Recognition Justice Theory: Toward a Justice-Based Theory of Migration, Belonging, and Social Cohesion

This study develops Recognition Justice Theory (RJT), a new interdisciplinary theoretical framework for analysing migration, belonging, and social cohesion through the distribution of recognition. While existing scholarship has examined justice, recognition, citizenship, migration, and social cohesion largely through separate analytical traditions, this study integrates these perspectives into a unified framework capable of explaining how structural injustice generates unequal recognition, contested belonging, exclusionary mobilisation, and weakened social cohesion. The article introduces three original analytical concepts—Recognition Inequality, Recognition Deficit, and Belonging Inequality—and incorporates Political Misrecognition as the mechanism through which structural grievances are redirected towards socially visible and politically vulnerable populations. Together, these concepts constitute the analytical architecture of Recognition Justice Theory and provide an integrated vocabulary for examining migration, citizenship, democratic inclusion, and political community. Building upon the author's earlier work on dignity-centred migration ethics, Divine Impartiality, and Political Misrecognition, the study positions Recognition Justice as both an explanatory theory and a normative framework. It argues that durable social cohesion depends not merely on redistribution, integration, or legal incorporation, but on the equitable distribution of recognition through which individuals and groups are acknowledged as legitimate participants in a shared political community. The study contributes to migration studies, recognition theory, justice theory, citizenship studies, peacebuilding, political theology, and social cohesion research, while establishing the foundation of an emerging Recognition Justice research programme.