We cannot answer ‘What is justice?’ without considering questions about where and who. This talk argues for more deeply situating justice, and how we conceptualize and measure it, in a context of scale. That is, what justice means, and what it can mean, is contingent on spatial - whether it is a question of the individual, collective, national or global – and temporal qualities. I will be drawing on research and activism with and by families in Scotland who have experienced a death in custody. Their quest involves both a desire to share the full humanity of the people they have lost and a collective drive towards accountability of the state who has killed them. Their aims, ideas and methods contrast with what the state claims to offer through its own mechanisms of justice. My research on bureaucratic violence provides a lens to unpack the contradictions and tensions of state and family versions of justice, further revealing the ways the state attempts to absorb the latter. By arguing for attention to scale, and situatedness generally, I aim at undermining the monopoly that moral and political philosophy have historically enjoyed in theorizing justice, largely through a method of abstraction.

Rather than mitigate risk, our approach to violence and our efforts to separate ourselves from people who’ve caused harm, through policing and incarceration and myriad forms of political, social and economic exclusion, has hastened, and in fact ensured, that we live in a more violent future. We see this across the globe, from the million-dollar blocks and the gang, violent crime and especially the sex offense registries of the United States, to the fervor over knife crimes, joint enterprise crimes and “modern slavery” in England and Wales. Exclusion is a kind of violence that has the unfortunate effect of producing more violence in its wake. The least of these looks for a way out. We begin by examining how and why the needs of the racialized poor are so often misrecognized as threat, and end with a call to reimagine public safety and the role of government in our lives.