Between Activism and Apathy: Injustice and Citizens

            The fight against injustice needs all of us. Like MLK said, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Like said the author of this article, "we all have the political responsability of fight injustice." Once I'd like to thank everyone taking part in this huge worldwide movement for justice and my political rights. For more than six years the world has been witnessing this global fight for justice. Let's make this movement even bigger this year. I have a YouTube channel, here is the link.   https://www.youtube.com/@lucianofietto4773/videos. Since the creation of this channel its visualization counter doesn't work, the same has been happening with the counter of this blog since its creation in 2010.   This post is a summary of the article with the incomplete title above published in November 2025 at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/13698230.2025.2588077?needAccess=true

                This responsibility to join with others in collective action in order to address injustices. It is only though engaging in collective political action that we can alter unjust structures, and accordingly discharge our political responsibility. In this paper, I am viewing activism as engaging in collective action to pressure powerful agents through 'public demand'. It might be thought that political responsibility can be discharged through resisting injustice rather than through activism. Resistance 'designates' a broad range of dissident activities. We can distinguish activism from other forms of resistance in the following two ways: 1) Activism is necessarily collective action, it involves being part of a movement, whereas resistance can be individual or collective action. 2) Activism is purposeful action with an end goal of overcoming injustice.     Organised collective action is necessary to alter unjust structures. The conclusion, that citizens have a responsibility to engage in collective political action to address injustices, is not limited to the literature on injustice. It is also a feature of political approaches within broader global justice theory. Global injustices require that citizens step up, and that they do so by regularly engaging in activism. Social connection model of political responsibility is not intended to confirm our existing institutions regarding responsibility, it is meant to challenge them, and to offer an alternative account of political responsibility suitable for the globalised conditions in which we currently find ourselves. In this section, I examine three alternative routes by which citizens can discharge their political responsibility to address injustice: 1) Activism light - citizens engage in activism, they just do less of it. 2) Role-ideal model - citizens push the boundaries of their social roles in a way that challenges unjust structures. 3) Scaffolding activism - citizens discharge their responsibility by supporting the activism of others. In examining these routes, I am assuming a divison of labour bewteen citizens who are committed activists and other citizens. Citizens may move between the two categories over the course of their lives. Non-activists citizens have some influence over the success of activist projects through choosing which activist groups or projects they scaffold. Here, the analogy with the division of labour in a representative democracy may again be applicable, with scaffolding serving the function of voting and activist groups taking on a similar role to political parties. In order to address these concerns, I examined three alternative ways in which citizens can fulfil their political responsibility to address injustice. I recommended the scaffolding activism as a promising and underexplored option and developed an initial account of scaffolding responsibilities. In doing so, this paper fills a gap in existing accounts, detailing an important and undertheorised way that citizens can discharge their responsibility to act to address injustice without engaging in actvism themselves. The arguments of this paper may have important implications beyond the injustice literature, concerning the nature of political duties to address injustices within broader global justice debates. In closing, I want to highlight two important areas for further work, 1) developing a comprehensive theory of scaffolding activism. 2) examining the role of scaffolding in facilitating other forms of political action.