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Justice and Rights · Episode 4Aug 21, 2023 · 24 min

Cecilia Jacob on Justice

Cecilia Jacob

International Relations, Australian National University

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Bethan Willis

00:02

Hello and welcome to the new podcast series from the Global Faculty Initiative. I'm Dr. Bethan Willis, a member of the Global Faculty Initiative team based at the Oxford Pastorate, a chaplaincy serving the research community at Oxford University and beyond. In this podcast, I'll be hosting conversations with world leading theologians who have written Theology Briefs - briefings, which open up key themes in Christian theology in order to encourage dialogue amongst academics in research universities worldwide. I'll bring leading edge, interdisciplinary scholars into these conversations, exploring with them how these theologies engage the innovative frontiers of their own research and writing. Our conversations will range across the arts and sciences and from business to the professions. Together we'll discuss how theologies can enrich university and academic life in all their dimensions. In this series of the podcast, we explore Professor Nicholas Wolterstorff's Theology Brief on Justice, which can be read or downloaded on the Global Faculty Initiative website. In this episode, I speak to Professor Cecilia Jacob about her Disciplinary Brief on justice. We discuss her work in the field of international relations, including questions of accountability in international justice; the importance of a relational perspective on rights; and how we might balance pragmatism and idealism in seeking justice for vulnerable communities. So welcome Cecilia, Professor Jacob.

Cecilia Jacob

01:40

It's lovely to be with you here in person, in Oxford.

Bethan Willis

01:44

You are here visiting the Blavatnik School of Government, but you are Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University. So international relations is your field. Can you tell us briefly what your areas of interest are and the focus of your current research?

Cecilia Jacob

:

Yes, so as a scholar of international relations, I'm interested, I suppose, widely in the development of international institutions and laws and norms, particularly in the area of conflict, and in the area of mass atrocities. So when we talk about mass atrocities, we're looking at large scale violations of human rights. So these are generally the areas that I have looked at over the years. More specifically, I suppose I've also been interested in social context of violence within a domestic context and how we might link up international strategies to prevent atrocities and that's a focus of a lot of my recent research.

Bethan Willis

:

And are there particular countries which you've focused on or been interested in within that?

Cecilia Jacob

:

So definitely Southeast Asia is the area where I did my PhD research. I worked in Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar. I've written quite a lot on India as well. I've done some field research there. And so this is the area of expertise where I tended to be engaged. At the moment, I'm also doing field work more at the multilateral level, so looking at United Nations organizations in New York, but also in Geneva with the human rights focus.

Bethan Willis

03:15

So we are here to discuss your excellent Brief on justice, which was a contribution to the Global Faculty Initiative series. How did you find engaging with Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Theology Brief on justice, and has that process of engaging with theological reflection made you look afresh at your scholarship and the questions of justice that come up in your field?

Cecilia Jacob

03:35

I loved the whole exercise. I think it's so refreshing as scholars who are deeply embedded and focused on your field to start having conversations with Christian academics across the disciplines and to pull out a lot of themes that we tend to return to over and over again in different aspects of our work. So justice is one of those themes (other ones we've looked at are questions of order and flourishing and so on) and the whole process of tracing back your own research and the kinds of questions that you're asking, and thinking what's really the purpose of why I'm doing this research, and what I'm drawing out of it, does help you to think about where your own values and norms and commitments are as a Christian. [It can] also play into the way that you conduct your research and the kind of focus and answers I think that you bring to bear.

Bethan Willis

04:24

And so you've prioritized some of the spiritual or psychological or relational questions within your field, and as you were engaging with this process, realizing that your Christian faith has actually prompted you to take this particular focus.

Cecilia Jacob

04:37

Well, definitely. I think one of the areas perhaps that makes my scholarship a little bit different is I tend to start with those domestic contexts of violence and social context of violence. And from taking that perspective, I've always, well over the years and doing field research in countries affected by conflict, realized how important those psychosocial spiritual dimensions around relationships and community-building and peace-building are. And I think that this is something that I then work my way back up when I'm looking at international strategies, norms, and programming to do peace building, for example in societies. It's something that's very integrated in the way that I look at these problems.

Bethan Willis

05:24

And I think when we spoke about this a little bit before, you were talking about human nature as well and how, the assumptions about human nature within your field, sometimes you want to trouble those a little bit and think about moral responsibility in different ways because of your Christian faith.

Cecilia Jacob

05:39

That's right. So I think within international relations and within political science more generally, we can be quite skeptical, even cynical about human nature and the propensity for people to be selfish, and too, I guess those recurring cycles of violence and conflict between states and within states. But I think there are ways to bring a deeper perspective into that. So for example, when I was writing this justice Brief and also an earlier piece that I had written for a special issue we did in the International Journal of Public Theology, I looked at Daniel Philpot's work on reconciliation as justice, where he looks at reconciliation being the restoring of right relationships. And that is on a personal level between us and God, but also how that then extends to an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of justice within societies and communities more broadly. And I think that way of thinking about it enriches the way that we look at these global problems. I think something I also should mention is when we talk about justice in my own field where I look at mass atrocities, we tend to talk about justice a lot. We look at war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide. And these are very much framed as questions of international justice and often from a criminological kind of perspective. And so I think we do have a lot to bring into these kinds of discussions about how we can look at restoration and transitional justice, something that you look at as well, more broadly within societies.

Bethan Willis

07:19

So the justice questions are there in your field up front and center, but you are finding different ways of approaching those different priorities that you might bring to those questions of justice. So a key focus in your Brief offered in response to Wolterstorff is the theme of accountability. And I wonder if before we go a bit further with that, whether you can just introduce that theme to our listeners, what you're talking about when you're talking about the theme of accountability.

Cecilia Jacob

07:44

So when I'm looking at accountability in my own research at the moment, I am very much looking at this, I suppose higher level macro international accountability for these problems of war crimes, crimes against humanity. And one thing that I've noted empirically has been this rise of accountability as a solution to the problems that we're facing. But I suppose where I want to problematize the relationship between accountability and justice has been to think about the kinds of accountability we're talking about. So in my field, we tend to be thinking a lot about retributive models of accountability. We tend to be looking at the very narrow form of justice. So where you have a very small handful of elites that are facing formal criminal prosecutions. And my concern about that is the possibility of turning away from a richer and more complex focus on justice for societies and what that could look like. So I think that's very difficult for states to engage at that level. And so they tend to turn to these solutions that make sense to them.

Bethan Willis

08:52

And I think in your Brief you talk about how the geopolitical context and kind of pushback against liberal values has perhaps undermined some of the efforts towards pursuing justice for vulnerable communities and certainly justice in a kind of fuller form. And I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit about this in relation to Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ideas of first order and second order justice. So in his Brief he says, first order justice is about how we treat others in our ordinary affairs. And secondary justice is the kind of justice which kicks in when things have gone wrong and action is needed to address injustice. So he says that only if you understand first order justice can you understand second order justice. And it seems to me that your Brief picks up and expands that point in some ways. So I guess the question is, is it right to say that the failure of individuals, of us, I suppose, of leaders, states, international actors to understand or practice first order justice - so justice in their everyday affairs and relationships- is affecting our ability to practice or understand second order justice on a global scale? So justice when things have gone wrong.

Cecilia Jacob

09:59

So especially in international relations, we tend to jump to the role of international institutions and international law as a solution to the problems of global conflict. And I think what we're discussing here in terms of first order justice is how we can build that ethic of responsibility and promoting values such as human rights (and where we’re talking about human rights, really looking at the dignity and worth of the individual) that we do see that that is very challenging at the moment in, as I mentioned, the current geopolitical context where there seems to be this kind of a contest or battle between states. And so this brings us, I think to the later point around pragmatism where we're seeing a lot of states and where we see states, we're talking about the individual level diplomats recoil from using the language of human rights. And so they tend to use a lot of euphemisms which move us towards accountability that take us, I guess a step or several steps further away from these questions of first order justice of how we interact with each other. And I think then we tend to turn to proxies for international justice, which is then a focus on those macro level institutions, which it's important that we think about those, but I think we do need to problematize the kind of language that we use.

Bethan Willis

:

Is there a way in which, as individuals within civic society, we actually contribute to a common understanding of justice which might eventually underpin better action at the macro level that you are looking at?

Cecilia Jacob

11:36

And this is something that we've thought about, I think amongst some of the other Christian scholars that I know is how we tend to compartmentalize knowledge and action. So where we look at our Christian commitments and values and norms, and we separate those from the academic enterprise and what we're doing within our field. But I think what we need to be doing is looking more holistically about how we think as Christians and how we then apply that to how we act. So whether that's through academia or whether that's how we engage in society, I think it has to start at that level. I think you need communities that are acutely aware of the importance of reconciliation and restoring relationships to really get to the heart of how we build that ethic of care and responsibility back into our societies. And so we do need those levels to connect from the community all the way through up to state actions.

Bethan Willis

12:35

And that's a big theme in your work, isn't it: reconciliation and right relationships? And we see that in your Brief , the importance of that kind of broader framing to understand how we act in terms of second order justice when things have gone wrong and you write, I think that the emphasis needs to shift from meeting individual rights or dues, to promoting a relational understanding of justice. Justice is being in a state of right relationship; rights should be situated within the broader social context individuals occupy. So can you tell us a bit about how that's worked out in your work, particularly your work with the GAAMAC? Can you talk to us a little bit about that and that emphasis on right relationships?

Cecilia Jacob

13:16

Yeah, the work that you're referring to there was for an organization called GAAMAC, which is Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes. And this is the largest state-led global network of actors. It is states as well as civil society, academia, and others who I guess exchange knowledge and build information sharing around how we might go about preventing mass atrocity crimes. So I co-chair the Asia Pacific Working Group and we did quite a substantive study, a report that's published online on hate speech. And so we engaged scholars from around Southeast Asia and South Asia to really look deeply into this question of hate speech. So how it's conducted, what's the relationship between the various groups, how it's facilitated. But we also sought to look at strategies for mitigating hate speech and incitement of violence, and looking at where we could actually introduce strategies for, I guess, building back those relationships.

14:19And so this was, I'm very proud of the work that this group, of well, scholars and civil society across the region did in this collaborative effort. I think it gave us really acute insight into the depth of the problems of hate speech and incitement and how that mobilizes. And it gives us a good understanding of, I think, the way that groups have perceptions of each other and the way that those are manipulated and used to build violence. But it also gives us wonderful case studies of where you can engage in this kind of reconciliation of shifting the frame of discourse and narrative among communities and societies to build back peace within those. And I think that's a wonderful model of where we can be engaging. And I think it's really important to recognize that we're not going to end these problems of social conflict and violence and war. We do live in an imperfect world, but I think we can bring in perspectives that can help to bring hope to restore this ethic of care and relationship back into societies and in certain cases help to transform certain situations. And I think that's a responsibility that is incumbent on us to bring that in.

Bethan Willis

15:41

Yeah. So you've touched on this a little bit already, but I think our next question is really around this balance between pragmatism and idealism. I think in your Brief there's a really clear sense, when I read it at least, of a Christian vision of justice, that you have an understanding of the ends of justice. But as a social scientist and thinking about your work as an advisor and a convener within wider public life, you are dealing with complex realities and engaging actors with a wide variety of motives and seeking to find concrete practical steps forwards to seek justice for vulnerable populations. Can you tell us a bit about how you - and how we as listeners- might seek agreement on justice within those kinds of spaces and how you seek to find a balance between pragmatism and idealism and hold those things together?

Cecilia Jacob

16:27

I think that's really important. I think for academics, learning to have conversations and dialogue with people in different spheres is important. As you mentioned, I do work across those boundaries between government and civil society as well as academia. And something I've learned also having worked in those spaces before coming to academia as well, is that we tend to speak a different language. And if we really want to make progress, then we have to step outside our academic bubble and learn how to speak to each other and to understand the kinds of problems that we're facing. Going back to some of the broader questions that we were talking about in terms of global justice from the perspective of international crimes and so on, I think something that I've had to face in my own work engaging on the practitioner level is to realize that we do live in quite an imperfect world. And where many academics in my field, particularly where they promote ethics and philosophy, do look to more utopian or idealist solutions to problems. And I think we do have to be quite practical at times. And when we talk about pragmatism, I don't mean it in the way that we actually dispense with our values and norms, but that we realize that we are never going to achieve a perfect world, and that we can actually make incremental steps. I think it's important to communicate with practitioners that there is a certain level of sacrifice that does need to be made in order to achieve normative ends. And I think we have seen that there are states that are willing to take on a certain level of sacrifice to be able to move questions of global justice forward. But again, learning, I guess, how much and how far to go before you, I think do more harm than good in that relationship is really important. So you do need to have a sense of practical wisdom as well, I think when you're navigating between these spheres.

Bethan Willis

18:28

In terms of the field in which you are working, what do you think are your hopes for the future? What do you see in the coming decades; what are the challenges that you see?

Cecilia Jacob

18:41

I think we have quite a big gap between the ideational language and frameworks that are being developed. So something that I'm looking at and writing about now has been the way that the humanization of international law and institutions has really taken hold. And we tend to have this sense that we've arrived at this arc of justice that we've had the centrality of humans within international institutions and international law. And I think the biggest challenge there is that that's quite out of step with the politics. And so how do we find a new way of bridging our ethical concerns and our normative language with practical actions is really the key challenge. I think that's why so much of my work really focuses on this question of implementation because I think that until we learn how to speak to each other and to think about how these normative aspirations translate into actionable outcomes, we're only having a sophisticated conversation among ourselves without thinking about the actual people who are the recipients of these kinds of deliberations. So what kind of a politics and what would that look like? And I think we do need political actors who are normatively engaged, who know how to navigate this political space and to know how much pragmatism to use and how much to push on ideational concerns. And so this is perhaps where I think it's headed is to find that middle ground, that practical wisdom and that practical sense of how we might interpret these advanced international norms and bodies of international law.

Cecilia Jacob

And now the possibilities that we have at hand because we've seen new initiatives in global justice, which I actually think are fantastic. I'm not critical of those at all, but to think how this can translate to a wider sense of justice. So I think this question around what does a thin global justice look like? So where we are really looking at prosecution of a handful of elites, for example, when we are losing attention and resources to building back into societies a more restorative model of justice, that I think is an enormous challenge. And I think there was traction within the international community to focus on questions of transitional justice and peace building. But I think that has started to wane when the political will has started to dissipate. And I think we are going to need politicians and diplomats and civil society and academics and so on who are really willing to keep pushing on these difficult questions. And it might be much more contingent. I don't think, in the current global environment we can have very universalistic ideas about how we're going to implement this. I think we need people working at all levels and in all geographic zones that are committed to realizing these objectives.

Bethan Willis

22:00

Obviously this process of theological engagement has been really fruitful for you as a scholar and for us as readers and listeners. Are there particular ways of engaging faith and scholarship together that you would recommend to other Christian academics who may be listening?

Cecilia Jacob

22:13

Something that I think I've learned over the years, and this process has also been a part of it, has been that you have to be a bit more purposeful and a bit more intentional about actually taking the time to reflect. I think sitting down and writing a Brief or a response is a nice discipline for you to actually sit down and reflect on those themes in your work and to think, why is it that I look at these particular subject matters? What really drives me? Why do I ask these particular questions? And what do I hope to achieve? What's the message that I want to communicate? And I think if we can be more intentional to think, what is it as a Christian that you bring that's unique? What's your voice? What's your contribution and what value can you add back to these complex social problems or these wider questions that we face in academia across the spectrum to think, can we actually insert a voice into this space that is part of the mainstream, that is shaping the discipline and helping the discipline to think in a different way? I think as Christians, we bring in a perspective that is often very refreshing and brings a lot of wisdom and practical wisdom to the issues that we're exploring. So to think purposefully and intentionally about setting those out and then how that might integrate, I've found that these exercises have been very useful when I come back to my writing to realize that those were quite implicit, and then to think about how I can be more explicit about weaving those back in.

Bethan Willis

23:45

Yeah, so it's been really wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for speaking with us today and sharing your insights on faith and justice and your work in international relations. Many thanks.

Cecilia Jacob

:

Thank you.