The Architecture of Impunity: The Presumption of State Obligation in Enviornmental Justice Theory

This article develops the framework of impunity as an explanation for the durability of environmental injustice. Impunity names a mode of governance in which communities are excluded from the domain of state obligation. Drawing centrally on Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract, I argue that such exclusions are encoded in the social contract via agreements and meta-agreements and produce state-community relations of non-obligation. This results in the governance condition of impunity. I argue that recent debates in environmental justice scholarship regarding the state have left obligation analytically underdetermined by not distinguishing between state failure to fulfill an existing obligation and exclusion from the domain of obligation altogether. This leaves impunity under-theorized as a cause of persistent environmental injustice in the literature.