Navigating Toward Social Justice
“Social navigation” is a way of understanding how young people cope with social and political uncertainty in a terrain of uncertainty (Utas 2005; Vigh 2008, 2009). This approach is helpful in explaining how young people live with social transformations from war to postwar and beyond.
The concept of “navigation” is used here literally, as well as metaphorically, to denote practices of movement in the context of social volatility and opacity. Vigh (2006, p. 14) notes that in such situations one cannot navigate the way as one wants:[W]hen navigating we are aware that we might be repositioned by shifting terrains and circumstances. As we seek to move within a turbulent and unstable socio political environment we are at the same time being moved by currents, shifts and tides, requiring that we constantly have to attune our action and trajectory to the movement of the environment we move through.
As Vigh suggests, navigation is a concept that integrates agency, social forces, and change, particularly in contexts where people need to invest considerable time and energy into interpreting and understanding how to act within situations of flux and social change - such as a postwar setting. With respect to the situation in former combatant zones in Sri Lanka, this calls for more knowledge about how to go about the new social terrains that shape how people can live and act. The postwar setting has created new possibilities, but new restrictions are also emerging. Social navigation may be helpful here for analyzing how people make sense of their constantly shifting worlds and strategize in conditions of uncertainty.
Vigh’s ideas have been applied by several authors, to both war and nonwar contexts, in order to better understand and realize the political and economic instabilities that young people experience worldwide (Archambault 2013; Langevang and Gough 2009).
Central to the notion of navigation is the movement that it involves. Langevang and Gough consequently understand navigation in terms of social and spatial mobility and this focus will be applied in this chapter. In particular, the chapter examines social mobility in relation to employment and education and the associated spatial mobility that is understood as necessary for achieving social mobility in these two key domains of young people's lives. Y oung people may be understood as mobile in two ways. First, their navigations allow for a much greater diversity of paths and emphasize practice/becoming. Second, young people are often understood as “in between” childhood and adulthood, and they face a great deal of societal expectations based on this assumption. This means that they may experience their lives as in flux and in a heightened state of transformation. In a more general sense, mobility may be perceived as social processes. It includes more than spatial (and thus corporeal) mobility and may affect changes in local structures and relationships. Mobility as a strategy for change may also be perceived as a “positive agency in choices” (Dyer 2010, p. 307). However, in a postwar situation, mobility may be restricted and take unexpected forms.Restricted freedom to move, lack of development opportunities, insecurity, and fear among young people imply limited access to justice. Justice itself is a term used in various ways. In legal terms injustice includes lawbreaking, grasping, and unfairness. Grasping is taking too much of what is good only; unfairness is concerned with both what is good and what is injurious (Englard 2009). Amartya Sen's seminal work on rights and development as freedoms (1999) brought new attention to the issue of justice within development and poverty studies as well as gender studies. Justice here is generally perceived as the provision of fairness and equal opportunity and frequently divided into distributive and corrective justice.
The former term addresses the equal distribution of goods and services, while the latter approach aims at restoring a situation of rightful distribution that was interrupted due to breach in the rights of a person or group (Endut forthcoming; Hammerton 1927; Hossain forthcoming). In both perspectives, justice is about identifying strategies that may transform society to make it more just and equal and recompense for past wrongs. In the context of this chapter, moving from war to postwar has already created a hope for people that they may find a way out of uncertainty and marginalization toward social justice. However, when people are unable to move freely and participate in postwar recovery processes, distributive injustice is occurring. Corrective justice arises as a legitimate claim to improve the ability to (re)integrate into society, ideally irrespective of ethnicity, and more importantly irrespective of people's previous roles in the war. In such a situation, the possibilities and restrictions related to movement are crucial for understanding the way young people experience the postwar situation and the prospects for social justice. The next section therefore addresses the lack of equality and fairness in postwar recovery in Sri Lanka and questions the lack of corrective measures on behalf of the authorities to address grievances and inequalities relating to minority youths.3