Stasis announces a new call for papers for a thematic issue: Justice: (Re)Conceptualization

Stasis invites authors to engage in a series of reflections on key political concepts in their contemporary configurations. The first concept in this series is “justice.” Since antiquity, justice has been regarded as the “first virtue of social institutions” (Rawls), understood as the projection of ethical principles—truth and the good—onto the social realm.

 In the twentieth century, an explosion of interest in justice took place within analytic philosophy, above all following the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. This work gave rise to a broad tradition of normative theories of justice, often understood as an ethical paradigm of economic liberalism (Brian Barry, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, Ronald Dworkin, Rainer Forst, Amartya Sen).

Although Stasis has rarely engaged with analytic philosophy in the past, this issue seeks to foster a productive dialogue between ethical-normative approaches in the analytic and continental traditions. In continental philosophy, justice has generally not been tied directly to capitalist or socialist institutions; instead, scholars have sought to move beyond the economic, quantitative, and managerial logic characteristic of the American school of thought. Nevertheless, justice has remained a central concern—particularly in French philosophy. A key figure here is Emmanuel Levinas, for whom justice constitutes the fundamental ethical framework of the subject’s relation to the Other. In a similar vein, emphasizing the dimension of transcendence, Paul Ricœur, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy have also offered influential reflections on justice.

Following the collapse of the USSR, the question of justice—above all “social justice”—became a major theme in social research and political philosophy across post-Soviet countries. Particular attention has been paid both to existing conceptions of justice in these societies and to the history of the term spravedlivost’ in Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian. Both etymologically and in usage, it differs significantly from the French and English justice, which also encompasses meanings such as law, adjudication, and the administration of justice. This divergence shapes the content of the concepts themselves. For instance, Giorgio Agamben has sharply criticized the category of justice (iustitia), pointing to its connection with apparatuses of coercion and the state of exception—criticism that may not apply in the same way to German or East Slavic terms.

Today, the question of justice has вновь become urgent in light of the crisis of neoliberal economics, the renewed appeal of socialist ideas, and the rapid emergence of new technologies requiring regulation (such as drones and artificial intelligence). Rising inequality and debates over radical measures aimed at the ethical transformation of the economy—for example, universal basic income or the democratization of enterprises—return us to discussions of political economy initiated by Rawls. At the same time, a new set of challenges has emerged, related to recognition and political membership: how can the evident demands of universal justice be reconciled with the realities of nation-states and the protection of labor markets?

In this context, the task is not merely to reflect philosophically on contemporary developments, but to (re)conceptualize the fundamental categories of political philosophy. Society looks to philosophers for orientation in an increasingly uncertain and rapidly changing world.

We therefore invite authors to reflect on the following topics (the list is not exhaustive):

• What is justice? A historical perspective
• Rawls’s legacy in the contemporary world
• Analytic and continental conceptions of justice: is dialogue possible?
• Quantitative and qualitative conceptions of justice
• Is there a place for justice as a value in Marxism?
• Justice and dissensus: how is social unity possible?
• The justice of borders in a globalized world
• Distributive justice and recognition
• Justice in Soviet discourse and post-Soviet societies
• Democracy and justice: the problem of populism
• Just war and the parameters of a just peace
• New forms of inequality: in search of social justice
• Justice in the age of AI