Summary Diversity, Equality and Justice: Lecture 1-11 (DEJ) (Politics of Difference) (FY)
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Course
Diversity, Equality and Justice (73230237LY)
Institution
Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
This summary includes notes from all the lectures of Diversity, Equality and Justice (Politics of Difference) and a lot of added extra information from the teacher or the literature. Everything that I deemed important is highlighted. I also mention many of the reading materials, like Fukuyama, Habe...
Gehele samenvatting DEJ
Lecture 1 DEJ
The Politics of Difference
Which differences are political?
Differences can seem non-political, but they can become politically salient.
What is considered normal?
➢ In families it is considered normal two have two adults, a male and a female, and two
children.
➢ If there is a third adult it would not be considered normal. Also, this person is not
protected in any kind of family law. So, it matters to a great deal what is considered
normal and what is not.
How should Political Scientists study difference?
• Difference belongs in the private sphere → an individual should be able to live his life
like he wants to, without state interference
• In the public sphere is the sphere for what is shared → the idea of the common good →
finding compromises → it should be a neutral space without distinctions between people
→ if there are distinctions than you will have injustice and discrimination
o Critique: the public sphere is not as neutral as it claims to be. It is more the
domination of what is considered normal.
• It is important how political scientists conceptualize ‘difference’
• The king of the Netherlands retired the golden carriage because it was linked to slavery.
o Connects to the distinction between people who study interests and people who
study ideas.
Why ‘The Politics of Difference’ and not ‘Diversity, Equality and Justice’?
It is not about making the course oriented around three concepts, but there are a lot more
concepts regarding this topic that need to be studied.
➢ Diversity has a sort of marketing name to it, and it is more used in corporate life.
The politics of difference:
“How power and political institutions categorize people into groups and how this generates
inequality”
,Take aways
• The politics of difference refers to: “How power and political institutions categorize
people into groups and how this generates inequality”
• Not all differences are political, so we’re interested in how and why some differences
become and remain political
• Defining what is “normal” and what is “different is political
• Political scientists study differences between interests AND identities
• Political theorists have often seen differences as best protected by respecting individual
freedom in the private sphere
• Critical theorists question the possibility of a “neutral” public sphere
• Describing difference – through statistics or otherwise – is political
, Lecture 2 DEJ
Difference in Public
Why did you come to university to study politics?
• There are some very famous politicians that never studied politics.
• Most people that are engaged in studying politics, do this because they are convinced that
the knowledge that is produced matters.
o It matters in the public sphere: a space where politics, reason and scientific debate
really matters.
o So, you want to study political science because you want to have the actual
scientific knowledge and the ability to give relatively objective answers.
“The end of history & the last man” – Francis Fukuyama
➢ A book that argues that democracy is the endpoint of human history
➢ So, after the Cold War history was over, because democracy is the best endpoint for
human history → it couldn’t get any better
In the period of George Bush, they took over Iraq because of the claim that they had a lot of
illegal weapons that were a threat to the US.
➢ However, they stayed years after they obtained the weapons
➢ As a justification for this heist, they used the theory of Fukuyama → that they were there
to democratize Iraq
➢ Fukuyama didn’t approve of this and changed things in his book
The public sphere according to Habermas
The public sphere is:
• A communicative realm;
• where participants leave their status and identities behind;
• to discuss and debate the common interest and government;
• and the ‘force of the better argument’ wins
Communicative realm:
Politics doesn’t always happen in central, organized, parliamentary institutions, but also out on
the streets; in public spaces.
➢ It can be chatting people on the streets, a little tent outside parliament where people try to
represent themselves and present their ideas to parliament as a form of protest, in
autocratic countries like Myanmar people gather in little teashops to discuss politics
➢ You do see an overrepresentation of men, just like in parliament
➢ Also, Ted Talks can be seen as the public sphere, that can also spread all over the world
➢ Also, the realm of communication can take place on Twitter or on Zoom
, Participants leave their status and identities behind:
• Engaging in rational and rather neutral discourse
Discuss and debate the common interest and government:
In the Netherland you had the Dutch East India Company, this was owned by a small group of
elite businessmen, and rich people invested in this company.
➢ After some time, they started to wonder what was actually happening with their money,
down there in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
➢ These discussions, in Habermas’ idea, began to constitute the public sphere.
➢ Very male set of interests beginning to gain an interest in the public, primarily on the
basis of physical interests
Force of the better argument wins:
The idea that the appeal to justice and reason has an ability to pray upon people’s sensibilities,
their faculties of reason and their self-perceptions of who they are and how they want to be
perceived.
Critical theory relies on the principal that all arguments in some way are grounded in a set of
interests → all arguments about what we should do in politics have forms of bias inherent to
them.
For example: Ways of asking questions about organized violence
• How can we create world peace?
o United Nations, Status quo powers
• How can you deter a potential aggressor?
o Military industry
• How can we reduce the number of battle deaths in war?
o Soldiers and potential recruits
• How can we reduce the number of civilian deaths in war?
o Civilians in conflict environments
• How can we reduce conflict related violence?
o Women and children in conflict environments (think about e.g. rape)
➢ Different types of questions from scholars, all of them leading to relatively objective and
neutral forms of analysis about what is and what ought to be done about organized
violence
➢ But each of them is skewed in a particular way to different interests
Factors people can rely on while choosing an article for their research paper, based on the
author/article:
Method, gender, race/ethnicity, nationality/class, language.
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