Equality, plurality and structural power

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Periodical article

Title:	Equality, plurality and structural power
Author:	Botha, Henk
Year:	2009
Periodical:	South African Journal on Human Rights (ISSN 0258-7203)
Volume:	25
Issue:	1
Pages:	1-37
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	constitutional law jurisprudence philosophy of law equal opportunity
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1080/19962126.2009.11865191
Abstract:	One of the great paradoxes of South Africa's constitutional transition is that, in order to remedy discrimination and redress disadvantage, it is necessary to invoke broad social categories and identities which are themselves implicated in relations of inequality and subordination. The author explores this paradox from three different angles. He argues for a complex understanding of the right to equality as being underpinned by at least three values: dignity, equality and democracy. He advocates a greater sensitivity to the social construction of difference in order to avoid the uncritical equation of difference with supposedly self-contained individual and collective identities. He calls for a memorial understanding of constitutionalism which resists the monumentalization of past struggles and is concerned with the limits of the law in detecting and responding to disadvantage. Taken together, these three perspectives enable a transformative discourse on equality, which remains open to the capacity of disadvantage and difference to resist the closure in which law inevitably lapses. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract, edited]