Reparations, Time, and Decolonizing Postcolonial Violence towards Global Gender Justice

Abstract

Abstract: Reparations are emerging as a world-making project, as a political goal that moves us beyond models of responsibility that come primarily in the form of bombs and sexual violence as we have seen in the United Nation's Responsibility to Protect (R2P). In this paper, we argue that reparations are a world-making project which challenges simultaneously colonization and enslavement in their newer incarnations of capital and gendered violence in war. We first engage with the debates on violence and postcoloniality. Second, we engage with the politics of reparations and gender. To do so we focus on feminist transformative reparations and repair debates. Some of the mainstream literature of liberal and progressive orientations remain within the realm of integrating survivors of violence within racial-national compacts, thereby evading the inter-related forms of violence and extractions that underwrite such integration and social compacts. Third, we turn to reparations, gender, and time. Fourth, we work towards a definition of radical repair. Fifth, we consider reparative practices as decolonization movement in its multiple registers—as acts of undoing structures of violence and its incarnation/s in war, and as acts of justice—moving beyond the dominant juridical or financial definitions of reparations (as established by the colonial state, or by capitalist legal systems) to think reparation as an active process oriented towards futures that does not lose sight of the ongoing 'liveness' of the colonial. Finally, in the concluding section, we discuss reparations as abolition. We argue that transformative reparations are not mere restitutions but attempts to challenge presuppositions about the world and its making as well as abolish this "simple" and death world, while envisioning reparations as solidarity and love, in the heterogeneity of bodies, words, affects, sounds, movements, and intensities.