We are pleased that this issue of Social Justice is truly international in scope, featuring contributions from the United States, Japan, Spain, Australia, and Sweden. The overriding themes concern broader issues of justice in a post-Cold War world. Authors examine or reexamine how the momentous changes in the world situation affect a variety of arenas, from theory, culture, and the liberation theology movement that had its origins in Latin America, to the shift away from African socialism and Swedish-style social democracy, and the dangers inherent in the reorganization of internal security organizations as they search for a new mandate.

In an essay written to commemorate the retirement of Andre Gunder Frank, a long-time contributor to and friend of Social Justice, from the University of Amsterdam, Pat Lauderdale et al. explore notions of justice and political deviance to explain the reception of Frank's challenge to orthodox approaches to theory and social science. Frank's famous notion of the "development of underdevelopment" in Latin America flew in the face of prevalent hegemonic concepts in the West and elsewhere, such as modernization and development. As the authors note, to oppose becoming modern, in the U.S., for example, is often equated with opposing freedom, democracy, and therefore justice, as well as a technologically advanced and efficient style of life. More recently, Frank's claim that the capitalist world-system dates back thousands of years, not just a few hundred as is often assumed, includes explicit and implicit objections to façades of justice as he critically examines scientific modernization, development, and progress -- each a legacy of the European Renaissance. The essay details the way in which Frank's theories directly contributed to the work of liberation theology in confronting the realities of injustice, oppression, persecution, and poverty experienced by the peasants and indigenous people of Latin America. In addition, the authors show the relevance of Gunder Frank's and Marta Fuentes' analysis of social movements for the study of indigenous peoples in their native nations, not states. Frank's work lends support to the indigenous perspective, which views nature and humans as one, in contrast to the melting-pot banner of development, in which people are instructed to ignore diversity or to homogenize it whenever possible.

In "The Fall of Real Socialism and the Crisis in the Human Sciences," leading Japanese critical theorist Shoji Ishitsuka examines the implications of the collapse of "real socialism" in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and calls for a reexamination of all received paradigms in philosophy and the social sciences. He offers the concept of "non-modernity," which would put an end to dualistic understanding, to dialectics, and to history and would instead return to totality, a disappearance of parts and of individuals. It is the antithesis of Eurocentrism, "modernity," stage theory, modernization theory, and the idea of the inevitability of progress. The former are legacies of an Enlightenment framework that stresses the identity principle -- the idea of the assimilation of all civilizations centered on Christianity -- and presupposes the idea of progress, which underpins the development of modern natural science. In the post-socialist world, it is also necessary for the idea of "social justice" to be reconsidered. Until recently, for modern principles such as freedom (based on asceticism), equality, universal love, or solidarity to work most effectively and with greatest appeal, both "social problems" and "social justice" were dealt with in terms of assimilation, integration, centralization, or globalization -- in short, via modernization. At present, however, to the extent that "non-modernity" is taking hold, the difference principle, rooted in anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-ethnocentrism, and anti-cultural chauvinism, is gaining weight and is eloquently expressed in the phrase "the right to difference for feminist, gay and lesbian, and ethnic movements and issues." Thus, with postmodernism even the concept of social justice is distancing itself from modernity and is assuming a greater role.

José Larrea Gayarre, in his essay on the challenge posed by liberation theology to neoliberal economic policies, assesses the importance of this theological movement as an element in the opposition to capitalism. With the collapse of "real socialism," the liberal capitalist system was enshrined by certain triumphalist analysts as the best, and even the most desirable, of all possible ways of ordering the world. More serious yet, many governments once faithful to "socialism" began to abandon social democratic objectives, with many countries neglecting efforts to integrate the poor and the underprivileged into society. Measures like special employment programs, and the general defense of their interests, are being quietly forgotten. The author's critique of capitalism is that not only does the free market fail to meet minimum human needs, left to its own devices, it also accentuates the polarization of wealth and immiseration on a global scale. Far from being a "natural order of things," the system ultimately requires coercive power in the form of war and domestic repression. The liberation theology movement responded to the socio-analytic dimension of seeing the situation of poverty and oppression; it judged the present situation of poverty in light of the Bible and theological and teaching traditions, and translated these concerns into a commitment to existing social organizations and movements: trade unions, groups, community organizations, cooperatives, and revolutionary actions. Larrea adds that liberation theology and the movements inspired by it are anticapitalist, but not necessarily pro-Marxist; they are above all Christian and reject that which is incompatible with the beliefs and requirements of the Christian faith.

In "Gentle Genocide," Pat O'Malley traces how racism and cultural genocide were operative in the historical development of government policies and the approach of Christian missionaries and academics (especially anthropologists) toward Australia's indigenous population -- from the eugenics program of the 1930s to their later eviction to make possible a nuclear test site. According to O'Malley, critical appraisals of these policies tend to explain the plight of desert Aboriginal people through a model of racist neglect. Much evidence exists to show state culpability in failing to protect nomadic people against the violence and rapacity of white pastoralists and miners, and more directly through police killings and systematic assaults. More generally, it is argued that state culpability should be made clear with respect to willful neglect where aid -- through medical, food, and water supplies -- could have saved many lives. The author argues that such explanations do not account for the energy and tenacity with which the state pursued policies "protecting" remote desert people against white incursions. Through an analysis of the politics of state-missionary relations with respect to the Ngaanyatjarra (pronounced "Nunnandjurra") people of Western Australia, O'Malley demonstrates the intersection of two primary sets of political rule -- a missionary government aimed explicitly at cultural genocide and a state government policy explicitly aimed at biological genocide. Critical accounts err in their characterization of a more benign form of "neglect" because the state carried out its policies through "government at a distance." By "protecting" what were believed to be lethal traditions (infanticide, circumcision, subincision, etc.) among Ngaanyatjarra and neighboring people, between 1930 and 1950 the state sought to "allow" the decimation of the Aboriginal population of the Central Australian Reserves. Fortunately, the policies of gentle genocide failed spectacularly. As the vigorous physical, political, and cultural existence of the Ngaanyatjarra now indicates, the administration of ungovernment did not doom them to extinction. It created the vital space for a continuation of practical forms of indigenous government finely tuned to desert existence.

Jenny Hocking's article, "Charting Political Space: Surveillance and the Rule of Law," addresses fundamental questions regarding the role of internal security agencies following the removal of their Cold War rationales. In Australia, the security function -- intelligence collection and analysis -- has become comprehensively merged with domestic policing. Australia followed the British model of domestic intelligence gathering, which splits domestic security functions between a security service and police special branches, in contrast to the U.S., where the FBI enjoys a joint mandate to conduct criminal and national security investigations. Domestic surveillance in Australia has been expanded as the national security discourse shifted from the notion of "terrorism," which surfaced in the 1970s and began to infringe on legitimate political activism, to the more recent and broader notion of "politically motivated violence." Ironically, expanded powers were implemented during debates on curbing the excesses of such organizations.

Tom Meisenhelder's article, "The Decline of Socialism in Zimbabwe," discusses the factors behind Zimbabwe's retreat from its socialist development plan and its efforts to enhance the role of a capitalist-oriented growth model. This change coincided with the larger watershed world transformation unleashed in 1989. After defeating the settler colonial regime in 1980, the revolutionary government had sought to implement a social justice platform via social programs that aimed at reducing social inequalities, providing essential social services to formerly disenfranchised Zimbabweans, and gradually strengthening the public sector. This gradualist transition was encapsulated in the phrase "growth with equity," which meant that the government would reconcile itself with capital to gain the necessary economic resources for creating a more just society. It was hoped that private capital would cooperate with government policies aimed at enacting land redistribution and developing cooperatives and other public enterprises. The top-down approach of the new political leadership was the source of its primary weakness -- that democracy was never stressed. In an international arena hostile to socialism, Zimbabwe's decade of socialist rhetoric and social reforms cost the country and resulted in such punitive events as the withdrawal of IMF funds and U.S. aid, the severe delimiting of funds from other "Western" powers such as England, and helped to insure costly destabilization raids from South Africa. At the same time, the socialist countries were unwilling or unable to match or replace funds and support lost from the "West." According to the author, a balance between economic growth and social reform was nonetheless achieved. Paradoxically, at the same time that the IMF was withdrawing, local business confidence was moving higher toward that of the early boom years. Domestic business confidence improved in most years and plans for investment seemed to be on the increase. Thus, international lending agencies and Western powers -- which often mistakenly equate "development" and judge a nation's performance simply in terms of economic performance -- in this case disregarded objective performance and applied pressure that strengthened technocratic forces within the ruling party who championed austerity measures opposed by the militant military faction and radical wing. This program, ESAP, was soon nicknamed "Extreme Suffering for the African People."

Finally, Åke Sandberg's article discusses the current and future possibilities of the Swedish social welfare model. Despite the hopes of some progressives in the United States that the Swedish model could represent the best-case scenario for the U.S., Sandberg shows that Sweden's social democratic experiment is itself plagued with problems. An important impediment is that with a center-right government in power since 1991, the close cooperation between unions and social democracy in government has been broken. A primary goal of the "Swedish model" on the theoretical economic plane is full employment combined with stable prices, along with a commitment in practice to equality. In the Swedish debate, social justice -- interpreted as a decent life for everyone with only moderate differences in material conditions -- is also a means of developing some sense of belonging together, of solidarity with the broader social system. When social justice is involved, a long-term perspective is necessary, which tends to be neglected in market-oriented economic thinking. External constraints, as in the case of Zimbabwe, influenced internal policy options: the Swedish government's inability to combine full employment and price stability may be partially explained by the country's open economy, with its free trade and free flow of capital, as well as the transnational organization of capital.

-- G.S.