The Color of Social Security traces the myriad ways and interconnected social systems in which racism has been embedded into American social security programs. Drawing on American history, Jon C. Dubin exposes institutionalized processes undermining racially equitable receipt of retirement and disability benefits. Examples include the 1935 Social Security Act, which excluded Black agricultural and domestic workers in order to protect the postbellum Southern racial economic and political order; the 1972 Supplemental Security Income program’s exclusion of persons of color in the US territories, with genesis in 125 years of racialized colonial domination; 1980s criminal justice system restrictions; systemic racial bias in disability decisions in the 1990s; disability eligibility obstacles from “race-norming” in the 2000s; and the misevaluation of Black claimants with sickle cell disease under Social Security Administration regulations since 2015. While exploring these histories, Dubin offers concrete solutions to address racial inequity and create a more equitable future.

Chapter 5 focuses on racial disparities in the social security disability programs, commencing with examination of a much-discussed, extensive 1992 US General Accounting Office study of the topic documenting unexplained racial disparities in Social Security Act disability approval decisions, followed by other General Accounting Office reports and other studies revealing additional racial disparities in aspects of Social Security Act disability adjudication. The chapter then contextualizes the disability standards and their statutory elements and processes and explores the social construction of disability thereunder. It also examines the socially constructed, nonbiological concept of race, as differentiated from class, and also the intersectionality of race and disability, to provide a theoretical and substantive framework for examination of bias in pain and symptomology assessments. It includes studies of misevaluation, mistreatment, and undertreatment of Black patients’ pain and subjective symptomology, including psychiatric conditions, by doctors, therapists, and other treatment professionals, along with subsequent Social Security Act Administrative Law Judge bias in decision-making. It also examines the racial impact of misevaluation of claimants with Sickle Cell Disease – a pain-producing condition disproportionately afflicting African Americans. The chapter concludes with a series of remedial recommendations for monitoring and ameliorating racial bias and racially disparate decision-making in Social Security Act disability adjudications.

This chapter explores the attitudes and perceptions of fifty-five practitioners engaged in infrastructure-related dispute prevention and resolution in the Asia Pacific region. The aim of the survey and follow-up interview conversations is to provide insights into the dynamics, challenges and lessons learned in engaging with communities to prevent and resolve disputes in the context of infrastructure projects. The principal finding of this chapter, based on survey data and follow-up questions, is that from the perspective of regional practitioners, prior community consultation is considered the most effective approach to preventing infrastructure disputes. This finding is consistent with the results of the data analysis in the prior chapter correlating heightened consultation standards with a reduction in the proportion of project disputes. A number of challenges continue to exist in mitigation efforts with the most challenging being the ‘lack of agreement on shared economic benefits’ and ‘limited communication’. Overall, practitioners advised that most disputes arise because ‘there was no consultation or inadequate consultation with a marginalised part of the community’. The chapter also includes practitioner suggestions on areas for improvement. The findings of this chapter demonstrate the significance of effective prior community consultation and grievance mechanisms for preventing disputes.

The villain of the story, then, is arbitrary power and its hero is tempered power. Starting there and then asking where such problems are to be found, and what might be relevant to dealing with them, has significant implications for where we should look both for problem-makers and for problem-solvers. As for makers, Chapter 7 argues that if arbitrary power is as obnoxious as I claim, and tempered power such a valuable ideal to pursue, then any serious attempt to approach the goal of the rule of law cannot assume, as is commonly done, that its targets are just governments and the agencies of states. The need to temper ways power is exercised must be considered in relation to a much larger and more complex force field than that of state power, since arbitrary exercise of power is likely to arise in many places, and so too will reasons to want it tempered. So, we should have in mind much more than the usual rule of law suspects and concern ourselves more broadly with people and entities able to access power substantial enough that its arbitrary use is liable to harm. That will extend to many places we like to call ‘private’ but whose effects are often palpably public.

This chapter introduces the broad conceptual framework of the processes of subjectivisation within global discourses and connects it to agency. It introduces the idea of situational agency and draws upon Mahmood’s work to suggest that agency can be found in the ‘inhabitation of norms’. the chapter provides a background context to post-genocide Rwandan policies, introducing the key agenda of unity and reconciliation, and presents Rwanda as a post-colonial state. Finally, this chapter problematises the collection and interpretation of field data in a post-colonial setting.

Chapter 5 argues that there is a distinctive activity and with it a particular problem, a particular kind of mischief, that is the central concern of the rule of law ideal. The activity is the exercise of power. The focus is not on the purpose of power’s exercise, for which we have other concepts, but the way it is exercised. The goal is to minimise arbitrary ways of exercising it. The chapter explicates the notions of power and arbitrariness. It argues that power itself is not an evil but a necessity for many good things. Nor for that matter is arbitrariness evil in itself. Rather, it is the combination of arbitrariness with power, when substantial, that is obnoxious. It suggests several reasons why it is both intrinsically immoral and likely to have bad consequences. The chapter concludes by arguing that hostility to arbitrary power is rarely the only game in town, but it is almost always justified. Power that is not arbitrary is not what we most want out of life, but it is a condition for many of the things we do want. Hostility to it is immanent in the rule of law ideal.

This chapter explores developments after standards for pre-project consultation were raised in 2013. The six cases examined in this chapter, funded by multilateral and national development banks operating in the Asia Pacific region after heightened community engagement policies, were introduced underscore a number of key insights. The post-2013 cases broadly demonstrate a number of key improvements including greater rigour in consultation and diligence mechanisms, heightened precision in identifying issues of community concern, higher pre-project diligence and screening standards, ongoing environmental and technical monitoring, the presence of locally trained mediators, skill development for consultation participants, and a longer-term view of community welfare and responsive grievance remedies. Shortcomings persisted in some cases, including instances of duress, lack of information disclosure, fraud, limited access to consultation mechanisms and environmental harm leading to project cessation in two cases when the adverse social impacts were seen to outweigh potential benefits. On the whole, corresponding with more rigorous community consultation and diligence standards, during this phase, the number of stalled/cancelled and litigated case declined by 33%, the percentages of cases brought to court declined by 16%, and the number of cases pursuing party agreement through mediation or negotiation increased by 50% compared with ad-hoc discretionary consultation practices prior to 2013.

The first half of this chapter explores the linguistic means by which Twa tell their story. By mobilising linguistic resources, they are challenging their continued exclusion under the charge of ‘mind-set’ problems and are attempting to renegotiate the social constructs that govern the position of Batwa in Rwandan society. As such, the language practice of contradiction is read as an assertion by Twa of their full membership in society and a demand for equal care. The second half of the chapter locates the Rwandan state as the key mediator of global life for Rwanda’s Twa, translating global ordering narratives into the everyday. The state makes use of the development narrative, refracting it through the prism of national unity, to offer Twa an attractive and accessible vision of a non-fragmented modern Rwandan subject.

This chapter discusses the development of international law in the post-war era that aimed to liberate global information flow to guarantee world peace. It starts by discussing the achievements and failures of the 1948 Geneva conference on the freedom of information and considers two avenues in which the post-war project of freedom of information continued after the 1948 conference. First, in the drafting of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, freedom of information as a peace project became framed into a fundamental human right, displacing the question about the material and interstate aspects of freedom of information. Second, freedom of information was addressed in forums of international telecommunication and trade dominated by the United States, where freedom of information became equated with the elimination of discriminatory telecommunication rates to enable American global trade. This chapter shows a division of labour and crucial conceptual compatibility between the human rights framing and free trade framing of freedom of information and multiple fault lines surrounding the early intimation of the dual-sided framework.