@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12979},
      author = {Mohan, Anjali},
      title = {Structures of Injustice: Reframing Responsibility for  Transnational Harms},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {This dissertation critically interrogates existing  frameworks of responsibility for large-scale, transnational  harms. Each chapter focuses on one framework—moral,  political, and legal, respectively, tracing the  relationship between individual agents and the structures  that produce the harms. All three frameworks focus on the  role of individual agents at the expense of the structural  conditions that give rise to the harms. Chapter 1 examines  the framework for moral responsibility within the “global  justice” literature and what I contend is its central  question: “What do we owe distant suffering strangers?”  Obscured by the question are the structural connections  between the “saviors” (from the global North) and the  “suffering strangers” (from the global South), Chapter 2  confronts the contemporary framework for political  responsibility centered on citizenship within a  nation-state by assessing the reality of so-called  “stateless” individuals. The individual rights-bearing  stateless person emerges as a sort of illusion, one that  nonetheless masks the state structures and officials that  render individuals stateless. Also removed from view are  the individual state citizens that contribute to the system  by, among other things, accepting its terms and playing by  its rules. Chapter 3 engages the legal framework that has  governed the prevention and prosecution of genocide under  international law, which interprets the definition of  genocide as requiring that particular individuals harbor an  “intent to destroy” the targeted group. When the existence  of genocide turns on perceptions of individual  perpetrators’ internal mental states, the structures that  produced the allegedly genocidal violence, the other  individuals who contributed to those structures, and the  victims of the genocide are all secondary. Obscured by  these frameworks, therefore, is not just the dynamic  between individual agent and structural conditions, but  also the relationship among the individual agents whom  structures connect. The dissertation concludes arguing that  existing frameworks for responsibility need more than just  supplementation. They also need to be reconceived so that  they are better attuned to the structures that produce the  harms and the relations among individuals that they forge.  These imagined alternatives do not offer additional grounds  to persuade us that we should feel responsible but, rather,  illuminate ways to improve our responses.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12979},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12979},
}