While notions of justice are as old as human civilisation, recent decades have seen a proliferation of terms like climate justice, social justice, mobility justice, epistemic justice, and planetary justice. Liberal theories of fairness and social contract shaped many late twentieth-century debates (Rawls 1971; Nozick 1974; Fraser 1997; Sen 2009), whereas popular mobilisations for racial, gender, climate, and decolonial justice have drawn on feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial thought (Fanon 1963; Okin 1989). ‘Justice’ here encompasses both institutional frameworks, such as legal systems and legislation, and broader moral and affective claims about fairness, harm, and redress.

In anthropology, early ethnographic works documented customary law, dispute resolution, and moral codes across cultures, but often without explicitly theorising ‘justice’ as such (Nader and Sursock 1986). Since the 1980s, however, particularly in the field of legal and political anthropology, documenting and analysing diverse forms of (transitional) justice has been a cornerstone of research in conflict and post-conflict contexts (Wilson 2001). Anthropologists have emphasised that justice is not a universal principle but a culturally embedded, historically situated process (Robbins 2010). They have demonstrated how formal judicial systems often fail on the ground, and how structural inequalities and colonial legacies constrain both access to legal justice and the achievement of substantive justice (Merry 2006).

Ethnographic accounts have also shed light on the making of justice in practice, interrogating how courtrooms operate, how lawyers and litigants negotiate outcomes, and how disputes over what justice should mean unfold in specific settings (Andreetta 2022). At the same time, anthropologists have increasingly examined justice claims made outside institutionalised frameworks—by social movements, protestors, and everyday actors—showing how these moral claims can contest, reinterpret, or supplement formal legal understandings of justice (Englund 2006). Even when justice is recognised or mandated by formal institutions, these rulings do not necessarily alter practice, and debates persist over who counts as a legitimate recipient of justice. Increasingly, and inspired by their (Indigenous) research collaborators, anthropologists have also expanded the boundaries of justice by engaging with multispecies and environmental justice to explore how environmental harm, extinction, and interspecies relations challenge anthropocentric legal and moral frameworks of justice (Rose 2011; van Dooren 2014; Tsing 2015).

Taken together, these insights underscore the need to examine how global human rights and justice discourses—shaped by anthropocentric and liberal frameworks—can inadvertently (re)produce injustices, even as they seek to promote fairness, equity, or redress. At the same time, anthropologists are particularly well equipped to trace and analyse emergent forms of (in)justice produced by rapid societal transformations, precisely because they ground concepts in lived experience, attend to local and historical contexts, and critically interrogate abstract frameworks that tend to universalise hegemonic perspectives. This allows them to study struggles over AI and digital rights, movements for reparations of colonisation and slavery, reproductive or metabolic justice, and challenges to established normative understandings of justice.

This issue of Etnofoor invites contributions that critically explore justice as both an ethnographic object and an analytical tool. How is justice imagined, performed, and challenged in everyday life? How do institutions, movements, or worldviews define what is just—and for whom? What does it mean to do scholarship in the name of social justice? What happens when anthropologists themselves become entangled in struggles over justice, whether as advocates, researchers, witnesses, or transgressors?

We invite authors to submit an abstract of no more than 200 words to editors@etnofoor.nl by October 24, 2025. We also welcome book reviews, methodological reflections, and creative contributions such as photo essays, semi-fictionalised ethnographies, or graphic narratives. The deadline for authors of accepted abstracts to submit their full paper is February 1, 2026. The issue is scheduled for publication in the summer of 2026.

References

Andreetta, Sophie.

2022    Failing, writing, litigating: daily practices of resistance in Belgian welfare bureaucracies. International Journal of Law in Context, 18(3): 317–332.

Dooren, Thom van

2014    Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.

Englund, Harri

2006    Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz

1963 The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Fraser, Nancy

1997    Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. New York: Routledge.

Merry, Sally Engle

2006    Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nader, Laura, and Lina Sursock

1986    Anthropology and Justice In: Ronald L. Cohen (ed.), Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. Boston, MA: Springer. Pp. 205–233.

Nozick, Robert

1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

Okin, Susan Moller

1989 Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.

Rawls, John

1971 A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Robbins, Joel

2010    Recognition, Reciprocity, and Justice: Melanesian Reflections on the Contemporary Global Order. In: Kamari Maxine Clarke and Mark Goodale (eds.), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post–Cold War Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 171–190.

Rose, Deborah Bird

2011    Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Sen, Amartya

2009 The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tsing, Anna

2015    The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wilson, Richard A.

2001    The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimising the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.