Abstract
This paper aims to shed light on the by-products of ‘justice seeking’ and challenges faced by the justice seekers in the post-justice-seeking regimes. Justice seeking might be desirable when it brings institutional changes that lessen the degree of unfair treatment. However, justice seeking, regardless of how it is sought through, might not always lead to institutions that ensure better distributive justice compared to the status quo due mainly to contestants’ failure of omission. Two justice-seeking episodes are illustrated to examine this hypothesis. Myanmar’s transition to democracy, considered as justice by the pro-democratic parties, was sought for a long time and finally achieved in 2015 through a peaceful parliamentary election. In contrast, the government of Sri Lanka, and the mass population as well, wanted justice against the insurgencies caused by the LTTE which finally achieved through armed confrontations. The case of Sri Lanka tells us that justice-seeking activities occasionally lead to such outcome as weakening of organizational ability to self-control or govern the organization that the justice seekers belong to. Likewise, Myanmar may possibly fall into the same dilemma of causing the slow pace of change associated with the general frustration in the people who want to feel tangible results immediately.
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Notes
We follow the Rawlsian description of justice as‘the first virtue of social institutions’ (Rawls 1971, p. 3) and the Rawlsian sense that ‘all social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage’ (Rawls 1971, p. 62). Rawls calls this way of conceptualization of the principles of justice as ‘justice as fairness’.
Rents refer to 'excess income' which, in the neo-classical economic theory, should not exist in efficient markets (it does not mean that all the rules of creating, maintaining or transferring rents are always inefficient). The rent-seeking theory assumes that the economic agents spend their time and effort in seeking for creating, changing or abolishing the rules that determine the extent of incentives or restraints of seeking economic rents.
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Suzuki, Y., Miah, M.D. & Aung, L.H. Challenges in the post-justice-seeking regime: the cases of Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Asia-Pac J Reg Sci 1, 537–558 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-017-0049-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41685-017-0049-x