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Abstract

Systems of indicators and international rankings have today become a new mode of evaluating social, political, and economic life. In the context of measuring the rule of law and justice delivery systems at a local as well as a global level, such indicators enable empirically grounded solutions to justice reform issues. However, scholars like Siddharth Peter de Souza argue that the existing discourse concerning the rule of law and access to justice indicators promote a specific vision of a well functioning justice system grounded in western normative considerations. de Souza, in his book Designing Indicators for a Plural Legal World, challenges the institutional and state-centric approach to indicators. The book highlights the need for an anti-hierarchical and counter-hegemonic approach that allows for a plurality of discourses on matters of law and governance. Most significantly, de Souza tries to develop a bottom-up approach towards indicators using the capabilities approach that he calls the Justice Capabilities Framework. In this article, I undertake a critical appraisal of this framework. I characterise the processes through which indicators mask contestations and impose prescriptive frameworks on individuals and institutions as a violent process—something that vitiates the subjectivity of agents. In this reading, the value of the Justice Capabilities Framework is understood as an attempt to curb the excesses of this violent process, which categorises, hierarchises, and orders knowledge and influences social and institutional behaviour. Through my conceptual scheme, I attempt to analyse five key issues in relation to the Justice Capabilities Framework.

Custom Citation

Abhineet Maurya, 'The Violence of Numbers: A Critical Appraisal of the Justice Capabilities Framework' (2024) 20(1) Socio-Legal Review 72.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.55496/HYCW4163

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