positioned groups (Fricker 2007, 91). One may distrust a female speaker not only because she is a woman, but also because the hearer himself is a man. 12 Various forms of social power often go hand in hand – e.g. identity power may be closely linked to material power (Fricker 2007, 15–16) 13 But identity power can operate purely structurally too. Fricker presents an example of “an informally disenfranchised group, whose tendency not to vote arises from the fact that their collectively imagined social identity is such that they are not the sort of people who go in for political thinking and discussion” (Fricker 2007, 16). 14 Fricker (2007, 130) identifies two kinds of silence. The other one is called pre-emptive testimonial injustice and signifies the cases in which testimony is never solicited – that is, it works before any potential testimonial transaction. The victimised subject is thus epistemically excluded. 15 Fricker (Fricker 2007, 44) points out that this kind of harm has an important symbolic dimension: it carries “a social meaning to the effect that the subject is less than fully human”.
11 of sharing information which is essential for being a knower. These are the primary or intrinsic, irreducible harms. Then there are adverse implications, or secondary, extrinsic harms, which may be practical, epistemic, a psychological (Fricker 2007, 46–55). Briefly: Being distrusted is practical harm. Loss of epistemic confidence in one’s beliefs or her justifications for them constitutes epistemic harms, which may lead to loss of knowledge or failure to acquire new pieces of knowledge. Psychological harms take the form of self- fulfilling prejudices and/or failure to “steady” one’s mind, i.e. to find out what one actually thinks about the world and herself for which subject needs to engage in trustful interaction with others (Fricker 2007, 51–53).
Let me now recall that although a hearer uses her predominance to wrong her speaker, she herself is subjected to power too. Since identity power operates primarily at the level of coordinated, collective imaginative conceptions of social identity – stereotypes –, and not on the level of the individual, it can control actions of a subject even despite her beliefs (Fricker 2007, 15). It is quite possible that the prejudice affecting her judgement comes from her prejudiced beliefs. But there is also a possibility – not small at all – that the prejudice is not doxastically mediated but coming from social imagination and affecting our judgements directly, sometimes even without our awareness (Fricker 2007, 36). That is, the subject may believe that gay people do not differ from her in any way relevant to early childhood education, and yet she inadvertently deflates credibility of such person16. As Fricker explains, this is possible because our credibility judgements are non- inferential. Unless prompted by some extraordinary factors, we do not really think about how much credibility should we assign to a speaker. Instead, we immediately perceive her as more or less credible – we see her in epistemic colour (Fricker 2007, 71)17. And since this capacity, called testimonial sensibility, is informed by an inherited socially situated
16 Such situations may happen even to subjects who are conscious of unequal power relations and committed to resistance against related prejudicial stereotypes. Fricker (2007, 37) draws our attention to an example of a feminist woman free of sexist beliefs who does not take female political candidates as seriously as she does in case of male candidates. According to Fricker (2007, 39), this may be a case of residual internalisation, which may take either a diachronic or synchronic form. If her social imagination lags behind her beliefs – she changed them recently, perhaps, and so her intuition is still aligned with the old prejudiced ones – we can conceptualise her situation as a case of diachronic residual internalisation. In contrast, if she is a life-long feminist and yet her intuitive judgements sometimes betray her, maybe she lives in an atmosphere heavy with sexist stereotypes in which it may be difficult to filter out prejudice wholly efficiently – this would be a case of synchronic residual internalisation. 17 Here Fricker (2007, 71–72) draws on moral cognitivism in the virtue ethical tradition according to which the ability of moral understanding of the world is a matter of sensibility acquired by socialisation and training. The subject then becomes able to see the world in “moral colour”.
12 body of generalisations about “the competences and motivations of this or that social type in this or that context” (ibid.), a form of stereotypes again, we are not completely free at deciding how to perceive others.
The influence of the collective social imagination is not inescapable though. It is not even the only factor informing our testimonial sensibility. Besides the passive social inheritance, there is also sometimes passive and sometimes active individual input in the form of subject’s individual experiences. At times, the difference between what a subject experiences and what the inherited beliefs tell her to see may cause dissonance. The subject is responsible for taking into account such tensions and to find an appropriate critical link between the two streams of experience, correct for prejudices, and train this capacity, which never ceases to adapt (Fricker 2007, 34). This practice may eventually lead to the acquisition of the virtue of testimonial justice18 for which one qualifies if, first, her credibility judgement is unprejudiced reliably enough across time and space, and if, second, she is motivated by the sake of the virtue itself rather than by mere instrumental reasons.
Finally, let me return to the questions of culpability. It follows from what was said above that a hearer is epistemically and ethically culpable for committing testimonial injustice when wrongs his interlocutor by an unfair deflation of her trustworthiness by relying on prejudicially biased credibility judgement. As was suggested, it is not easy to avoid committing testimonial injustice – it is in fact a norm rather than an aberration. Being a virtuous hearer is not a matter of decision, it demands training. Also, it is impossible to possess this virtue completely, for the social reality changes and even if it did not, it is probably not in one’s capacity to become acquainted with every sphere of life and with every social group. The best one can do is to count with such possibilities and be more intellectually humble. Nonetheless, as Kantian ethics assert, ought implies can. Fricker argues that in some socio-historical contexts lines of reflection necessary for some judgements to be made may be simply absent or out of reach (2007, 100). Therefore, it
18 It might not be immediately relevant for the purpose of this thesis but let me add that Fricker claims that this virtue defies traditional categorisations. Depending on the context, it may be either intellectual or ethical virtue, and so it is hybrid in its nature – intellectual-ethical. She reaches this conclusion by demonstrating that while the immediate aim of the virtue is always the same – to neutralise prejudice in one’s credibility judgement –, ultimately it may aim to achieve either truth or justice (Fricker 2007, 122). Perhaps the most interesting implication is that the ultimate ends do not have to be always in harmony (Fricker 2007, 126).
13 would require extraordinary insight and sensibility to overcome this predicament and avoid committing testimonial injustice. For such cases, Fricker (2007, 103) reserves the term circumstantial epistemic bad luck, which signifies the situation in wherein a subject is not culpable because the requisite critical consciousness is unavailable. Nonetheless, she continues, that does not necessarily mean that the subject’s conduct is perfectly fine. We need to acknowledge that besides routine discursive moves which use available conceptual resources in a mundane way, there are also exceptional discursive moves which use them innovatively and may lead to progress. In plain words, it required some innovative thinking to come with the idea that burning women accused of witchcraft is not ok. Now, in Fricker’s view, we cannot blame people for making routine moral judgements. But we can feel disappointed and hold them responsible for making routine moral judgements in a socio-historical context “in which a more exceptional alternative is ... just around the corner” (Fricker 2007, 105), that is potentially available given the present conditions.
1.2 Hermeneutical Injustice The ability to understand and express what one experiences should not be taken for granted. Sometimes one may lack appropriate words because what she tries to describe is elusive and defies verbal confinement – perhaps it is pure joy, grief or mystical experience. In such cases, it does not seem appropriate to consider the absence of fitting words to be harmful, and the task of finding them is usually entrusted to art or philosophy. However, there are also cases, in which it is in one’s interest to be able to describe her experiences – otherwise, she is disadvantaged and harmed. And there are also cases where the inability to do so is not a mere coincidence, but a result of inequality in power relations. Such cases would qualify for what Miranda Fricker termed hermeneutical injustice, which is
“the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization.” (Fricker 2007, 158)
She usually replaces “collective understanding” with the term “collective hermeneutical resources”, or “shared pool of concepts and interpretative tropes” as she calls it elsewhere
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(Fricker 2016, 163), but it always means a collection of meanings, concepts or conceptualisations that are held in common. As she recently clarified in response to her critics (e.g. Mason 2011; Medina 2013), the fact that a concept is not present in collective hermeneutical resources does not necessarily mean that it does not exist (Fricker 2016, 164–70). Some hermeneutical resources are not equally spread across the whole society, and so they may be missing from the shared pool – but they do exist localised in particular groups’ resources. Other concepts, however, may not exist at all yet. Accordingly, collective hermeneutical resources are those “that just about anyone can draw upon and expect those meanings to be understood across social space by just about anyone else” (Fricker 2016, 163). In any case, if a concept is missing from the shared pool, the intelligibility of its use is hindered.
To illustrate hermeneutical injustice with an example, Fricker invites us to consider a real-life situation of a woman, Carmita Wood, sexually harassed at her workplace before the term “sexual harassment” emerged. Her boss “would jiggle his crotch when he stood near her desk ... or he’d deliberately brush against her breasts while reaching for some papers” and one night “he cornered her in the elevator and planted some unwanted kisses on her mouth” (Brownmiller, as cited in Fricker 2007, 150). When she finally quit her job, she failed to explain to an unemployment insurance investigator why she did so: She “was at a loss to describe the hateful episodes. She was ashamed and embarrassed” and eventually stated “that her reasons were personal” (ibid.). Only after some time, when she met women who had a similar experience at some point in their life, she realized that their stories had very much in common, but this “common” had no name – there was a lacuna in their hermeneutical resources, eventually filled with the term “sexual harassment” (ibid.).
Wood’s case exemplifies vividly what does it mean to have some area of social experience obscured, but it still needs to be clarified what is meant by “hermeneutical marginalisation”. As I mentioned earlier, Fricker partially draws on Foucault’s work, and we can find his imprints also in the idea behind hermeneutical marginalisation. Language is a constantly evolving system, and it is no longer outrageously daring to claim, as postmodernist authors have been doing, that meaning of concepts we use is contingent and undoubtedly also influenced by power relations. Accordingly, hermeneutical resources are not given to us – society makes them. However, as always, there are power
15 inequalities involved: not everyone has the same opportunity to participate in the making and remaking of the resources. Some subjects are excluded from this process and subordinated to more powerful agents – they are hermeneutically marginalised (Fricker 2007, 153). And if marginalisation tracks them due to their identity also through other social activities, then the resultant hermeneutical injustice is typically systematic (Fricker 2007, 156) as opposed to one-off or incidental.
In less abstract terms, it is not difficult to imagine groups that lack proper representation in positions that have the best opportunities to shape the concepts we use; e.g. there are not many, if any, influential Romani politicians, journalists, TV celebrities or musicians in the Czech society. Therefore, their capacity to participate in the process of meaning-making is considerably deflated, and thus there may be gaps in the collective hermeneutical resources where the terms signifying their distinctive experiences should be. This exclusion makes the collective hermeneutical resources biased – they reflect lives of dominant groups but less so of those groups subordinated to them. Consequently, while “the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their [social] experiences ready to draw on ... the powerless are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly, with at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible” (Fricker 2007, 148). Accordingly, Fricker suggests using a narrower definition for the cases of systematic hermeneutical injustice, which describes it as
“the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” (Fricker 2007, 155)
It does not mean that hermeneutical injustice would render the whole life of systematically marginalised subjects unintelligible. At least parts of their social experiences are always shared with the dominant subject, and so are well understood. Rather, operations of hermeneutical injustice are localised and centred in hermeneutical hotspots. These are “locations in social life where the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation” or where they even have “a positive interest in sustaining extant misinterpretation” (Fricker 2007, 153) that covers the proper meaning of the situation, e.g. exactly the way “flirting” served as a cover for “sexual harassment”.
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Then there are incidental cases for which much of the already said is true too. Again, the root cause is hermeneutical marginalisation, but this time, Fricker argues, it is not something that would track the subject across different social spheres, perhaps because her social identity is well positioned in terms of identity power. She offers an example from Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, in which a man, Joe, is persistently stalked by another man “with delusions of love between him and Joe” (Fricker 2007, 156). When Joe tells his female partner and later a police officer about his concerns, both hearers trivialise his experience. On Fricker’s (2007, 157) interpretation, there is a lacuna in collective hermeneutical resources which prevents Joe from communicating his experience intelligible. The difference between this case and the case of Carmita Wood or the Roma people is that Joe probably does not face marginalisation in any other sphere of his life – it is just “a one-off moment of powerlessness” as Fricker (2007, 156) terms it19.
In her more recent paper, Fricker (2013, 1319) identified three dimensions along which hermeneutical injustice may exist in various degrees of severity. First, hermeneutical injustice is internally diverse as regards the degree of misunderstanding. As an example of extreme misunderstanding may serve conception of domestic violence “as the violent affirmation of a proper natural hierarchy” (ibid.), while less extreme cases may involve understanding domestic violence as a criminal offence while still having some related social meanings confused. Second, there is diversity in how widespread the failure of understanding is20. The “maximal” cases already presented, in which the subject herself is unable to comprehend her experiences, are one extreme. But there are also “minimal” cases, in which subjects know perfectly well what is happening to them, but since they are marginalized, their experience is insufficiently represented in the collective hermeneutical resources, and so their attempts to talk about the issue are unintelligible to dominant knowers (Fricker 2013, 1319, 2016, 165–68). The third dimension extends our understanding of what it is that is not understood. Besides unintelligible experiences, there also may be gaps in hermeneutical resources that concern distinctive forms of expression rather than the content of what is said. Imagine, for instance, a person having a strong accent – perhaps, as Orwell observed, “dropping her aitches” (Crystal 2016; Orwell 2001) – or using slang expressions characteristic for working class. Insofar this
19 This is not supposed to mean, however, that incidental cases are less ethically serious (Fricker 2007, 158). 20 See also section 2.3 of this thesis.
17 group is also hermeneutically marginalised, she may find herself in a situation in which her accent would be perceived as so alien and ridiculously unintelligible that her attempts to take part, e.g., in an intellectual debate would simply fail.
Introduction of the second dimension allows us to see clearly that not knowing, or lacking fitting words, does not necessarily equal being wronged: The subordinated subject is wronged, but it is the dominant subject who may lack words. The same is true also for the “paradigmatic” cases offered at the beginning of this section in which literally no one knows: Both the powerful and the powerless are epistemically handicapped by the absence of a proper concept. However, their disadvantage is not symmetrical, and only one side is wronged, and thus suffering injustice. The difference rests in the fact that one side is having obscured something from the shared hermeneutical resources which is particularly in her interest to be rendered intelligible. This inability to make this important something communicatively intelligible, which is the result of unequal hermeneutical opportunity, is the primary harm of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007, 162)21. This “important something” can be social experience but also the very self of the subject. Indeed, the marginalised group may be unable to participate equally in making and re-making of the collective hermeneutical resources pertinent to its very self. Consequentially, hermeneutical injustice may have power to construct, constitutively or causally, the group as something it is not and “which it is against [its] interests to be seen to be” (Fricker 2007, 168). In such cases, concepts available to use disproportionally reflect views of the dominant group, and so skew the identity of the subordinated subject. Secondary harms, in the form of practical and epistemic disadvantages, are similar to those produced by testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007, 163), and so I will not present them again here.
One important thing has not been mentioned yet, and that is the matter of culpability. Interestingly, in contrast to testimonial injustice, no agent perpetrates hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007, 159). In Fricker’s view, no individual can be blamed for misunderstanding of what is absent from the collective hermeneutical resources. There is
21 Fricker draws our attention to an important difference between testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice: in the former case, “the prejudicial exclusion is made in relation to the [social identity of the] speaker”, while in the latter it is “in relation to what they are trying to say and/or how they are saying it” (Fricker 2007, 162). What both cases have in common is “prejudicial exclusion from participation in the spread of knowledge” (ibid.).
18 no ethical failure involved – quite contrary the hearer may be doing her best to understand, and yet she fails (Fricker 2017, 59). Hermeneutical injustice is a purely structural issue which exists “dormant” and materialises “in a more or less doomed attempt on the part of the subject to render an experience intelligible, either to herself or to an interlocutor” (ibid.). That does not preclude, however, the possibility of possessing the virtue of hermeneutical justice. In this case, the virtuous hearer would strive to make his credibility reflect
“the degree to which the interpretation the speaker is struggling to articulate would make good sense if the attempt to articulate it were being made in a more inclusive hermeneutical climate—one without structural identity prejudice” (Fricker 2007, 170, emphasis removed)
While the primary ethical role22 of this virtue is to correct for the negative impact that hermeneutical injustice has on a speaker, it is important to note that there is also an important secondary ethically positive role. Each exercise of the virtue erodes hermeneutical marginalisation a bit because the marginalised subject gets an opportunity to contribute with her perspective (Fricker 2017, 54–55). Moreover, if the virtue is performed collectively, Fricker suggests, it “could ultimately lead to eradication of hermeneutical injustice” (2007, 174).
22 The structure of the virtue of hermeneutical justice is the same as in the case of the virtue of testimonial justice. While the immediate aim is “to neutralize the impact of structural identity prejudice on one’s credibility judgement”, the ultimate end differs depending on the context – it may aim either at truth or justice. Accordingly, it is an intellectual-ethical virtue.
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2 Epistemic Injustice: Replies Fricker’s book attracted as much praise as critique. It is perfectly understandable that it is beyond a single person’s capacities to develop a definitive theory that would need no enhancements. The following pages must be read in this light – Fricker developed a solid basis, in many ways innovative, that none of the authors I cite here refuted or rejected however harsh they critique may sound. At the same time, I must emphasise that “epistemic injustice” does not equal “Fricker”. As was already said above, she was preceded by like-minded authors who developed similar ideas under different names, and now also followed by scholars who took her concepts to positions she might not have envisaged. As Kristie Dotson (2012, 42) pointed out, Fricker’s account is an account. It has strong and weak points, but most importantly, it is only one perspective among many.
Since the character of this thesis is introductory, I nevertheless do adhere to Fricker’s theoretical apparatus and take it as a referential point even in this chapter. So, below I present remarks of other authors, and to a smaller extent also mine, developed in response to Fricker’s book and articles. Needless to say, this exposition is far from exhaustive. I selected issues that struck me, a reader, as the most important qualifications, both regarding the theory in general and the aims of this thesis in particular. Therefore, this chapter should serve as a suggestion to understand some parts of Fricker’s work differently rather than as an exhibition of all conceivable points of critique.
This chapter is divided into three sections. I begin with a critique of Fricker’s “isolationist” approach towards credibility attributions, according to which credibility is infinite, and so we do not need to be concerned with unfair credibility inflations. In her view, testimonial injustice is not a matter of the distributional model of justice. That may or may not be correct – opinions of the authors I cite in the section diverge in this regard. More importantly, though, credibility excesses play a more significant role than Fricker assumes because credibility is interactive, and so disproportionate attribution of credibility affects the whole testimonial interaction. I also draw attention to a structural variant of testimonial injustice that concerns unfair distribution of credibility markers. In the second section, I turn to a discussion between Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. and Ann J. Cahill. Inspired by Cahill’s critique of the term objectification in the context of sexual mistreatment, Pohlhaus argues that victims of testimonial injustice suffer epistemic
20 derivatisation, not objectification. This allows her to see the harm of testimonial injustice in a different light: the victim is not reduced to an object but to a reflection or derivate of the dominant subject. Finally, in the last section, I present Kristie Dotson’s contributory injustice. This kind of epistemic injustice shares some features with the original two types but captures an important aspect that was omitted from Fricker’s account: agents’ ethically and epistemically bad practices that prevent other knowers from contributing to the collective hermeneutical resources. I conclude noting that boundaries between the forms of epistemic injustice are fluid: Sometimes it may be difficult to say whether we witness one kind of injustice or another, and we should not strive to delineate them strictly. Indeed, as Pohlhaus (2017) argued, it is even possible to abandon this typology altogether.
2.1 Distribution of Credibility and Structural Testimonial Injustice In the very first paragraph of her book titled Epistemic Injustice, Fricker (2007, 1) warned the reader that unfair distribution of epistemic goods is not what she meant by the term “epistemic injustice”. The explanation she offered was simple and persuasive: she argued that in cases of unfair distribution of epistemic goods it is only incidental that the goods in question are of an epistemic kind, and so there would not be anything distinctive about epistemic injustice. She was later prompted to qualify her position after David Coady (2010) challenged her opinion that epistemic goods are goods as any. He argued that there are epistemic goods that are – in contrast to, e.g., wealth – intrinsically valuable, i.e. irreducible to means to other goods, and so they cannot be considered epistemic only incidentally. Accepting his point, she started distinguishing between distributional and discriminative kind of epistemic injustice and stated that her work revolves around the latter (Fricker 2013, 1318). This was not, however, the only instance in which she cautioned against thinking in distributional terms – and, to my mind, not the most important one.
She rejected the distributional model for the second time when discussing deficits and excesses in credibility economy, i.e. testimonial injustice. In her view, this way of reasoning is not suitable for thinking about this issue for two reasons. First, in contrast to goods such as wealth, “there is no puzzle about the fair distribution of credibility” (Fricker
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2007, 19). Fricker assumes that the level of credibility should simply correlate with the evidence that the subject is speaking the truth. Second, credibility is not a finite source, and so it does not invite competition over its acquisition and the related ethical dilemma how to distribute goods in conditions of scarcity (Fricker 2007, 20). Recognition of infiniteness of credibility allows her to leave out credibility excess of this picture because it is not substantial for the injustice in question – no one is harmed or wronged by credibility excess. In Fricker’s view, inflated level of credibility neither goes at anyone else’s expense, nor it immediately23 harms or wrongs the subject herself because it does not diminish her status as a knower (ibid.).
These assumptions were challenged by two authors in particular: José Medina and, again, David Coady. To start from the end, Medina claimed that it is short-sighted to focus only on immediate harms because epistemic injustices “have a temporal trajectory and reverberate across a multiplicity of contexts and social interactions” (2013, 59). Fricker (2007, 47–49) herself mentioned that epistemic injustices might, e.g., impair one’s epistemic development, which clearly is anything but an immediate effect. It is thus surprising that she rejects this temporal dimension in the discussion of credibility excesses which may have similar non-immediate impacts – such as spoilage of one’s epistemic character which I will briefly discuss in the following section. But credibility excesses may have immediate effects too; e.g. it may prompt one to become overly self- confident and arrogant during a conversation (Medina 2013, 60). Finally, Medina invited us to consider the negative effects – immediate or not – that inappropriately inflated credibility can have on other interlocutors, including the hearer who assesses the situation. Most importantly, the false epistemic authority of the speaker may inhibit their epistemic agency and judgement to the extent that they fail to question or object what they are being told (Medina 2013, 60).
Now, Medina agrees with Fricker that credibility is not a finite good, and so, in this sense, it does not have distributive nature. This does not mean, however, that we can freely attribute credibility with no implications for other involved subjects at all. What
23 Fricker (2007, 21) asserts that it may harm the subject only in the long run, as a cumulation of individual episodes of credibility excess that spoils one’s epistemic character. Individually, however, these moments do no harm to the speaker.
22 she, in his view, overlooked is that credibility is interactive and that credibility judgements involve implicit comparisons and contrasts with other subjects (Medina 2013, 63). Therefore, if we give disproportionately24 high amount of credibility to someone, not only that we act unfairly, but we make the subject more trustworthy at someone’s expense. It follows logically that we indirectly harmed other participants of the given interaction because we broke the whole system of proportionality – someone is thereby deemed comparatively less credible than should be. The conclusion we should draw from this is that only by looking at credibility judgments holistically, we can see that credibility excesses are, contrary to what Fricker thinks, inseparable part of the mechanism behind epistemic injustice.
Coady does not add much to what was already said, only shifts this account definitely towards the distributional model. In contrast to Medina, he asserts that credibility is finite good and that competition over it “is a pervasive feature of much of our social and political life” (D. Coady 2017, 63). In his view, it thus perfectly fits the distributional model. On the other hand, even though unjustifiable credibility excesses are often linked to unjustifiable credibility deficits, he claims that attribution of credibility is not in all cases a zero-sum game because credibility judgements are not always contrastive and comparative. Although he does not provide any explanation for this, only an analogy with wealth and the possibility of getting wealthier “at no cost to anyone else”, it seems to be perfectly true for situations such as in which there is no clash between speakers25. Given the purpose of this thesis, I do not consider necessary to decide here whether Medina’s proportional or Coady’s distributional account better captures the reality for they both point in a quite similar direction. I do think, however, that Coady made a good point when he noticed that the whole process could be a non-zero-sum game too. Indeed, it is fairly easy even to imagine a situation in which a supportive testimony provided by an epistemically authoritative subject may “lift” other subject’s unfairly deflated level of credibility – such
24 In Medina’s view, credibility should be attributed proportionally to “epistemic credentials shown by the speaker” (2013, 61). He does not differ in this respect from Fricker who claims that the hearer’s obligation is to “match the level of credibility she attributes to her interlocutor to the evidence that he is offering the truth” (2007, 19). 25 It is not so clear, though, whether credibility judgement ceases to be comparative and contrastive in such cases. The absence of a conflict does not prevent us from thinking about the speakers as, for instance, equally credible.
23 as when a person we, perhaps uncritically, admire stands up for a person against whom we are prejudiced.
But Coady applied the distributional model on hermeneutical injustice too. In his view, the access to making and re-making of hermeneutical resources is also limited and subject to competition. I do not see any benefit in insisting on utilization of this model, yet he made usefully explicit something what so far was a mere unspoken assumption. That is, in case of both levels of credibility and access to hermeneutical resources, equal is not always just. In regard to the former, this observation should not come unexpected: I have already said a lot about fair and proportional attribution of credibility. But when it comes to the latter, it may a bit surprising. Indeed, Fricker discussed unequal access to hermeneutical resources only in connection to unfair hermeneutical marginalization. However, does it mean that the ideal state is equal participation? Probably not. As Coady (2017, 65) reminded us, Fricker is not an egalitarian when it comes to credibility, and so, perhaps, she would agree with him that equality is not desirable in the case of hermeneutical resources either. To explain his position, he suggested considering the hermeneutical situation of neo-Nazis. Although they have their own understanding of words such as “Jew”, they have very limited opportunities to contribute with their conception to shared hermeneutical resources. This may be a result of their exclusion, and so it would make sense to consider them being hermeneutically marginalized and victims of hermeneutical injustice. But Coady argued that this is not the case for “it is a good thing” that they are limited in this way – there is no injustice present. Accordingly, he suggested that “[s]ome groups of people ... do not deserve to have as much hermeneutic power as others” (ibid.). He then presented another example, this time concerning opponents of same-sex marriage who, in his view, can be also rightfully inhibited in this way. Unfortunately, he did not offer any rule for determining what is the fair distribution of the access to hermeneutical resources or hermeneutic power as he calls it. The best he gave us is a comment that both Nazis and the opponents of same-sex marriage “were wrong all along” (D. Coady 2017, 66). Still, I consider this to be a useful and thought-provoking observation.
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Finally, Elizabeth Anderson (2012) used the distributional model to show that testimonial injustice can also take purely structural forms26. As I explained in the first chapter, in attributing credibility we often rely on stereotypes, and insofar they are empirically reliable, there is nothing wrong with using them. These stereotypes leave imprints on subjects in the form of “credibility markers” – indicators that serve one to decide whether and to what extent can a speaker be trusted. Therefore, if I witness a debate about causes of the colony collapse disorder, one’s university background in biology can probably serve as a quite legitimate sign when it comes to attribution of credibility. Now, the problem emerges when there is injustice in the distribution of these markers of credibility. Anderson (2012, 169) invites us to consider a relatively widespread27 marker of credibility: use of standardised grammar. Since one acquires the skill of speaking according to standardised rules mostly at school, inability to speak “correctly” may imply that the subject is poorly educated or not educated at all. Therefore, when it comes to educated judgements, the hearer may just because of this marker decide to doubt the speaker’s testimony. However, if some groups in the given society are deprived of fair access to education, its members may consequently be unable to use standardised grammar, and so be treated as less credible – even when talking about issues about which they do have the knowledge, even if acquired outside the formal education system. In other words, “an original structural injustice ... generates additional structural inequalities in opportunities for exercising full epistemic agency” (ibid.) in the form of unfairly distributed credibility markers. Interestingly though, the hearer herself does no wrong when she lets her judgement be guided by such unfair marker, for the injustice is in the structure and may be very difficult to notice. Quite contrary, she follows “a sound epistemic procedure that could even be justified to (and perhaps shared by) the Speaker herself” (Wanderer 2017, 34).
26 Besides differential access to credibility markers that I present here, Anderson also identified two other causes of group-based credibility deficits: ethnocentrism and “shared reality bias” (2012, 169). Since they are more or less integrated into the third kind of epistemic injustice I present in section 2.3, I will not discuss them. 27 In fact, it is so common in our societies that it would probably be more useful to talk about it in negative terms, i.e. to think about the use of non-standardized grammar as a marker of incredibility. After all, we do not usually attribute credibility to a speaker just because she is able to speak according to standardized rules.
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2.2 Epistemic Objectification and Derivatization Let me remind us that Fricker portrays the primary harm of testimonial injustice as epistemic objectification: The subject is excluded from the community of knowers and treated as a mere source of information. As such, she cannot “speak” – she is only a silent, passive object, like a grouping of clouds, from which information can be gleaned. As hauntingly poetic as it may sound, it does not quite feel like a fitting description of reality though. For when I unfairly distrust my partner, I am still not treating her as a mere source of information. Rather, I arrogantly think that I know something better than her or that she is not in a position to know what she is saying. I do not glean information from her as if she was a piece of stone; I do not analyse her words, deconstruct them and look for hidden patterns and meanings as if she could not express them on her own. And if I did, our connection would be better described by the word “tyranny” rather than “romantic relationship”. Indeed, the terms Fricker uses – being a mere object, a source of information – evoke situations of total domination or asymmetry, such as Leo Johnson’s tyrannical treatment of his wife Shelly portrayed by Lynch and Frost in their Twin Peaks. Hopefully, such extreme situations, although much more widespread than we maybe recognize, are still not quite normal in our societies – while testimonial injustice, as Fricker points out, definitely is. Let me now bring in a conversation between two scholars to turn these intuitive remarks into a theoretically informed account.
Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. (2014a) invited us to consider an interesting paradox. When I dismiss information without any good reason whatsoever, I epistemically fail no matter whether that piece of information was gleaned from an object or offered by a subject. However, perceptions of my failure may peculiarly differ depending on the origin of the information. If I, without any good reason, refuse to believe that it is raining outside, although I can clearly see people carrying umbrellas above their heads and perhaps even the falling raindrops, others may rightly see me as irrational. However, if I, without any good reason for doubt, fail to believe what other person is telling me, this “sanction” does not always follow. In the way of this contrast, Pohlhaus shows us that understanding victims of testimonial injustice as epistemic objects is not quite fitting: If a man doubts a woman’s explanation why her car broke down, he is not usually seen as acting irrationally. Indeed, victims of testimonial injustice can be distrusted without the risk of this kind of a
26 sanction because they are perceived as subjects, and as subjects, they have “the capacity to deceive and/or to be deceived” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2014a, 104).
However, victims of testimonial injustice are not recognized as full subjects either. To resolve this problem, Pohlhaus turned to Simone de Beauvoir analysis of the relation between men and women and Ann J. Cahill’s (2011) related suggestion to use the term “derivatisation” instead of “objectification” when it comes to cases of sexual mistreatment. Although Cahill (2014) objected28 against Pohlhaus’ reading of her work as primarily influenced by Beauvoir – I will explain her objection just in a moment –, Beauvoir’s concepts provide us with a useful starting point. In her analysis of the position of women, Beauvoir asserted that there are not only subjects and objects but also “others” or “semi- subjects” in a sense (Pohlhaus Jr. 2014a, 105). Their sole purpose is to provide recognition to subjects, for objects cannot do this, and it is too risky to ask other full subjects for recognition – one would be too vulnerable to unpleasant critique and other inputs that may threaten her or his conception of self and the world. This recognition, however, is monodirectional: subjects do not recognise the full subjectivity of semi-subjects, for they serve only as a confirmation of and support to subjects. This treatment robs semi-subjects of their unique subjectivity and leaves them only with what they can find in the subjectivity of the full subject. In Cahill’s words, semi-subjects are “derivatised” where “to derivatize is to portray, render, understand, or approach a being solely or primarily as the reflection, projection or expression of another being’s identity, desires, fears, etc.” (2011, 32). This leads to the situation in which
“[t]he derivatized subject becomes reducible in in all relevant ways to the derivatizing subject’s existence–other elements of her ... being or subjectivity are disregarded, ignored or undervalued. Should the derivatized subject dare to demonstrate aspects of her subjectivity that fall outside the derivatizer’s being– assuming such a demonstration can even be perceived (it may well be so incomprehensible so as to be beyond the perceptual range of the derivatizer)– she will be perceived as arrogant, treasonous, and dangerously rebellious.” (Cahill 2011, 32)
28 Their discussion was a rather friendly exchange. Both authors acknowledged that their thoughts are for the most of the time in agreement and that the major issue is “whether the language [Pohlhaus] use[s] can say what [she] want[s] it to say” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2014b, 44).
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Pohlhaus argues that this account fits situations of testimonial injustice better than Fricker’s mechanism of objectification. The victim of testimonial injustice is distrusted because her sole purpose is to confirm what the subject believes and because she cannot know more than the subject, whose mere derivate she is, does. Attempts to contribute with own pieces of information that “would redirect epistemic practices toward those parts of her experienced world that extend beyond or trouble the veracity of the dominantly experienced world” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2014a, 107) are simply dismissed as implausible or mistaken. Accordingly, Pohlhaus redefines the primary harm of testimonial injustice as “being relegated to the role of epistemic other, being treated as though the range of one’s subject capacities is merely derivative of another’s” (ibid.)29.
Now, in Beauvoir's logic, the remedy would be to promote other to the position of the subject, which is exactly why Cahill objects against reading her work as Beauvoirian. As she explains, Beauvoir understands otherness as a problem, while her derivatisation model, inspired by writings of Luce Irigaray, shows that the real problem is sameness: The non-dominant subject is constructed as insufficiently distinct or not distinct at all from the dominant one (Cahill 2014, 67). Furthermore, she argues that the subject/other model obscures this fact, because labelling the derivatised subject as “other” implies that she is already distinct – but the problem is that she is construed as not distinct at all (ibid.)! Following Irigaray, Cahill suggested to replace illusory difference, or seeming otherness, with actual otherness, or “a robust difference that renders both the nondominant subject and the dominant subject as other” (ibid.). In other words, we should strive for the other/other relationship, where all subjects will be understood as “other-to-another, as distinct, differentiated, and nonreducible” (ibid.). Pohlhaus acknowledged these points but pointed out that there is at least one sense in which subjects should regard one another as same. That is, in the sense that
“each is capable of uniquely contributing to shared pool(s) of knowledge and to collective epistemic resources in ways that may affect epistemic agents by challenging embodied habits of mind, possibly even redirecting epistemic comportment(s) within the world thereby informing embodied knowers in
29 Matthew Congdon (2017, 248–50) put forward a similar idea: epistemic injustice as involving the moral harm of misrecognition in the Honnethian sense of the word.
28
ways that they could not have done on their own or even predicted.” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2014b, 47)
Let me finish this section with my own remarks. Pohlhaus argues that the derivatisation conception of testimonial injustice has several additional advantages, one of them being its explanatory power of the selectivity of distrust towards victim’s testimonies. Fricker herself noticed that there are “pockets of epistemic trust” (2007, 131). By this term she meant that even a white supremacist may believe a black speaker when it comes to certain topics, “so long as there was no challenge to a white person’s word, no perceived implication of [black speaker’s] non-inferiority of intellect, nothing about the subject matter that might be seen to imply that this Negro was getting above himself” (ibid.). Nonetheless, in Pohlhaus’ view, Fricker’s subject/object model did not give us any explanation of why this inconsistency occurs – “it leaves the impression” as if it depended on the will of the perpetrator (2014a, 108). In contrast, she asserts that “hearers perceive the speaker as credible only when the speaker’s testimony does not trouble the scope of the hearer’s subjectivity” (ibid.). But I believe that this is what Fricker meant: As she notes in the quote above, the subject accepts information as long as it does not doubt her own beliefs, including self-conception – that is the reason why “the Negro” cannot get above himself because it would threaten hearer’s understanding of subjectivity. However, it is probably true that her formulation is too vague to be useful, and so I accept Pohlhaus’ clarification.
My second and more important remark. Pohlhaus claims that “testimonial injustice does not just prevent information from being circulated, but rather it prevents a particular kind of information from being circulated” (2014a, 109, emphasis mine). However, I would like to caution against focusing on information – as opposed to a conveyor of the information – too much. If a man dismissed his wife explanation of why their car broke down only to later find out, perhaps upon his own examination of the car, that she was right, he most likely would accept the information. The information itself – that they bought low-quality fuel perhaps – does not threaten his subjectivity. The problem is that a woman, a subject who is not supposed to know such things, offers this information30,
30 Or that he, as a man, who is supposed to know such things, did not come with this idea first. In both cases I am, of course, merely reflecting prevailing stereotypes, not my own views.
29 and so threatens his belief of male superiority or impervious, traditional gender roles. So, the information itself is not the problem in this case. I do not doubt that Pohlhaus recognises this difference as well31, and yet, I would suggest reserving the category of testimonial injustice only for cases where the root cause of epistemic dysfunction is hearer’s prejudiced view of speaker’s identity which leads to unfair credibility deflation. I understand cases in which the problem rests in the incompatibility of information with one’s belief system as belonging to the category of contributory injustice which I present in the following section. There is an important distinction32 in the sense that in the latter case, where the information itself is problematic, it does not matter so much who the speaker is.
2.3 Being Insensitive to Insensitivity: Wilful Ignorance and Contributory Injustice The concepts of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice do not suffice to see the whole picture of epistemic injustice. Even if combined, they still fail to capture some significant epistemically wrongful aspects of, e.g., “debates” about the #MeToo movement. While we can observe a lot of unfairly questioned testimonies and, perhaps, occasionally, lack of fitting words on the side of victimised subjects in these debates, there still is something missing in the picture. Recall the misinterpreting slippery-slope statements according to which men might not feel safe saying “Good morning” to women anymore (Rogers 2017). Or random comments pregnant with epistemic arrogance aiming to explain what “in fact” happened in cases labelled with the hashtag, notwithstanding the actual testimonies and interpretations of victims. Reactions like these have something in common: They are raised in defence of certain conceptions of social reality, and they often use inadequate epistemic resources that miss the point completely. These are the situations in which the powerless subjects have quite fitting words and concepts, and yet they fail to receive appropriate uptake when utilising them in communication with those in privileged positions. However, in contrast to hermeneutical injustice, it is not the case that the hearer
31 She writes: “[T]o allow himself to be moved in an unexpected direction by the word of a woman would go against Greenleaf’s fundamental belief in male superiority and the affinity he thinks is shared among men” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2014a, 108). 32 However, as I argue in the conclusion of the following section, the forms of epistemic injustice overlap.
30 simply does not understand – she does something more than this. Kristie Dotson suggested calling such cases contributory injustice, which she defines as situations in which
“an epistemic agent’s willful hermeneutical ignorance in maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources thwarts a knower’s ability to contribute to shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community by compromising her epistemic agency.” (Dotson 2012, 32)
Dotson accused Fricker of being responsible for obscuring33 this kind of injustice, but it would be unfair to claim that Fricker missed this aspect altogether. Recall the hermeneutical hotspots I mentioned earlier, the “locations in social life where the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation, perhaps indeed where they have a positive interest in sustaining the extant misinterpretation” (Fricker 2007, 152). Also recall the second dimension of hermeneutical injustice, with “midway” and “minimal” cases, in which the marginalised subject has proper concepts but fails to communicate them intelligibly because of hermeneutical gaps on others’ side (Fricker 2016, 165–68). Both observations touch, even if cursorily, the issue I outlined above. Nonetheless, in neither of the texts, she explained how the powerful subjects sustain misinterpretations present in hermeneutical hotspots or why is it so difficult to change their minds even when they are directly confronted with concepts that would close the
33 Dotson found fault with Fricker’s conceptual apparatus, which in her view forecloses the possibility to identify new forms of epistemic injustice, and so obscures them. More specifically, the point of contention is Fricker’s concept of epistemic bad luck. Recall that following Judith Shklar, Fricker (2007, 39) assumed that epistemic injustice is a normal, even if pitiful, part of our lives. Unless one can claim to be a virtuous hearer – and as was already explained, it is next to impossible to possess the virtue of (testimonial) justice fully – one inadvertently commits injustice from time to time. Still, Fricker claimed, the harm done by not knowing better may not necessarily be one’s fault, if she finds herself living in a socio-historical context epistemically unfavourable to knowledges pertinent to the given epistemic harm. In other words, since ought implies can, one may simply have epistemic bad luck (Fricker 2007, 41–42) which does not qualify as an act of injustice – it harms someone, but the factor of wrongfulness is missing. By stating so, however, Fricker closed the conceptual structure upon which her theory stands, and so, Dotson (2012) claims, effectively foreclosed possibility of identifying other kinds of epistemic injustice: There are epistemic harms that qualify as testimonial and hermeneutical injustices and what is left are cases of non-culpable epistemic bad luck. It is, however, exactly this field of apparent non-culpability, which harbours another form of epistemic injustice, which Dotson calls contributory. Still, I would not abandon the possibility of having epistemic bad luck completely. Imagine living in a totalitarian state, North Korea perhaps, where the state propaganda is so ubiquitous that it may hardly be in one’s power to think and know otherwise. I nonetheless believe that we could find even cases less extreme, closer to our own social lives – but it is impossible to recognise that we are currently having epistemic bad luck, for since that moment it would not be epistemic bad luck any longer.
31 gaps. Instead, she insists that agents are typically non-culpable and that hermeneutical gaps simply happen to us because of hermeneutical marginalisation for which no one is individually responsible34. Rebecca Mason (2011) observed that there might be two types of unknowing involved when it comes to hermeneutical gaps: One stems from hermeneutical marginalisation, while the other from “bad knowledge practices” (Mason 2011, 295). Fricker considers only the first case, which is the core of hermeneutical injustice. But I believe that to understand situations depicted at the beginning of this sections, we need to introduce also the latter in the form of contributory injustice. Surprisingly, Fricker (2016, 170–76) compared hermeneutical injustice with Charles Mills’ concept of “white ignorance”35 (Mills 2007), which is an example of ignorance as a “bad knowledge practice” and also a form of contributory injustice. She did so, however, only to show where the two concepts overlap but decided not to incorporate the latter into her theoretical framework – even though it could provide answers to the moments that were left unaddressed by her account.
So, to state it more clearly, there is this problem: There are situations in which the speaker possesses perfectly fitting words to describe her experience and utilises them in communication with the hearer. However, no matter how well she performs, the hearer resists her effort, misinterprets her words and so on. Neither the concept of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice suffices to explain this situation: The problem does not rest in credibility deflation, and the structural perspective of hermeneutical injustice does not explain how the hearer can persistently resist direct attempts to fill the present hermeneutical gap. So, there is something missing in Fricker’s theoretical apparatus. The authors I cite in this section expressed similar worries while taking a different path than I did: Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (2012, 716) pointed out that situatedness of the knower and her interdependence with other knowers can produce a tension that may in some cases lead to wilful hermeneutical ignorance. Since this term is also the main building block of Dotson’ contributory injustice, let me explain it in more detail.
34 While adding that persistent testimonial injustice may lead to hermeneutical marginalisation, and so hermeneutical gaps and injustice (Fricker 2016, 163) – but this is an only partial answer. 35 “A kind of epistemically culpable and morally noxious miscognition that facilitates the maintenance of the status quo” as Rebecca Mason (2011, 302) characterised it.
32
Knower does not exist in a vacuum; knower is a social subject. Important aspects of her being in the social world are situatedness and interdependence with other knowers (Pohlhaus Jr. 2012, 716). The former term signifies the very fact that our social lives are not generic36. We live our lives in certain social contexts in which we occupy different social positions. Since we thus encounter some situations more often than others, we attune our cognitive capacities accordingly and, therefore, we notice and pursue certain objects of knowledge while we miss and neglect others (Pohlhaus Jr. 2012, 716–17). Sometimes, or perhaps even quite often, we do not see that our knowledge is situated in this way: As when we assume that every reasonable person must know something which is, in fact, dependent on one’s position in the social world, or when we think that our capacity for knowledge is infinite. In sum, our social situatedness “both confines and directs our habits of attention, which has a profound effect on what we come to know” (Dotson 2014b, 120).
We have already encountered the idea of knower’s interdependence, although I did not use this exact term before. It is the very logic upon which the normative idea of hermeneutical justice is built: That in knowing we use hermeneutical resources that are collectively shared, and so everyone should have a fair share of participation on their making and re-making. Interdependence – or division of epistemic labour – is beneficial for both, epistemic subject and community. Except in special circumstances, it would not make much sense to isolate ourselves epistemically and invent our own secret concepts, for it would significantly constrain our ability to communicate with others intelligibly, share what we know and build upon what others know. Or, as Pohlhaus Jr. put it by analogy with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark on language, “a concept that in principle can be followed by only one person is not really a concept” (2012, 718).
Situatedness and interdependence are closely related. Epistemic resources are developed with the aim to make sense of the experienced world (ibid.). Some of them reflect it quite well, while the use of others brings dissonance that needs to be addressed. If the relation between situatedness and interdependence functions properly, specifically situated knowers supply the collective epistemic resources with concepts mapping their
36 This observation is closely related to the matter discussed in the previous section: That by making the victim-subject only a derivate of someone else’s subjectivity, testimonial injustice goes against the “nature” of our sociality as knowers, i.e. our situatedness.
33 specific experience, and so enrich knowing of their society. However, since this logic is in no way different from what we have seen in the case of hermeneutical in/justice, it should not come as a surprise that proper working of this “interdependence part” is not a matter of course: Sometimes there are obstacles that hinder the flow of concepts into the shared pool of epistemic resources such as hermeneutical marginalization. Nonetheless, this time we are not interested in marginalised subjects who struggle to deliver their concepts into the pool. Instead, we focus on subjects who actively resist filling the gaps. It is obviously in the interest of the
While it is obviously in the interest of marginalised subjects to remedy structurally biased concepts that negatively affect them, this may not be the case for dominant subjects. There are at least three reasons for preferring the status quo. First, new, challenging concepts may be disorienting (Pohlhaus Jr. 2012, 721). Hermeneutical gaps are not always gaps in the literal sense – there may be some concepts already present, even if distorted by the perspective of the privileged. Attempts to contribute with fitting words thus directly attack the old inappropriate ones on which knowers rely and which sometimes even inform their identity. Such destabilisations can thus threaten “ontological security” of these subjects (Giddens 1991; Jarvis 2018, 8–9). Second, it may disclose information that one would prefer not to know – as in cases where one’s well-meant effort to help African children is revealed as a manifestation of the “white saviour complex” or paternalistic racism. And third, one may dismiss a concept as altogether irrelevant (Pohlhaus Jr. 2012, 722): Recall that concepts are developed to reflect experience. However, since we are talking here about the experience of specifically situated subjects, the existence of this experience may not be so obvious to the dominant knowers, and so the concept can be dismissed as irrelevant. In any case, this preference for inadequate concepts together with active refusal to enter the relationship of interdependence with the subject striving to contribute with more fitting words is what Pohlhaus Jr. (ibid.) calls wilful hermeneutical ignorance, which is a form of culpable epistemic injustice.
Despite these factors that may motivate the subject to “opt for” being wilfully ignorant, it is not a matter of wholly deliberate choice37. At this point, it is advantageous to turn to
37 One may feel that using the word “wilful” for a non-deliberate act is contradictory. The tension in my view disappears once we acknowledge the “meta-level” of the matter which I explain here with Medina. That is,
34
José Medina’s concept of active ignorance briefly. Although he, as far as I know, never made such link38, I dare to say that it can be understood as a virtue epistemological equivalent to wilful hermeneutical ignorance. Medina (2013, 28–30) claims that one’s social position in respect to being epistemically privileged or marginalised tends to bring with itself certain epistemic virtues and advantages and vices and disadvantages. These attributes are neither inescapable nor exclusive: Anyone can possess or overcome them, but since they often result from certain social conditions, it is more likely to find them within one group rather than another. For instance, members of a better socially positioned group may persistently receive inappropriate credibility excesses, and so their epistemic characters are more vulnerable to spoilage (Medina 2013, 59, 72). Active ignorance, which is described as “an ignorance that occurs with the active participation of the subject and with a battery of defense mechanisms” (Medina 2013, 39), consists of three epistemic vices: Epistemic arrogance, epistemic laziness, and closed-mindedness (Medina 2013, 30–36). Epistemically arrogant subject fails to see the epistemic limits of both her social situatedness and cognitive capacities, and so believes that she can know everything there is to know without the need to learn from others. Epistemic laziness is a lack of curiosity which stems from “the privilege of not knowing or of not needing to know” (Medina 2013, 32). In this way, one’s finite perspective becomes even more limited. Finally, while the powerful subjects may have the privilege of not needing to know, they may also have a need not to know. This need produces closed-mindedness which primarily functions as an unconscious defence mechanism raised to protect the subject from pieces of knowledge that threaten her beliefs – e.g. that she is complicit in injustices around her (Bernasconi 2007). To be sure, one does not choose to possess these vices, as they rather result from whom one becomes during the never-ending process of socialisation where social context plays a considerable role. Still, one is responsible for confronting these pressures and cultivation of virtues, and so can be blamed for staying actively ignorant.
the hearer does not quite choose to be ignorant, but if she tried to be a bit more open to what others are saying, she could see that she, in fact, has a choice to fight her ignorance. 38 Medina recognises only testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, but he greatly extended the latter concept in the way that has a lot in common with work of Pohlhaus and Dotson. Since he puts a strong emphasis on holistic understanding of epistemic injustice, boundaries between the kinds are not of the greatest importance in his approach.
35
The trouble is that subject is not always aware of her epistemic vices. Indeed, the ignorant subject is not only “locked” in her limited and prejudiced epistemological perspective but also unable to recognise this limitation. In Medina’s (2013, 75) words, the subject is meta-insensitive, or insensitive to her insensitivity. This brings us finally to Dotson’s contributory injustice, which is built upon a similar observation. While testimonial and hermeneutical injustices39 are in her view manifestations of inefficiencies and insufficiencies40, respectively, within subject’s epistemological system41, in case of contributory injustice the system itself is faulty: The subject relies on inadequate concepts while having trouble seeing their deficiency because her epistemological system does not allow her to see them in this way. The system tends to obscure its limits, and so reassures the subject in the belief that everything is as it should be. And even if one somehow feels that something is wrong, every step towards remedy is challenging for “what one seeks to interrogate is the condition for the possibility of the interrogation itself” (Dotson 2014a, 132). The subject must somehow step out of her own epistemological framework and see that her solipsistic position is utterly incomplete.
Help could come from the outside, but one of the important features of our epistemological systems is their resilience: They “can absorb extraordinarily large disturbances without redefining [their] structure” (Dotson 2014a, 121). If all three Medina’s epistemic vices are fully present, resilience is only strengthened, and so the
39 She prefers to think about the phenomena as “epistemic exclusion”. Epistemic exclusion is defined as “an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers” wherein by epistemic agency is meant “the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given community of knowers in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources” (Dotson 2014a, 115). If the exclusion is persistent, it qualifies as an epistemic oppression. 40 Dotson utilises a three-order scale of epistemic exclusion (2012, 26–35, 2014a), which maps the increasing difficulty of addressing the present defect, to demonstrate that while testimonial and hermeneutical injustices concern problems within the epistemic system, in the case of contributory injustice the problem is the system itself. I am not going to explain what testimonial and hermeneutic injustices are again – let me only briefly reintroduce them in Dotson’s framework. In the case of the first- order epistemic exclusion, the cause of the infringement of one’s epistemic agency is inefficiency within shared epistemic resources. This means that everything that should be present for the proper functioning of the system is present, but something does not function as it should. So, is not necessary to change the system, only to make sure that the underlying norms are observed. This is the case of testimonial injustice, where the site of injustice is the credibility of knowers – a value present, but unfairly observed. The second- order epistemic exclusion stems from insufficient epistemic resources. Hermeneutical marginalisation leads to gaps in hermeneutical resources, and so the structure itself needs to be examined and revised. Therefore, what is minimally required is to examine and extend or alter existing concepts. 41 She understands epistemological system as “a holistic concept that refers to all the conditions for the possibility of knowledge production and possession” of a subject (Dotson 2014a, 121).
36 subject is prevented from entering the relationship of genuine interdependence and trust42 with the speaker. As a result, the subject resists efforts of other knowers to enrich the shared epistemic resources with their pieces of knowledge, considering their contributions as irrelevant or mistaken, while maintaining her biased, inadequate concepts that distort the reality around her. In other words, the subject commits contributory injustice. Needless to say, the subject is selective in her approach towards others’ contributions – she does not have a reason to deny those pieces of information that support her beliefs. However, if it is in conflict with her understanding of the world or if it is even unimaginable (Medina 2013, 68) in her socio-cultural context, it may prompt her to commit contributory injustice.
Both the concept of contributory injustice and Medina’s interrogation of the ignorance involved in epistemic injustice offer many more interesting moments that could be discussed here. I finish my exposition here though, for going further would be beyond the scope of this thesis, and finally move to the part where I explain how the concept of epistemic injustice may be relevant for security studies. Before I do so, however, I would like to point out that this separation into kinds of epistemic injustice is not set in stone. As one may notice, the three kinds of epistemic injustice significantly overlap in some regards. To mention just some of these points: Contributory injustice and testimonial injustice share a level of selectivity and resistance towards certain kinds of information or informants, respectively. Persistent testimonial injustice contributes to hermeneutical marginalisation which leads to hermeneutical injustice. And both hermeneutical and contributory injustices revolve around structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources but differ in the matter of culpability of agents. I feel tempted to conceive of them as a triangle with one kind of injustice in each vertex. But I immediately need to add that such conception would be wrong because it would again create an unjustifiably closed structure again while there already are other kinds of epistemic injustice being discussed: discursive injustice (Kukla 2014), interpretative injustice (Peet 2017), and so on. Furthermore, without going into detail, I want to point out that it is also possible to abandon this effort to categorise injustices altogether. Pohlhaus presented four lenses which serve “to understand the grammar of the term ‘epistemic injustice’ for future and
42 For the significance of trust, which could not be discussed here, see chapter 2.3 in (Medina 2013) or (Hawley 2017).
37 new uses” (2017, 14), and so allow to study the various ways in which epistemic injustice manifests itself without a need to impose limited and arbitrary concepts on ever-changing social experience.
38
3 Security and Epistemic Injustice Since the publication of Fricker’s (2007) book the concept of epistemic injustice has appeared in many articles dealing with smaller or bigger epistemic injustices hidden in our society. There has been a considerably smaller amount of those that could be characterised as belonging to the field of security studies43. I have found five such articles, and although I suppose that there is probably more of them, I do not expect this number to be much higher. This is surprising, because violence goes hand in hand with unequal power relations, and so potentially with epistemic and other kinds of injustice. I briefly present the five articles I have mentioned to demonstrate what kinds of insights may application of epistemic injustice apparatus on security cases generate. I nonetheless want to go one step further and show after that it is possible to integrate the theory of epistemic injustice into securitization theory.
The most creative application was probably offered by Caron E. Gentry (Gentry 2014). She took the concept to the macro level of international relations to better understand why non-state groups, in contrast to states, are only rarely seen as actors that could legitimately use violent force. She argues that non-state groups are victims of hermeneutical injustice. While hermeneutical marginalization of violent non-state groups means that they cannot contribute with their experience, and so are “inadequately conceptualized and ill understood” (Gentry 2014, 25), privileged politicians, advisers, and academics “maintain a system that protects said privilege” (Gentry 2014, 23): They produce and re-produce an epistemic construction in which it is known that moral legitimacy to use force results from political authority of states. In her view, these two aspects, political authority and moral legitimacy, should be seen and assessed separately. Otherwise, we get into situations in which both a state and a non-state group use “terroristic violence”, but the former is seen as “far more legitimate” in doing so (ibid.).
Gentry (2015) uses the concept of epistemic injustice also in her other article, in which she focuses on the selectivity with which Western subjects approach violence perpetrated in the West and the developing world. She points out that while violence against women
43 It is, of course, difficult to decide what is pertinent to security studies and what is not. I was guided by intuition rather than a strict definition, but I think it does not invalidate my argument in any way.
39 in developing countries is seen as a security concern that needs to be resolved, the same violence perpetrated in the West is “minimised, ignored and/or individualised” (Gentry 2015, 363)44. Citing Foucault and Richard Jackson, she argues that everyday violences against woman “in the West are subjugated knowledges, or knowledges which ‘have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges [and] as insufficiently elaborated’ because they are seen as ‘naïve’ and ‘hierarchically inferior’” (ibid.). Subjugating knowledges is, then, a case of epistemic injustice (Gentry 2015, 367). In contrast to her text on the hermeneutical injustice done to non-state groups, she uses the concept of epistemic injustice only vaguely. Nonetheless, she believes that there is an epistemic justice done when she notices certain resistance in academe to call this kind of violence “everyday terrorism”, although it reportedly bears a strong resemblance to what is conventionally known as terrorist violence (Gentry 2015, 364–66). Similarly to the case with non-state groups, there are privileged subjects who produce and maintain certain epistemological constructions of what terrorism is and where it can be found while “subjugating the knowledge of patriarchal/intimate/everyday terrorism” (Gentry 2015, 366).
Antuan M. Johnson used the concept of epistemic injustice to explain why American prosecutors tend not to prosecute hate crime laws “on behalf of women who are sexually harassed or assaulted because of their gender” (2017, 91) despite that these laws usually include gender as a protected class. She argues that although the concept of hate crime seems to be gender neutral, it is actually biased because women are precluded from contributing with experience of sexual violence which men only rarely have. Therefore, there is a hermeneutical gap “which renders sex and hate mutually exclusive” (Johnson 2017, 93), which leads to a structurally prejudiced concept which masks “the realities of gender-based violence for women” (Johnson 2017, 107). Hermeneutical injustice is thus done.
Finally, Vittorio Bufacchi (2006) takes us to a post-conflict setting in which Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are established, and truthful accounts of what happened are sought. The question is, however, “[h]ow do we acquire knowledge of violence?” (Bufacchi 2006, 277). The answer is from direct, personal experience, but mostly through others’
44 She, for instance, draws our attention to disparate levels of attention paid to the kidnapping of 276 Nigerian girls by Islamist group Boko Haram and “1200 reported disappearances and murders of First Nations women in Canada” (Gentry 2015, 362).
40 first-person narratives, i.e. testimonies (Bufacchi 2006, 280). The problem is that knowledge based on testimony has “precarious nature” because it relies on memory, which can be unreliable when it comes to traumatic events, and also because memory, and knowledge in general, is collectively and socially formed (Bufacchi 2006, 284–85). But this does not mean that we should doubt what victims of violence say. To the contrary, the act of listening and trusting their testimonies is important for the rebuilding of their sense of “self and personhood that had been destroyed by the act of violence” (Bufacchi 2006, 289). Unfortunately, victims of violence often become victims of testimonial injustice (ibid.), especially if they possess prejudiced identity. As a result, these victims are not only physically harmed and epistemically wronged but also robbed of recognition necessary for their recovery. Moreover, since testimony works only in the context of mutual recognition of trust and respect (Bufacchi 2006, 284), we cannot expect to open those who are being treated unfairly. Bufacchi thus demonstrates the importance of possessing the virtue of testimonial justice when working in post-conflict settings.
Each of these contributions shows us that the framework of epistemic injustice enhances our capabilities to notice and understand important aspects of issues which are pertinent to security studies and related fields, be it just war theory, conceptualisation of terrorism or hate crime, or transitional justice. I would like to demonstrate its relevance in a way different from analysing cases one by one. What I want to show in this chapter is that the conceptual apparatus of epistemic injustice can be integrated into securitisation theory, and so to provide it not only with more explanatory power but also another ethical dimension. I say another because there already is one, namely whether securitisation can be justified45. The ethical aspect I introduce in this chapter rests on the assumption that it can be, and so something is wrong if it fails or succeeds when it should not: As you surely foresee based on the previous two chapters, I will argue that someone may be epistemically wronged in the course of (de)securitization process or by its result.
But first things first. Why I chose securitisation theory? I did so for two main reasons. First, securitisation process is an obvious place wherein epistemic injustice may take
45 Remember that the original formulation of securitisation theory perceives securitisation as a failure (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 29). I cannot delve deeper into this interesting topic here, and so I will just point out that there is an ongoing debate on the normative value of securitisation and desecuritisation (see e.g. Floyd 2011, 2015; Roe 2012).
41 place. It is an exchange between an actor who tries to portray an issue as a security problem and her audience who may or may not accept it. Second, securitisation theory is so well established in the field of security studies that I cannot be accused of convincing those who are already convinced. On the contrary, I assume that even researchers who usually do not find heterodox approaches appealing may benefit from what the idea of epistemic injustice offers in combination with securitisation theory.
However, the original formulation of securitisation theory is burdened with ambiguities and under-theorised corners (see e.g. Balzacq 2011a; Léonard and Kaunert 2011, 57; McDonald 2008; M. C. Williams 2011) and I would not be able to make my contribution if I did not move beyond it. As Balzacq (2005, 172) notes, one of the main drawbacks of the original theory of securitisation, as formulated by Buzan, Waever and Wilde (1998) in their seminal book Security, is its strict formality. Its authors were trying to find universal conditions, or “grammar”, whose fulfilment would mean a successful securitisation. This heavy focus on universal rules, however, led to the neglect of the contextual diversity in which the act takes place46. It should be clear from the previous chapters that the thinking about epistemic injustice is hardly compatible with context- free reasoning about generic subjects, and so the original formulation allows my extension to be made only with difficulty.
There have been efforts (e.g. Balzacq 2011b) to change, adjust and extend this theory in a way that would both, better reflect and explain empirical evidence. Nonetheless, if I did not miss anything, there remained a weak spot in the theorisation of power-laden interaction between the securitising actor and her audience which can be further developed to enhance our ability to understand why some securitising moves fail or even to notice that there was a securitising move at all. Namely, although, e.g., Balzacq does consider power in a certain sense (see section 3.2), I suggest that his account does not suffice, and we need to attune ourselves to the possibility that there may be epistemic injustices involved in the securitising process, both failed and successful47. Besides that, I
46 An objection may be raised: They do take context into account. Indeed, they speak about “the external, contextual and social” conditions for a successful speech act (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 32). As I will explain in the next section though, this is one of the ambiguities of their formulation. 47 Shortly before I finished this thesis I found a recent article wherein Balzacq et al. argue that the issue of power relations deserves further investigation because it shows “various ways in which pre-existing power relations enable or preclude specific processes of securitization” (Balzacq, Léonard, and Ruzicka 2016, 502) – I thus think we are in agreement.
42 also point out that securitisation theory itself with its emphasis on elite securitising actors may be seen as an instrument of hermeneutical marginalisation, and so as contributing to hermeneutical injustice. What I thus offer is a version of securitisation framework which is sensitive to epistemic injustice while not contributing to epistemic injustice itself.
I thus divide this chapter into four parts. I begin with a brief introduction to the securitisation theory as formulated by the Copenhagen School in Buzan, Waever and Wilde (1998) and suggest that its somewhat surprising under-theorisation of audience does not allow us to see how securitising actor can be wronged. In the second section I move to critics of the theory and slowly prepare the ground for my own extension: First, I follow Thierry Balzacq suggestion to re-centre our attention from the securitising actor performing a securitising move to the effect it has on the audience. Next, I argue with Adam Côté that this is not enough – we need to grant audience agency. Otherwise it will not be able to do wrong to the securitising actor. In the third and fourth section I finally utilise the concept of epistemic injustice: In the former to show that there is epistemic injustice inherent in securitisation theory, and in the latter to explain in what ways may epistemic injustice be involved in securitising and desecuritising processes. I thus propose distinguishing four basic cases of epistemic injustice in securitisation and desecuritisation: unfairly failed securitisation, unfairly successful securitisation, unfairly failed desecuritisation, and unfairly successful securitisation.
3.1 Securitisation Theory and Silent Jury The approaching end of the Cold War and “proliferation” of security threats prompted scholars to ask what “security” means. Traditionally, it was conceived as a survival of the state, which was perceived as constantly facing a variety of objectively existing threats. Noticing that this understanding no longer reflects existing concerns in international relations, some scholars suggested to widen, and subsequently also deepen, the scope of the field of the study (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 2–8; Waever 1995, 47–54). This move went together with serious theoretical and methodological concerns about the coherence of the discipline, which led to attempts to develop a framework for
43 understanding security in this new environment. Since the late 1980s, Ole Waever48 has been working on such framework and eventually introduced the conception of security as a speech act, with specific contents stemming from operations within specific fields of practices (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 27; Waever 1995, 50–51) rather than originating in an objective essence.
Conceived in this way, “security is not of interest as a sign that refers to something more real” (Waever 1995, 55) because even very “real” threats are socially mediated – as in the case of “hostile tanks crossing the border” where “’hostile’ is an attribute not of the vehicle but of the socially constituted relationship” (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 30). Instead, “security” is a speech act by which something is done: An issue is in a Schmittian way elevated to the position above ordinary politics where established rules may be legitimately transgressed. In this sense “’[s]ecurity is ... a self-referential practice, because it is in this practice that the issue becomes a security issue–not necessarily because a real existential threat exists” (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 24). The issue is thus securitised: “presented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure” (ibid.). To bring the epistemological dimension into play more explicitly, I would also add here that from that moment on the issue is believed to be a security issue.
One does not simply securitise issues at will though. Following J. L. Austin’s (1962) theory of speech acts49, Waever identified several facilitating or “felicity” conditions which must be fulfilled for the speech act to work. These are divided into two categories: 1) the internal, linguistic-grammatical, and 2) the external, contextual and social (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 32). As regards the first category, the speech act must follow the “grammar of security”: The securitizing actor must present the issue as an existential threat to a referent object worthy protecting, wherein such threat requires utilization of extraordinary measures outside the limits of standard political procedures – otherwise the object will not survive in its existing form (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 24). The second category comprises two main conditions (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 33): First, the securitising actor has to possess a certain level of social capital – she has to be
48 For the sake of simplicity, I will talk only about Waever even when referring to his collaboration with Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde (1998). 49 See the following section for further details.
44 in a position of authority to make claims like these. Second, although the moving tanks mentioned above do not constitute a security issue themselves, they do facilitate securitisation if the actor can point at them. Therefore, it is advantageous if the claims can be supported by some evidence. In sum, this is what Waever calls securitising move, which may or may not lead to successful securitisation. The result depends on whether the audience of the speech act accepts it. In Waever’s view, the decisive word of the audience signifies that securitisation is an intersubjective process. As he explains, security “ultimately rests neither with the objects” – recall the tanks that are not a security issue in themselves – “nor with the subjects” – I cannot simply securitize issues as I like – “but among the subjects” – because I need acquiescence of other subjects (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 31).
Waever says surprisingly little on the topic of audience though (Léonard and Kaunert 2011, 58–59). Although it seems that audience is the single most important factor in the securitisation process, everything we learn is that sometimes it may not accept the securitising move – as if it was some kind of a mysterious, silent jury. According to Balzacq, this neglect of audience supports the suspicion that Waever’s conception is not as intersubjective as proclaimed to be. In his view, there is a fundamental tension in Waever’s conception of securitisation: On the one hand, there is securitisation as a self- referential speech act which must meet felicity conditions. On the other hand, securitisation is presented as an intersubjective process, which questions the purported self-referentiality of the act (Côté 2016, 542; McDonald 2008, 572–73). Waever’s emphasis on the grammar of security and only marginal interest in audience seems to prioritise the former, and so to challenge the latter. After all, as Balzacq points out, audience is even missing among Waever’s “units of security analysis”: he only recognises referent objects, securitising actors, and functional actors (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 36).
This leads to the situation in which we know the rules of the securitisation game – the internal and external felicity conditions – but we know almost nothing about the referee50 and her relationship with players. Is it enough to simply meet the conditions, purportedly
50 Some authors point out that Waever did not even provide us with usable instructions how to identify audience (Léonard and Kaunert 2011, 59).
45 universally valid for all actors, to get the acquiescence? However, what if this silent jury is not as righteous as it should be? What if it is not silent at all and instead has agency and own interests? Or what if it is simply biased? This is the direction I want to pursue in the rest of this thesis. Inspired by the theory of epistemic injustice, I suggest that we should focus more on the role of the audience in the process of securitisation. The situation is analogical: Just as a speaker may be wronged when testifying to her hearer, there is no reason why a securitising actor51 could not be unfairly treated by her audience when claiming that a certain issue should be securitised.
The problem is that we can never see how the securitising actor may be wronged if we do not recognise securitisation as an intersubjective practice. In the intersubjective process the actor becomes vulnerable: She may be dismissed in her attempts to secure recognition of others, just as the Beauvoirian subject discussed in the previous chapter. If we see securitisation as a self-referential act, we miss this dimension altogether. Hence, this gap needs to be filled first.
3.2 From Illocution to Perlocution and Audience with Agency Balzacq assumes that the ambiguity about self-referentiality and intersubjectivity of securitisation results from a misapprehension of Austin’s speech act theory upon which Waever’s account is based. The speech act theory is concerned with “doing things with words”, as the title of Austin’s (1962) seminal text suggests. As Balzacq (2011a, 4–6) reminds us, a sentence may convey three types of acts: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. The first, locutionary act is the basic utterance with which something is said, e.g. when I state that “It is raining outside”. It is the second, illocutionary act – often used interchangeably with the term “speech act” (Levinson 2008, 236) – which is central to the speech act theory and to Waever’s conception of securitization: It is “the act performed in articulating a locution” (Balzacq 2011a, 4) like when I say “it is raining outside” to warn the hearer. Importantly, to be successful, the illocutionary act must meet several necessary conditions52 - basically to follow a certain conventional procedure and
51 But as I will argue later, securitising speaker is not the only potential victim. 52 Drawing on Austin, Balzacq lists them as:
46 to be recognised as such. In other words, the successful illocutionary act means that I made a warning and the hearer recognised that I did so. The third act, perlocutionary, is the consequential effect of my utterance upon the hearer: I warned her that it is raining outside, and so she decided to stay at home. The function of perlocutionary acts is “to evoke the feelings, beliefs, thoughts or actions of the target audience” (Balzacq 2011b, 5). To sum up, Balzacq reminds us of Habermas’ useful catchphrase: “to say something, to act in saying something, to bring about something through acting in saying something” (Habermas 1984, 289).
It is tempting to see illocutionary and perlocutionary acts as two inseparable sides of the same coin – after all, the latter often follows the former, and it is usually speaker’s intention to “do something with words”. However, that would be wrong: Not only that an illocutionary act may fail to bring any effect, but the two acts may also differ significantly – like when the speaker warns the hearer by saying “be careful in Georgia, the traffic is crazy there” but the effect that is brought about – maybe intentionally – is that the hearer is impressed with speaker’s knowledge rather than being more cautious53. In other words, “[p]erlocution does not belong literally to speech act since it is the causal response of a linguistic act” (Balzacq 2011a, 5). However, in Balzacq’s view, this is the mistake that Waever did: He conflated speech/illocutionary act and perlocution (Balzacq 2005, 177). This can be most vividly seen in his claim that “[b]y uttering ‘security,’ a state- representative moves a particular development into a specific area” (Waever 1995, 55). The problem is that while it is “enough” to meet certain conditions to perform a successful illocutionary act, this is not the case for perlocution; perlocutionary effects upon the hearer are products of the circumstances in which words are uttered. These effects may be “intended or unintended, often indeterminate” but, importantly, they cannot be “conventionally achieved just by uttering that particular utterance” (Levinson 2008, 237).
“(i) a preparatory condition determined by the existence of a ‘conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances’; (ii) an executive condition to determine whether the procedure has been fully executed by all participants; (iii) a sincerity condition that posits that participants in this ‘conventional procedure’ must have certain thoughts or feelings, and ‘must intend so to conduct themselves’; (iv) a fulfilment condition determined by whether participants ‘actually so conduct themselves subsequently’” (Balzacq 2011a, 5). 53 This is a rather trivial justification of the concepts’ separation. For a more comprehensive discussion of the difference between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts see e.g. Habermas (1984, 289–94).
47
This means two things. First, “if perlocution does not adhere to rules conditioning the realisation of an illocutionary act ... it becomes plain that viewing security as a speech act is a restrictive theoretical position” (Balzacq 2011a, 5). The grammar of security may be relevant for performing securitisation move in the sense of an illocutionary act: Under certain circumstances, the utterance of phrases about existential threats may result in a general recognition that I am performing a securitising move. However, seen in this “acontextual” way it does not say much about the perlocutionary effect, i.e. securitisation. I know how to warn: “Be careful in Georgia, the traffic is crazy there”. But what effect will it induce? Will it frighten, annoy, amuse, embarrass, or encourage the addressee to accept the challenge? It depends on circumstances – the effect cannot be secured merely by uttering a warning according to pre-given rules. Accordingly, securitisation conceived in such self-referential way is “disconnected from the actual dynamics of world politics” and reduced to a conventional, “institutional procedure such as marriage or betting in which all the ‘felicity conditions’ must prevail for the act to be effective” (Balzacq 2005, 176). This leads us to the second Balzacq’s point: Perlocutionary, not illocutionary act should be central to the theory of securitisation. In focusing too much on how to say “security” correctly, who can say it and about what or whom it can be said, Waever somehow moved the most important thing – the perlocutionary effect, i.e. securitisation – to the periphery of the theory. As Balzacq (2011a, 5–6) points out, since “in any intersubjective process ..., the purpose is to prompt a significant response from the other (perlocutionary effect) ... perlocution is central rather than tangential to understanding” securitisation. This move from illocution to perlocution is also crucial for the argument of this thesis. If we focus too much on the structure of the securitising move and only suppose that the effect will somehow arrive insofar all the conditions are met, we may miss why it sometimes does not arrive or why it does arrive even when it should not. Obviously, I am speaking about credibility deficits and excesses: The securitising actor may be doing her best and yet she may fail because her words did not receive the appropriate uptake.
The problems associated with the securitisation theory’s emphasis on illocution led Balzacq (2005, 172) to reject the catchphrase “security as a speech act” and reintroduce
48 it as a pragmatic or strategic act54. With the exception of “practices”, his account does not introduce any fundamentally new feature or principle – rather, it remedies some of the aspects present but ambiguous or “underspecified” (McDonald 2008, 564) in Waever’s formulation. It is based on three core assumptions: 1) the centrality of audience, 2) the co-dependency of agency and context, and 3) the dispositif and the structuring force of practices (Balzacq 2011a, 8–18). By the centrality of audience Balzacq (2011a, 8–9) means that “[f]or an issue to be pronounced an instance of securitization, an ‘empowering audience’ must agree with the claims made by the securitizing actor”, where “empowering” means with “a direct causal connection with the issue” and “the ability to enable the securitizing actor to adopt measures to tackle the threat”. To secure audience’s acquiescence, the securitising actor must make sure that she identifies with it sufficiently and tunes “her language to the audience’s experience” (Balzacq 2011a, 9) – in a sense, she must use a language that wins hearts and minds. But this is not enough: Actor’s word must “resonate with the context within which his/her actions are collocated” (Balzacq 2011a, 13) which brings us to the second assumption. The idea is simple: Language does not create reality as the original formulation of securitisation might imply. Utterances of “security” make “the audience to ‘look around’ in order to identify the conditions (the presumed threats) that justify its articulation” (ibid.). If the actor claims that tanks crossing our borders are a security problem while there are no hostile nations with tanks around, it may be difficult to see how she may succeed in receiving support for utilisation of exceptional measures. Finally, the utterance of “security” or discourse is only a part of the picture – there are “practices”, routinised types of behaviour, “beneath and above the discursive ‘level’”, subtle but decisive (Balzacq 2011a, 15). These are based on inter- subjective understandings and connected by specific dispositifs which may be activated by security tools which embody these practices (Balzacq 2011a, 16). Not everything is thus under actor’s control – “securitization is not necessarily the result of a rational design wherein goals are set beforehand” (Balzacq 2011a, 15).
54 Balzacq (2011a, 25) follows Jacob Mey’s theory of pragmatic acts. In an attempt to bring back the balance between the universal rules of illocution and particular articulations in contextual circumstances, he suggests leading the explanatory movement of language from outside in rather than vice versa; i.e. to focus on environment or context in which both the speaker and hearer find themselves. As we could see, the speech act theory does the opposite when tries to capture how an utterance formulated by a speaker impacts on the hearer.
49
Balzacq also cursorily mentions the matter of the power position of the speaker and “linguistic competence” – not everyone is taken seriously when speaking about certain topics. Indeed, I do not expect that anyone would take my opinions on rocket science very seriously. But Balzacq (2011a, 25) immediately adds that on security issues “not a very sharp line can be drawn between those who can and those who cannot” speak. The only exception seems to rest in cases wherein subjects have asymmetric access to information, and so the audience decides to believe the securitising actors because of the assumption that the “actor knows what is going on, and works for common interest” (Balzacq 2011a, 25–26). This is basically the matter of assessing the credibility of speaker’s testimony that forms the basis of Fricker’s concept of testimonial (in)justice: the hearer must assess the speaker’s competence and sincerity in what she is saying. Nonetheless, although Balzacq includes power in this picture, he seems to understand it in Bourdieuan terms of capital accumulation resulting in a certain position in the field of security rather than ubiquitous (identity) power relations. Therefore, his account does not allow to see how prejudices may affect the perception of speaker’s competence.
In any case, Balzacq’s conception manages to move security closer to where it according to Waever belongs: among subjects. It is no longer enough for the securitising actor to follow the conventional procedure, perform the act of securitisation and expect audience’s acquiescence – she must take other subjects and the context in which they live into consideration all along55. In this way, we can better understand under what conditions is the perlocutionary effect, i.e. securitisation, achieved. However, the jury remains silent. It only replies yes, or no, but otherwise sits idly. Indeed, Adam Côté faults Balzacq’s account as not intersubjective enough: his “audience will accept contextually consistent securitising moves while rejecting all others ... but [it] cannot actively contribute to the creation of security meanings” (Côté 2016, 550). At first glance this does not necessarily impede my argument that a subject may face epistemic injustice in the context of securitisation: After all, I am not so much interested in the creation of inter- subjective meanings and a speaker may be wronged by hearer’s simple “no” or disregard. However, this would mean to overlook that the hearer did something wrong – that she
55 Even then is the result of the securitising move uncertain. Balzacq (2011a, 18) rejects the model of causal determinacy as inappropriate for understanding the process of securitisation. Rather he suggests examining degrees of congruence between the introduced factors, and so to understand in what conditions the securitising move succeeds rather than what are the sufficient conditions.
50 does not respond mechanically according to inputs but has the capacity to act. Even though Balzacq strives to move the centre of our attention from the performance of securitising move towards the effect on the audience, i.e. perlocution, the focus still rests almost exclusively on the securitising actor doing things right, and so misses the potentiality of the audience to do things wrong. Even if it was56 analytically enough to say that the circumstances, audience’s attentiveness including, must be favourable, it is not enough from the ethical point of view, for it would camouflage the culpability of the audience, and so the wrongdoing the actor may face.
Analysis of thirty-two empirical studies of securitisation led Côté to propose two modifications. The first is to see audience as an active participant of the securitisation process rather than a passive legitimator (Côté 2016, 551). The second is to understand securitisation as a deliberative process “consisting of multiple iterative, contextually contingent interactions between actor(s) and audience(s) regarding a single issue over time” rather than a one-way, linear process (Côté 2016, 552). Although I support the deliberative understanding of securitisation, it is the first point that is of major relevance for my thesis. Côté notices that even in texts “where audiences [were] analytically marginalized or excluded” (2016, 546) they nevertheless actively participated in the securitization process: They “challenged, questioned, and/or supported claims made by the securitizing actor ..., or undertook independent actions to modify, bolster, or destabilize security meanings” (2016, 550). Audience’s activity cannot be dismissed as inconsequential either: “In many cases, audience action had a direct effect on substantive policy outcomes”, while “in several cases, differing audience interpretations of similar securitizing moves led to significant variations in security outcomes”, and in one case the audience even “actively punished securitizing actors by voting them out of office for pursuing extraordinary measures without their acceptance” (Côté 2016, 546–47).
This might not seem like a particularly ground-breaking observation – there is nothing new about people challenging and questioning each other’s claims. Yet, texts that would theorise audience as having any significant agency are incredibly rare. In this sense Côté’s contribution does cast radically new light on the relation between securitising actors and
56 And I think it would not because that would mean to unnecessarily overlook an important aspect of the actor-audience relation and interaction.
51 audiences: We can finally see how influential audience may be and that it is by no means a mere passive jury. Rather than responding according to the securitising actor’s ability to speak in accordance with contextual circumstances, audience may pursue its own interests. And I suppose that we may include beliefs, their preservation and reinforcement, in the category of interests too. Recall that this is exactly what contributory injustice is about: Resisting knowledge that threatens one’s epistemological system. This will be the topic of section 3.4. Now I need to explain how the securitisation theory itself may become an instrument of hermeneutical marginalisation.
3.3 Epistemic Injustice of Securitization Theory You surely have noticed that the securitizing actor I have been so far outlining here in connection with epistemic injustice is not particularly powerful. Indeed, implicitly or explicitly, I suggested several times that she is vulnerable and may become a victim of epistemic injustice. Seen from the perspective of the securitization theory, this may seem odd: Such precariousness is hardly a characteristic feature of situations in which securitizing actors find themselves. But this is because there already is a certain conception of securitizing actors’ identity inherent in the securitization theory. Although Waever suggests that no one is principally precluded from taking this role (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 31), he portrays typical securitizing actors as political and bureaucratic elites (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 40; Waever 1995, 54). The reason behind this characterization rests in his primary orientation on successful cases57 of securitization (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 39) – and one must be in a position of power in order to securitize successfully.
Nonetheless, a failed securitizing move is still a securitizing move – otherwise there would be no reason to distinguish between a securitizing move and securitization, i.e. a successful securitizing move. Therefore, even if some subjects are worse positioned and indeed usually fail in their attempts to securitize certain issues, it does not justify the claim that only those in power are “[c]ommon players” (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 40) in
57 Whereas unsuccessful cases serve mainly to elucidate the limits of what can be securitized (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 39).
52 the role of securitizing actors58. I thus infer that – even though they are somewhat hidden in the original framework – there are also impotent or powerless securitizing actors59 who only rarely succeed in their securitizing attempts and can be easily dismissed by more powerful subjects in the role of audience. One such example may be the Inuit who try to convince Canadian government that climate change threatens environment and their well-being but typically fail to be heard (Greaves 2016b). I cannot tell how frequent such actors are. Maybe there is plenty of them, often performing weak and hardly audible securitizing moves on the local if not international level. Or maybe it is true after all, that those who do not have the capability to perform securitizing moves do not even try to speak and suffer insecurity silently60. But the thing is that we do not know.
I argue that this exclusive focus on elites or strong securitizing actors is an instance of epistemic injustice inherent in securitization theory. Even though there are studies (e.g. Barthwal-Datta 2009; Greaves 2016a, 2016b; Topgyal 2016) that resist this way of looking at things and purposely include “weak” or non-elite securitizing actors to show that they are not so silent, the framework of securitization theory nevertheless does encourage focusing on subjects who are in the position to turn a securitizing move into successful securitization. And as Matt McDonald points out, the preference of securitization theory for elite securitizing actors may arguably lead to two effects: Reification and normalization of dominant security discourses and further
58 This portrayal would be justified if political and bureaucratic elites comprised vast majority in the pool of securitizing actors – then it would be perfectly fine to say that they are more “common”. However, I am not aware of any study that would measure what social group performs securitizing moves, successful or not, most often. 59 Following Juha Vuori’s (2011, 194–215) typology of securitizing moves, Rita Floyd (2017, 48–51) suggests distinguishing between securitizing moves and securitizing requests. This distinction is based on the assumption that successful cases of securitization are only those that actually lead to employment of emergency measures – as opposed to those that only secure acquiescence that an issue is a security problem. Nevertheless, even though everyone can “speak security”, not every subject is capable of employing emergency measures. Floyd thus calls for the introduction of securitizing requests which aim to convince audience in capacity to introduce emergency measures to do so. Although I consider this distinction analytically advantageous, it is of little relevance for my thesis whether successful securitization leads to a “mere” acquiescence on what is a security issue or to introduction of emergency measures because I am interested in the former, the epistemic moment, which is a necessary condition of the latter, the practical move. Therefore, I simply speak here about securitizing moves which may mean both, securitizing requests or proper securitizing moves. 60 Lene Hansen (2000) draws our attention to subjects – Pakistani women in this particular case – who face “silent security dilemma”: They cannot speak security because voicing their concerns could further aggravate the threat they face. This is, however, a different situation. I do not doubt that some people choose to be silent because of the consequences that could follow. What I do doubt is that people choose to be silent simply because of the power-less position they find themselves in.
53 marginalization of the “experiences and articulations” of already marginalized voices (2008, 573). This situation resembles the case of hermeneutical injustice61: Insufficient attention to non-elite securitizing actors’ attempts to securitize certain issues hinders participation of their perspectives on the making and remaking of the hermeneutical resources of the field of security studies. In other words, these subjects are hermeneutically marginalized. And the logic behind the idea of hermeneutical injustice contends that where there is hermeneutical marginalization, there likely are also biased concepts. Indeed, if we consistently disregard weak securitizing actors and their failed attempts to securitize as not worthy studying and focus in our analyses only on those who have the chance to succeed, we may find out – or maybe not even notice – that our understanding of what insecurities people perceive and experience and what security in general means is only partial.62
Let me illustrate this with a hypothetical example. Researcher R1 is interested in what issues are presented as threats in a distant and not very well-known Country C. She quite easily finds out that in the government’s view, there is a problem with insufficient integration of Minority M living in the periphery of the country, which purportedly leads to increase of extremist political opinions among M’s members. The government thus proposes to introduce special measures in a form of obligatory, year-long study/integration stays in schools in C’s capital for all 15 years old members of M. This finding leads R1 to conclude that in C, M’s extremism is presented as the biggest threat. Now, she may even intend her paper as a critique of the steps taken by C’s political elites – she may point out they treat a certain aspect of cohabitation with M as a security issue, although it could be handled in the sphere of normal politics. However, since the securitization framework encourages her to focus on elite securitizing actors, it simply never occurs to her that she could also examine securitization attempts of those who are marginalized – as if they were not a legitimate part of C. The dominant security discourse
61 These are ideal concepts after all, so one cannot expect finding their perfect instantiations in the real world. Moreover, a theory in the role of perpetrator is something with which Fricker’s apparatus does not count. This makes Pohlhaus’ (2017) open lens approach more appealing for it allows more flexible analyses and interpretation. 62 On the other hand, securitization theory surely is not the only apparatus that works with subjects’ understanding of security and insecurity. So, even if securitization theory was completely deaf and blind to non-elite concerns, there still may be other routes via which the perspectives of non-elite subjects may enter the resources. Nonetheless, this does not change anything about the quality of the securitization framework.
54 is thus reproduced, while the alternative or non-dominant views are never solicited. As a result, our understanding of (in)security in C is biased – we have an idea what political elites see as security problems, but this picture is incomplete; hermeneutical injustice is done. I contend that it can be argued that M was hermeneutically marginalized by the faulty securitization framework63. I do not mean that R1 was completely non-culpable though – she is at fault for her lack of curiosity, fantasy or perhaps : She clearly could see more but decided to take the “easy” way suggested by the framework. Nonetheless, she contributed to hermeneutical injustice inadvertently and partly as a “victim” of a well- established theory, which led her to believe that only those in the position of power are relevant actors.
Some moments in general debates on what security means seem to support this simple suspicion that neglect of marginalized subjects’ voices leads to biased security conceptions, i.e. biased hermeneutical resources. Take for example Critical Security Studies which base their understanding of what security means on the idea of human emancipation (see e.g. Booth 1991). This approach certainly is well-meant: Its proponents intend to give priority to security of individuals rather than to constructions such as states. Yet, they are criticized for drawing on Eurocentric ideals and perspectives (Jarvis 2018, 7–8; Jarvis and Holland 2015, 64, 209) and for disregarding experiences of the powerless, who are regarded “as marginal or derivative elements of world politics, as at best the site of liberal good intentions or at worst a potential source of threats” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006, 332). Nonetheless, neither I propose any causally determinant relation nor is my ambition to examine here if and to what extent are security studies biased in this sense. What I want to do instead is to point out that there is such potentiality and that we should remember it when designing our inquiries into securitization processes as well as other issues pertinent to security studies. Otherwise we may contribute to epistemic injustice.
63 But also by all the other factors that led to the situation in which R1 could so easily fail to notice that M was trying to securitize certain issues. This may include unequal access to media, lack of representation in political institutions and so on.
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I do not want to create an impression that everyone is wrong, and that I am the first to see it64. Far from it. There is already a tradition of scholarly work that bears in mind exactly what I am trying to highlight here: That studies of security based on dominant, elite perspectives do not tell the whole truth. Whether these texts are perceived as belonging to feminist, postcolonial, “everyday”, or vernacular security studies, their authors share a similar “ground-up” perspective (Jarvis 2018). Originally, the focus was on women and post-colonial subjects but recently the scope of interest broadened to include not only “ordinary people” but simply everyone at every level. The focus on everyone with bringing as few ontological presuppositions as possible is the main contribution of vernacular security studies (Bubandt 2005). This stream of thought not only dismisses the exclusive focus on dominant security discourses but also deliberately eschews prioritizing the marginalized as a main unit of analysis, and so “avoids reproducing constructed vulnerabilities and problematic binaries that may or may not adequately capture the fluidity and contradictions of lived experiences” (Jarvis 2018, 11– 12). In so doing, it makes the researcher facilitated participation on making and re-making of hermeneutical resources open to an unprecedented level and indeed radically democratic with all its contradictions. No one’s perspective is principally excluded, and so the researcher – who works as an intermediary – gives everyone the opportunity to influence the understanding of security and insecurity. I thus suggest that the epistemic injustice inherent in the securitization framework can be remedied with introduction of “vernacularity”. If we acknowledge that anyone can play the role of securitizing actor, the securitization framework will become hermeneutically just.
Before I move to the last section of this chapter, I need to add that good instruments themselves do not guarantee good results. There is also the factor of researcher, standardly reflected in post-positivist social sciences literature, who is socially situated to the same extent as subjects of her study are. This means not only that researcher brings specific experiences and values with herself but also that she may perpetrate epistemic injustice against the subjects of her study. The example presented above can be easily altered to illustrate contributory rather than hermeneutical injustice. Let us imagine the
64 This is true for the other parts of this chapter too. There are now so many papers applying or discussing securitization theory that it would be “epistemically arrogant” to claim that I know every contribution to the debate.
56 same research task in the same setting but this time with Researcher R2. While R1 overlooked M’s securitizing moves, R2 is directly confronted with one of them. In the course of the research, she finds a blog post written by a member of M, addressed to international community. The text says, using the typical securitization vocabulary, that the obligatory study stays are a threat to the way M people live and that something needs to be done to stop this campaign against M65. Posts like these are not common in C though and this one was perhaps also published on an awkwardly looking website with clumsily organized text, pictures and so on. R2 reads the post but decides not to pursue this trace. Several reasons led her to this decision: First, it is not clear for her how study stays could threaten anyone. Her experience says the opposite: It allows one to learn and experience new things, become more independent, find new friends and so on. Second, the study stays aim to integrate M better into society, and so to tackle political extremism which is a serious concern in the 21st century. Both sides will eventually benefit because it will lead to peace and prosperity for everyone. Third, ordinary members of M are hardly experts on education – they cannot know what is good for them in the long term. And fourth, if this really was so serious problem, there would be more opinions like these and they definitely would not be published on such bizarre websites. Therefore, she dismisses this failed securitizing move as irrelevant noise.
This admittedly sounds like a far-fetched story66 but it serves well to illustrate that the claim that researcher may wrong subjects of her inquiry and further marginalize an already marginalized securitizing actor. R2’s spoiled epistemic character and resilience of her epistemological system led her to dismiss a piece of information, a securitizing move in this case, which clashed with her conception of the world. She failed to see that her conception of study stays is limited to the reality of Western states and that experience of people living in other parts of the world may be radically different. She also lacked the experience with many forms of oppression and at the same time rejected testimony describing one such form. And finally, maybe she did not even want to see that there is a problem because it would challenge her conviction that the fight against political extremism is necessary and that innocent people have no reason to worry. All three
65 In this case the securitizing moves go against each other. This is not a necessary feature, my argument holds true for cases of unrelated securitizing moves too. 66 Although postcolonial scholars could disagree – and I do not mean to say that they would be wrong.
57 epistemic vices of active ignorance would be thus in play: She supposed that she knows everything there is to know, she did not find it necessary to learn more, and maybe she even needed to not learn more. Remember that researchers are in a very powerful position compared to subjects of their research. To some extent, they have the power to “order the world”: To decide what is relevant and what is not, and then to support the result with their scientific authority. In this example, R2 unfairly barred the information from entering the shared epistemic resources, and so perpetrated contributory injustice from the position of a researcher.
3.4 Epistemic Injustice in Securitisation and Desecuritisation “Vernacularisation” of the securitisation framework opens a window to hitherto less visible spaces where epistemic injustice can take place. As we know from Fricker’s work, identity power often goes hand in hand with other kinds of social power, and so also with other kinds of injustices. And since elites are typically not powerless victims of injustices, their securitising moves are probably not the best place where to look for epistemic injustice67. This is why the idea behind vernacular security is useful for us because it instructs us to broaden the scope of our inquiry – to look everywhere and see how conceptions of security clash with one another and what emerges from such confrontations.
My point is that if we combine this approach with the apparatus of epistemic injustice, we may start perceiving things that did not occur to us before. First, we may find out that non-elite or worse positioned subjects perform securitising moves too, even if they sometimes are not heard or listened to (see e.g. Greaves 2016a, 2016b). And second, we may understand why they are not listened to if this is the case, and thus better understand under what conditions securitising moves fail, and therefore also under what conditions other succeed. Of course, not each failed securitisation or desecuritisation is a case of epistemic injustice. There may also be other obstacles involved, and of course, some of
67 But I immediately need to add that elite subjects may be epistemically wronged too – take for women among politicians. Moreover, even subjects with “secure” identities may become victims of the incidental variant of epistemic injustice, e.g. when they present a radically new idea.
58 them surely fail quite rightly – there is no need to romanticise those lacking power. But if some of do involve epistemic injustice, we finally get “fitting words” to talk about them.
I opened my thesis with two goals which this thesis aims to fulfil. This section is one possible answer to the second of them, i.e. the question: How can the theory of epistemic injustice be useful for security studies? I am convinced that introduction of the framework of epistemic injustice allows us to ask new questions when conducting inquiries into both failed and successful cases of securitisations. Namely, could not this securitising move fail (also) because the actor behind it was epistemically unfairly treated? How is it possible that this securitising actor was misunderstood in her description of a threat although retrospectively seen everything is clear? Or, how do structurally prejudiced conceptions held by audience affect their assessment of securitising moves? And so on. If we learn by asking these questions that not everyone has the fair chance to perform securitising moves successfully due to their social identity, that marginalisation of some subjects makes their experience with insecurity unintelligible, or that certain issues cannot be securitised owing to audience’s inability to question their misconstrued conceptions of certain issues, we make a big step further in understanding of securitisation processes. It is important to reiterate that I am not going to prove in my thesis that these things really happen. I do not obfuscate that arguments put forward in this text are derived from theory rather than real-world situations68. Rather, my aim is to suggest that they may happen and that we should start paying attention to this possibility for both, analytical and ethical reasons.
I assume that mechanisms behind transactions of testimonies and securitising moves are – in principle – rather similar69. In the former case, speaker offers a testimony which can be rejected by her hearer. In the latter, securitising actor attempts to convince her audience70 that a certain problem is a security issue – again, the audience can choose to reject the move. Insofar they do so honestly, both the speaker and the securitising actor
68 I need to add that the data are not easily accessible either. Remember that I am interested here in subjugated knowledges or “silences” in a sense – and it is the characteristic feature of things which are not heard or visible that there is anything but abundance of sources that can be readily analysed. Indeed, they need to be actively recovered first, which is beyond the scope of this thesis. 69 After all, giving testimony can be understood as a speech act too (C. A. J. Coady 1992, 42), so these situations would be comparable even in this aspect. 70 Or some of her audiences. Depending on the case, there may be a multiplicity of audiences with various identities and functions (see e.g. Balzacq 2005; Côté 2016; Salter 2008).
59 try to convey certain beliefs. In both cases, audience assesses speaker’s credibility – whether she is competent and sincere – and accepts or rejects what is being told. Now, my point here is that if we agree that a subject may be wronged in her capacity as a knower, there is no reason why this should not hold true also for a securitising actor and her attempt to portray a problem as a security issue. Before I move further though, I need to emphasise that this claim rests on the belief that there are “just securitisations” which I understand here utterly simply as securitising moves that aim to securitise “brute” threats71 rather than to achieve something by deception. If the latter was the case, then there would be nothing wrongful about the rejection of such move. Furthermore, although I started this paragraph with the comparison between transactions of testimonies and securitising moves, I suppose that any of the three kinds of epistemic injustice may be involved in the process of securitisation, not only the testimonial one. Also, (de)securitising actor is not the only potential victim of epistemic injustice. We should not forget that there are also referential objects, who may be wronged by securitisation done on their behalf – e.g. when a securitising actor misunderstands part of their social experience as threatening to them, and so securitises it (see note 75).
Combination of theories of epistemic injustice and securitisation offers four basic cases of epistemic injustice in securitisation and desecuritisation processes: unfairly failed securitisation, unfairly successful securitisation, unfairly failed desecuritisation, and unfairly successful securitisation. If we further distinguish causes why (de)securitisation unfairly succeeded or failed, we get twelve scenarios which you can see in Table 1. This matrix is open to adjustments and extensions: We can freely add both, other possible kinds of epistemic injustice and security utterances such as counter-securitisations (Topgyal 2016), securitising requests (Floyd 2017, 48–51) and so on. The enumerated twelve scenarios are only an illustration, not a prescription for what to see; I tried to use as abstract terms as possible in order not to exclude any possible real-world situation, yet even abstract terms are confining.
71 Balzacq (2005, 181) describes brute threats as “threats that do not depend on language mediation to be what they are — hazards for human life”. Importantly, this does not contradict the belief that “securityness” of an issue is constructed intersubjectively – indeed, until it is securitised, it is not perceived as a security issue even though it “exists”.
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Table 2: Four Basic Cases of Epistemic Injustice in Securitisation and Desecuritisation and Their Variants
Results Causes → A) Testimonial Injustice B) Hermeneutical Inj. C) Contributory Inj. 1) Unfairly failed Negative (identity) A problem is not Audience’s wilful securitisation prejudice causes understood (perhaps hermeneutical audience to give a even by the wronged ignorance in deflated level of subject herself) as a maintaining credibility to security issue, although structurally prejudiced securitising actor’s it should be, owing to hermeneutical attempt to securitise an hermeneutical resources thwarts a issue. marginalisation. sec. actor’s attempt to securitise an issue. 2) Unfairly successful Positive (identity) A problem is Sec. actor’s attempt to securitisation prejudice causes understood as a securitise an issue audience to give an security issue (perhaps confirms audience’s excessive level of even by the wronged misconstrued credibility to subject herself), understanding of the securitising actor’s although it should not subject matter, and so attempt to securitise an be, owing to is accepted. issue. hermeneutical marginalisation. 3) Unfairly failed Negative (identity) A problem is still Audience’s wilful desecuritisation prejudice causes understood as a hermeneutical audience to give a security issue (perhaps ignorance in deflated level of even by the wronged maintaining credibility to actor’s subject herself), structurally prejudiced attempt to desecuritise although it no longer hermeneutical an issue. should be, owing to resources thwarts an hermeneutical actor’s attempt to marginalisation desecuritise a security issue. 4) Unfairly successful Positive (identity) A problem is not Actor’s attempt to desecuritization prejudice causes understood as a desecuritise a security audience to give a security issue anymore issue confirms deflated level of (perhaps even by the audience’s credibility to actor’s wronged subject misconstrued attempt to desecuritise herself), although it still understanding of the an issue. should be, owing to subject matter, and so hermeneutical is accepted. marginalisation.
It needs to be specified what does it mean for securitisation to fail. Mark Salter argues that “there are several steps in the acceptance or failure of a securitizing move” (2011, 119). First, “the issue-area must be within the universe of possible political discussion” (Salter 2011, 120). Second, existential nature of the threat to the community must be accepted. Third, “the solution to the existential threat must be accepted” (Salter 2011,
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121). Fourth, new or emergency powers must be accorded to the securitising actor – but as I said earlier, I do not consider this condition necessary in this thesis. So, when I say that securitisation unfairly failed, I mean that the securitising actor72 was wronged in one of the first three steps, but most probably – yet not necessarily – in the second or third one. I do not have a similar scheme for desecuritisation; I just suppose that desecuritisation is securitisation in reverse, even if I know that debate on this matter is much more complex and I might be wrong (see e.g. Hansen 2012). It is true that I have been somewhat neglecting desecuritisation in this chapter, but I have been doing so for the sake of simplicity and coherence and I also assume that it is not detrimental to the point of my text. Therefore, actor attempting to desecuritise a security issue may be wronged in an analogical manner.
In what follows I am going to describe only a few of these twelve scenarios. This is because I believe that Table 1 itself becomes instructive enough once I explain the basic mechanisms, and so a description of each scenario would be unnecessarily tiresome for both, reader and me. I illustrate each of the selected scenarios with a short hypothetical vignette. None of them is “real”, but I try to keep them as plausible as possible. I decided not to illustrate them with real situations for it would be too constraining because every real-life case contains some exceptions to ideal concept. Moreover, as I already suggested several times, to confront this theory with data is the task of empirical research which should follow. Nonetheless, these vignettes are not “model” cases in the sense that real situations should proceed in the same way, they only serve to elucidate the idea. Besides, “exceptions” found in the real world are not detrimental, it is simply how the relation between ideal theories and diverse experiences work.
Let me begin with the scenario 1A, i.e. testimonial injustice in unfairly failed securitisation, because it is the case that I have already touched several times throughout this chapter. In this situation, a securitising actor performs securitising move but fails because her audience unfairly deflates her credibility level due to a prejudiced perception of her identity. As a result, audience rejects the securitising move because it does not perceive the actor as trustworthy. Let us imagine a community of indigenous peoples
72 Or someone else – the referent object - was wronged by the result of failed (de)securitisation.
62 which tries to convince the government of the country that climate change is an existential threat to their way of living73. However, the government is comprised by people who perceive the Inuit as mere derivatisation of their own subjectivity, and so simply turn this information down as implausible because derivatised subjects cannot bring any new information that would “would redirect [their] epistemic practices toward those parts of [their] experienced world that extend beyond or trouble the veracity of the dominantly experienced world” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2014a, 107). In other words, the government argues that it is implausible that indigenous people would be better positioned to assess security problems than experts within ranks of the state apparatus. Therefore, the audience rejects the existential nature of the threat, or perhaps even the very “securityness” of the issue itself. Since this conclusion is based on a mere prejudice, it is a clear case of testimonial injustice. I assume that situation could look similar if the derivatised subject instead attempted to claim that something is not threat – how could they know?
Medina and Coady showed us that credibility excesses matter too. That brings us to the case of testimonial injustice in unfairly successful securitisation, i.e. scenario 2A. The situation is simple: The securitising actor is trusted more than she should be, perhaps because of a positive identity-prejudicial stereotype in audience’s epistemological equipment. Consequently, a securitising move which under normal conditions would – and should – fail succeeds. This case may involve a popular politician who exploits a political issue to get more powers. She presents the issue, e.g. migration from war-torn Middle Eastern countries, as an existential threat to society, and easily succeeds because where there should have been critically thinking opposition, there was only audience with prejudiced view of actor’s social identity. The question is, however, who was epistemically wronged in such situation. If there were some other actors who attempted to prevent the securitisation but failed to do so due to the credibility excess given to the popular politician, then the answer is clear. But if not, no one was epistemically wronged because one probably cannot do injustice to herself. I assume that such cases – where there is no
73 The Inuit in Canada find themselves exactly in this situation. Greaves (2016b, 2016a) did a great job in describing their failed securitization attempts. However, even though he describes them as being silenced, it is impossible for me to say whether their situation would qualify as a case of testimonial injustice because he does not provide enough information on how exactly the government reacts to their attempts.
63 opposition at all – are sporadic. However, it means that it is necessary to include in the framework actors who resist or compete with securitising actors.
We can easily move from scenario 2A to 2C, i.e. contributory injustice in unfairly successful securitisation. In this case, the politician succeeds not because who she is but for what she says. Her portrayal of a problem as a security issue draws on structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources which resonate with her epistemologically spoiled audience. The audience accepts what the securitising actor proposes because it corresponds with what it thinks, while alternative views are dismissed for the exactly same reason. Therefore, if both the securitising actor and her audience are wilfully hermeneutically ignorant and share the same structurally prejudiced conception of “migration from the Middle Eastern countries”, the securitisation will succeed even if dissenting voices try to disrupt it with their attempts to fill the involved hermeneutical gap with their alternative views. Similarly, in scenario 1C, i.e. contributory injustice in unfairly failed securitisation, the securitising actor fails because her securitising move clashes with epistemological systems of her wilfully hermeneutically ignorant audience which use biased concepts to thwart securitising actor’s attempt. If the audience believes that the Global War on Terror is a great idea and refuses to see that it has also some, if not many, serious drawbacks, attempts to securitise this issue will most likely fail.
What remains are scenarios involving hermeneutical injustice. These cases are somewhat tricky because we need to remember that in Fricker’s view, which I follow here, “[n]o agent perpetrates hermeneutical injustice–it is a purely structural notion” (2007, 159). Let me start with scenario 1B, i.e. hermeneutical injustice in unfairly failed securitisation. In this case a hermeneutically marginalised group faces a “brute” threat but fails to intelligibly portray it as a security issue or even to conceive it as such. Copenhagen School’s idea of societal security (Buzan, Waever, and Wilde 1998, 119) is useful here because it allows us to imagine a community of indigenous people living in a country which goes through a rapid process of planned modernisation which constitutes a threat to its identity. Since the community is hermeneutically marginalised, it fails to deliver their specific experience with negative effects of the modernisation process into the shared pool of resources, and so the collective understanding of it is biased. Everyone is thus seemingly happy that the country moves towards prosperity except the indigenous people who try to raise some complaints but fail to do so intelligibly because when they
64 say “our way of life is in danger,” no one knows what they mean because there seemingly is nothing bad about the process and perhaps also because they cannot formulate it properly for they lack fitting words. Alternatively, maybe even the community itself does not understand it as a threat until it is too late, and it finds out that their traditional way of living and sense of identity is irrevocably disrupted and members of the community alienated. In any case, no one seems to be culpable for the hermeneutical injustice done, i.e. failure to understand the issue as a security problem. If the indigenous community managed to contribute with their negative experience, maybe someone would understand that the modernisation proceeds too quickly and recklessly. But since their capability to participate on meaning-making was limited, part of their social experience was obscured from collective understanding, and so the understanding of modernisation as harmless was utterly partial.
Application of hermeneutical injustice on securitization processes has also its limits, which can be seen in scenario 2B, i.e. hermeneutical injustice in unfairly successful securitisation. Let us imagine that there is a group, e.g. “migrants from Middle Eastern countries”, which is hermeneutically marginalised. Therefore, members of this group do not have a fair access to participation on making and re-making of shared hermeneutical resources. These hermeneutical resources concern not only their social experiences but also their social identity. Indeed, they may have troubles to influence even who they are in the collective understanding. In other words, they are vulnerable to what other subjects will say about them – it is not them, the “migrants”, who shapes the concept of their identity in the shared pool of resources74. Now, if “others”, e.g. media, say most of the time only negative things about them, presence of the “migrants” may start to be seen as a problem that should be securitised75. The affected subjects will perhaps try to object and say “we are like you, we are not a threat” but this would be unintelligible because an
74 This is, in my view, e.g. case of the Romani people in the Czech Republic. 75 But scenario 2B does not imply that the marginalized subjects must be in the position of “enemy”. Quite the contrary, a part of their social experience may be misunderstood and securitised for “their own good”. For example, Kelly et al. (2014) argue that understanding of the experience of woman working in artisanal mines in Democratic Republic of Congo is flawed to the effect that they are seen as helpless victims rather than women with agency who seek and find opportunities to better their life in such places. Although these locations do pose certain risks, they argue that their nature is misunderstood and requires re-examination. I believe that a vignette based on this situation would illustrate scenario 2B well too, but I decided to draw attention to the more extreme, but not less plausible, possibility that one loses control over who she is, and so is misunderstood and securitized.
65 important part of their social experience and identity is obscured from collective understanding. Under such conditions, hermeneutical injustice would be done but, again, no one would be directly culpable for it. There is, however, only a very thin line between hermeneutical and contributory injustice in this case, which is crossed when hearer refuses to know better. I thus assume that the issue could be securitised in hermeneutically unjust way only for a short period of time; sooner or later, the honest lack of information would transform into reluctance to accept information, and so a matter of contributory injustice. Especially in our age of easy dissemination and verification of information is ignorance more willful than ever. It is thus increasingly difficult to imagine conditions under which subjects would have a chance to miss information put forward by this marginalized group – which is at the same time seen as threatening, and so in the centre of interest – and at the same time could not do anything to improve their epistemic impoverishment. But perhaps it would not transform into contributory injustice, maybe this is how it would work: That hermeneutically unjust securitisation would crumble right in the moment when people realised that things are not as they seemed to be, that their conceptions of “migrants” was utterly wrong and they simply did not have enough information but now they see it clearly. Or maybe this scenario would work better in a historical setting wherein information travels slowly and verification is difficult. Or perhaps in a regime in which information is distorted by ubiquitous propaganda.
I believe that the way in which the two frameworks may be combined is now more than clear. I need to reiterate though, that these are only basic cases, and by “basic” I mean not the most common but allowing further adjustments, extensions, bifurcations and so on. I already suggested that more kinds of epistemic injustice can be added; I follow Kristie Dotson’s (2012, 25) advice and leave this structure open for other and further ideas. For instance, I assume that introduction of Kukla’s (2014) discursive injustice would allow us to see that the securitizing actor can be wronged even before the perlocutionary act, namely that audience may misperceive her as not even performing securitizing move but e.g. joking. But this is a task for some future theorizing and research. If I managed to convince my reader with this basic sketch that the concept and theory of epistemic injustice may be useful for study of securitization and security topics in general, I already achieved more than I could hope for.
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Conclusion The goal of this thesis was twofold: First, to present the theory of epistemic injustice and adjustments and extensions to it in the way that will be easily understandable for audience with no background in epistemology. Second, to demonstrate how the theory is relevant to the field of security studies.
I believe that I provided the reader with the basics necessary for her or his own thinking about epistemic injustice, whether in the context of security or not. I explained that epistemic injustice can – but does not have to – be divided into three kinds: testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory. Testimonial injustice concerns unfairly deflated credibility attribution to a testifying speaker which leads to partial or complete mistrust. The speaker is thus wronged in her capacity as a giver of knowledge. I also presented two important adjustments to the original formulation: First, credibility excesses matter too, and second, the speaker is epistemically derivatised rather than objectified. Hermeneutical injustice occurs in the case that one has some significant area of her or his life obscured from collective understanding. This leads to situations in which the hermeneutically wronged subject fails to communicate something important intelligible, either to herself or to her hearer. Finally, contributory injustice is perpetrated when a hearer maintains and utilises structurally prejudiced concepts to the effect that she thwarts speaker’s attempt to convey something to her. In contrast to testimonial injustice, the hearer resists certain knowledges rather than conveyors – but all three kinds of injustice complement each other.
I did my best to present the theory as clearly as the required length of the thesis allowed me. However, that inevitably led to the fact that some aspects had to be omitted, and, unfortunately, the positive side of the matter was one of them. I could not elaborate on epistemic justice and resistance to injustice. The first omission impairs my implicit aim to contribute with this text to rectification of injustices – to inspire the reader to train the virtues of epistemic justice, and so to better our society. This may sound naively idealistic but on the other hand, to recognise injustice is only the first step, however important, after which the second step, active attempt to do something – Arendtian vita activa – should follow. After all, we are talking about injustice here. The second omission might create an unfortunate impression that epistemically wronged subjects are passive victims. I hope I
67 can at least partially ameliorate this flaw – which is also present in Fricker’s (2007) book – if I recommend you to pay attention to José Medina’s (2013) great book The Epistemology of Resistance. As the title suggests, he addresses in it exactly this topic but also provides many valuable insights which extend Fricker’s framework – I cited some of them in section 2.3.
The second goal. I presented five already existing applications of the concept of epistemic injustice on cases pertinent to security studies. These contributions do show that framework of epistemic injustice offers the means to get interesting analytical and ethical insights which otherwise could remain hidden. I nonetheless decided to go one step further and integrate epistemic injustice apparatus into securitisation theory. Some necessary adjustments had to be done first because the original formulation of the theory focused too much on securitising actor performing a securitising move, and so left the role of audience – which is crucial for epistemic injustice framework – underdeveloped. I used Thierry Balzacq’s and Adam Côté’s insights to grant audience centrality and agency, and so the possibility to wrong the securitising actor. However, I found out that securitising theory itself can contribute to epistemic injustice. Since it encourages to focus on powerful agents who are capable of securitising successfully, it hermeneutically marginalises worse positioned actors. In other words, it encourages us to automatically avoid securitising attempts of non-elite actors, and so our understanding of what issues are perceived as insecurity may be biased. I thus suggested to apply perspective vernacular security studies and look at every level.
Finally, I integrated epistemic injustice framework into securitisation theory and identified four basic cases of epistemic injustice in securitisation and desecuritisation. These are: unfairly failed securitisation, unfairly successful securitisation, unfairly failed desecuritisation and unfairly successful desecuritisation. I nevertheless reiterate that this structure is rather basic and open to extensions. There are more kinds of epistemic injustice on the horizon – discursive, interpretative, participatory to name some – and the same is true for securitisation process, which can be further broken down to see elements such as securitisation requests, counter-securitisations or resistances. But even this basic framework allows to ask new questions such as “Could not this securitising move fail (also) because the actor behind it was epistemically unfairly treated?” or “How is it possible that this securitising actor was misunderstood in her description of threat
68 although seen retrospectively everything is clear?” or “How do structurally prejudiced conceptions held by audience affect their assessment of securitising moves?”. Value of this questions should not, however, be seen only in analytic insights they may generate. I must emphasise again that all this is about injustice. We must not lose this ethical dimension from our sight because we are not counting rockets in Russian arsenal here but potentially witnessing wrong done to real people.
I noted at the beginning of this thesis that this work was an “exploratory enterprise” – I did not know what I will find when I started working on this thesis – and I consider this enterprise, at least in its second part, successful. Even though the integration of epistemic injustice apparatus to securitisation theory remained rather sketchy – I hope I will have a chance to elaborate on this topic in the future – I believe that I managed to offer a version of securitisation framework which is sensitive to epistemic injustice while itself does not contribute to epistemic injustice.
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