Global Complicities
Complicity rhetoric is frequently adopted in public and political discourse. For example, Joe Biden has repeatedly used the formulation ‘silence is complicity’ as a call for the defence of human rights. Yet, in an ever more interconnected and globalised world, identifying and tracing the often complex relationships of cause and effect that comprise complicity is more and more difficult. The notion of collective complicity seems to be increasingly applicable to phenomena that define the contemporary world, such as the effects of global capitalism and the climate emergency (and has been elaborated, for example, by Christopher Kutz in Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (2000)).