Historical Responsibility Research Articles

Climate Justice and the Moral Relevance of the Past

Axel Gosseries’s What is Intergenerational Justice? (2023) is a splendid book.  It provides an introduction to the topic of intergenerational justice that is accessible and an excellent guide to someone unfamiliar with the issues.  At the same time it has much of interest to those who are well versed in these debates.  It has rich and illuminating discussions of, among other things, what principles of justice should govern how people treat future generations, environmental sustainability, climate change, and the implications of our impacts on future people for ideals of democratic legitimacy and normative theorizing about institutional design.   In this article I want to focus on Gosseries’s analysis of climate change.  His chapter on climate justice is rich and nuanced and covers a considerable amount of ground.  I shall focus on one issue in particular.  One key feature of climate change is that the problem has, in part, been caused by the actions of previous generations.  Human beings emitted very low quantities of greenhouse gases for centuries.  However, from the 19th century onwards emissions of greenhouse gases started to rise and increased dramatically throughout the 20th century and the first decades of this century.  One question that arises is: When we are considering what duties current generations have to mitigate climate change, what normative significance should we attach to the climate-endangering activities of people in the past?  Should those alive now pay for the ways in which past members of their country have harmed the climate system?  Many climate campaigners appeal to an idea of historical responsibility.  Are they right to do so?  In this article I shall analyse Gosseries’s discussion of these questions.

Colonialismo italiano e questione meridionale: amnesie, memorie competitive e alleanze intersezionali ai margini di una comunità immaginata bianca1

This article examines the intertwined histories of “internal colonialism” in Southern Italy and Italian colonialism in Africa, addressing the question of Italy’s national amnesia in relation to these topics. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” framework, the essay explores how the two historical issues mentioned above risk becoming competitive memories in contemporary public history debates. To develop this argument, the essay presents two case studies. The first is Pino Aprile’s Contro l’oblio. Giorno della Memoria per le vittime meridionali dell’Unità d’Italia. The book exemplifies competitive memory in the broader context of the neo-Bourbon approach to the Southern Question. The literal use of concepts such as colonialism and racism as metaphors for the Southern Italian condition risks creating self-apologetic narratives driven by “white anxiety,” absolving Southern Italians from their historical involvement in colonialism and contemporary racial privileges. The second case study examines the Museo Cesare Lombroso in Turin as an archive of Italian antiblackness. This section proposes the museum as a potential site for multidirectional memories, focusing on the interplay between the racialized representation of Southern Italians and Italian colonial racism. The goal is to articulate these two memories without overlapping them, emphasizing different historical responsibilities and contemporary privileges. The article underscores why intersectionality and positionality are critical to analyze the complexities of racial and colonial histories and their relevance to contemporary social justice struggles.

Český úděl z pohledu konce 60. let

This study attempts to capture the origins of the differences in opinion on the fate of the Czech nation which arose in the period known as the Prague Spring in 1968 as espoused by two of the period´s historical actors, based on an analysis of media sources of the time. Though the controversy was unleashed at the turn of 1969 by Milan Kundera and Václav Havel, other important intellectual figures from Prague and Brno, such as Karel Kosík, Jaroslav Střítecký and Lubomír Nový were eventually to join the fray as well. Within the controversy, two basic approaches may be observed, whose antagonistic tendencies arise out of the generational differences of the participants: the first, represented by Kundera, Kosík and Nový, sees the democratisation experienced in the Prague spring as an integral process within a continuum of Czech history and thus exalt it as a singular process bringing Bohemia once again into a world context; the second approach, however, represented by Havel and Střítecký, looks upon the reform with critical skepticism and refutes the so-called "fate of the Czech nation" (which purports to situate Bohemia in the context of world history) as a fictional construct which takes away the individual´s historical responsibility.

Threatening the Poor? The economic impacts of carbon border adjustment mechanism on developing countries

It is highly necessary to conduct a more detailed assessment of the economic impacts caused by the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), especially for numerous developing countries. This study utilizes the input-output (IO) model to evaluate the inequality consequence of CBAM. Results indicate that 1) the overall impact of output decline and production cost increase on non-OECD countries is greater than that on OECD countries; 2) regionally, African countries experience a more severe output decline, while Asian countries see a higher increase in production costs. Apart from BRICS, other developing countries demonstrate low reduction efficiency; 3) a refund mechanism based on historical emission responsibility results in larger benefits for the LDCs. Conversely, green innovation contribution and emission reduction efforts primarily benefit developed economies and large developing countries. We recommend 1) prioritizing assessments for developing countries before designing cross-border climate policy; 2) considering both fairness and efficiency when designing a refund mechanism.

Learning to embrace discomfort: Accepting our historical responsibility and implication in systemic racism.

Learning to embrace discomfort: Accepting our historical responsibility and implication in systemic racism.

Interpretation of Fairness Concept and Economic Impact Analysis of Carbon Quota Allocation between Industries in Indonesia

Abstract Quota allocation is critical in implementing supporting policies for carbon reduction efforts, such as the carbon cap and trade mechanism. Depending on the allocation rules, certain company types may benefit more economically. Inequality conditions can happen and reduce the willingness to participate in sustainability efforts. This study aims to propose fairness interpretations in the context of company-level carbon quota allocation. Four industries in Indonesia with inherently different emission and financial profiles were selected as case studies: energy, oil palm, basic materials, and finance. Fairness principles were analyzed to represent the interests of companies based on their financial and environmental performance. Indicators were selected to quantify the equality principles and aggregated into a Comprehensive Index (CI) for quota allocation, where the companies’ quota surplus/deficit is quantified into monetary value to estimate the economic impact with varying reduction targets. According to our analysis, the sectoral advantages/disadvantages would depend on the viewpoint of fairness principles, and the oil palm and financial sectors be less impacted than the basic materials and energy sectors with increased emission reduction targets. The sensitivity analysis suggests that the vertical, horizontal, polluter pays, and historical responsibility principles are more sensitive to weighting than the merit and basic needs principles.

Critique du récit pur: gleam of time in Maurice Blanchot’s narratives

ABSTRACT Maurice Blanchot’s itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned right-wing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a ‘pure novel’, inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this pure form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that ‘pure’ literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot’s fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author’s factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.

Forgotten responsibilities? Nordic truth commissions, Sámi history, and the difficulty of transnational perspectives on historical responsibility

The article studies the Norwegian, Finnish and Swedish truth commissions dealing with state-Sámi (an indigenous population living in northern Scandinavia, Finland and north-western Russia) relations through the concept of transnational historical justice. The fact that three separate commissions are studying the history of the Sámi has been criticized by earlier researchers, but never from the perspective of intergenerational, and more specifically historical justice. Our study of the mandate documents and the report of the Norwegian commission (the only one published in the time of writing of this article) points to constructive ways forward that could acknowledge and better embrace the transnational character of Sámi history, especially in terms of historical justice. We also study in what way the Norwegian commission worked within and stretched the framework set by the mandate document. Our conclusion is that the lack of transnationalism in the mandate and work of the commissions leads to historical Sámi individuals and groups being forgotten. These are historical groups and individuals whose existence does not fit in neatly in the presentist perspective of the commissions, projecting the current nation state borders back in time. For this reason, historical justice toward these groups is also a forgotten issue in the mandate and work of the commissions.

Educating the temporal imagination: Teaching time for justice in a warming world

Climate change has been called both a ‘slow emergency’ and an ‘urgent crisis’, it creates tensions between human and non-human temporalities, it asks some communities to ‘speed up’ and demands others slow down, and requires choices between present needs, historical responsibilities and future consequences. If students are to understand and confront climate (in)justice, then a ‘temporal imagination’ (Adam, 1998) is required that is alert to the ways that time is central to the politics of a warming world. This paper therefore explores how ‘teaching time’ can support the awareness of and attention to (in)justice. The paper discusses the limits of current approaches to teaching time in education and explores a range of practices for developing ‘temporal attunement’ (Jensen, 2023) that can be found in public arts, Indigenous education, educational philosophy, futures studies and decolonial praxis. It maps out five temporal educational practices of: relational time; rhythm; anticipation and reparation; temporal suspension; and critical time keeping. It argues that these practices can be put into dialogue as a basis for a ‘temporal pedagogy’ that comprises three moves: interruption (of habitual and dominant temporal frames and their production of injustice), attention (to the latent, situated, plural timings and rhythms of the situation), and encounter (through invitations to judgement about the temporal practices that should govern more just collective action in response to climate change). It concludes by working through an example of how such a pedagogy might be deployed to negotiate the conflicting temporalities of socio-ecological change.

Global egalitarianism and climate change: against integrationism

ABSTRACT A central question in debates about climate justice concerns how the global emissions sink should be shared among the global population over time. This paper considers how global egalitarians should answer that question. In particular, it defends emissions egalitarianism from a view known as ‘integrationism’, according to which shares of the emissions sink should follow from a more general egalitarian theory of distributive justice. First, I show that emissions egalitarianism can draw on a source of functional support not adequately acknowledged in the integrationist critique: it can express an underlying account of the structure of historical responsibility for climate change I call the Fair Share View. Second, I claim that integrationism is also in tension with other principles of responsibility for climate change, and that its scepticism about historical responsibility has not been appreciated. Finally, I provide an alternative to integrationism. My central claim is that integrationism posits too direct a relation between a theory of equality of wellbeing and practical questions about claims to the emissions sink. Egalitarians should appeal to a species of derivative principle I call ‘applied principles of global justice’, and emissions egalitarianism could plausibly be endorsed on these grounds.

Research on the hybrid teaching model of "race track + basic accounting practice"

To enter the information age, we must adapt to the requirements of the times, and we must have the ability to learn by using information technology in order not to be abandoned by the times. Only by adapting to the development of the times can students have their own stage in society in the future, so as to assume historical responsibilities for society and the people and bloom their own life value. The mixed teaching mode is the product of the information age and the only way for the teaching mode to develop forward. Therefore, the implementation of mixed teaching mode is the need of social development and the development of modern teaching. Autonomous learning ability is a comprehensive ability that students show in their learning activities. Students with this ability have a strong thirst for knowledge, are good at using scientific learning methods, reasonably arranging their own learning activities, are good at positive thinking, dare to question questions, and show a strong spirit of exploration and enterprising in the learning process. Cultivating students' autonomous learning ability is the requirement of quality education and the need of cultivating students' all-round development. Promoting the formation of students' autonomous learning consciousness, autonomous learning ability, autonomous learning habits and autonomous learning quality is an important purpose of classroom teaching reform. Can promote students to achieve excellent results in various competitions.

Sound Presentation of the Silent History: Orature in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

Abstract: In her novel The Stone Virgins , Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera provides a model of orature writing by using sound in the interaction between literature and history as well as literature and politics. This essay will principally draw on the ideas of Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o as well as Roland Barthes’ ideas about listening to analyze this effect. As a medium of oral tradition that carries traditional aesthetic and cultural values throughout the text, sound and its spatiotemporal framework establish an interpretative community among the author, the character, and the reader. In this community, silence—an extreme state of sound—and distorted sound highlight the individual memories of the suppressed people and form a contrast with the collective national memory that is put under the framework of the history of patriotism by official nationalist discourse. To reconstruct the suppressed history of the common people, Vera adopts the performance mechanism of orature by sound and thereby presents the inner monologue of the characters, which helps restore the subjectivity of the oppressed and sends out a call to the reader to participate in the reconstruction of a new history with the people as subjects. Vera’s sound presentation of the silenced Zimbabwean history is an important example of orature writing, showcasing a strong sense of historical responsibility among Zimbabwean writers and contributing to the formation of originality of African Europhone literature.

The Problems of National Identity in Contemporary Germany in an International Context

The article analyzes the influence of the current international situation on the concept of German identity. The main elements that form the basis of contemporary German self-consciousness are identified. The author explores the relationship between the regional, national, and supranational components of German self-identification, examining the persistent mental “divide” between the new (former GDR) and the old lands (West Germany). Special attention is paid to the challenges posed for the Federal Republic of Germany in terms of historical discourse and memorial practices by the influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. The role of the 2023 Palestine-Israel escalation in the transformation of the national narrative is separately examined. The article also evaluated the conflict around Ukraine as a factor in strengthening the European dimension of German identity.Among the key methods used by the author are content analysis of speeches by German officials, analysis of legislation and media. In addition, logical, chronological, and comparative-historical methods were applied. All this in aggregate led to the following conclusions. The Federal Republic of Germany is undergoing a systemic and multidimensional identity crisis. The main challenge is finding a balance between historical responsibility, transatlantic commitments, and national interests. The goal of the German establishment is to formulate a new national idea, which includes defining the role and place of Germany in the world, forming a value consensus regarding migrants, and overcoming the alienation between the east and west of the country. However, in the post-1990 world order, such a large-scale task remains rather impossible for the current elites.

Sociodemographic Background Predisposing Youths into Gang Violence in Lagos Metropolis, Nigeria

The historical and constitutional responsibility of youths in any country cannot be underrated because youth remain one of the vital weapons for accelerating and harmonizing societal orderliness Evidence gathered from extant publication shows that youth formed the larger percentage of people apprehended for violence activities in most correctional facilities in the world. In Nigeria, Extant publications were reviewed while Anomie and rational choice theories were adopted for the study. Mixed methods were adopted for collections of data from the inmates in the Lagos correctional facility approved for the study400 hundred copied of structured questionnaires in the three approved corrections in Lagos But 347 of the questionnaires were retrieved for the quantitative analysis while 36 out of 40 interviews conducted were found useful using In-depth interview for the inmates while key informant interviews were used for collection of verbal data from the member of the Nigeria Police Force, Correctional Officers, market men/women and community elders in Lagos. The concluded that gender positioning (t-047), family background (t-=083) and marital status (t=014) significantly predisposed youths into violent activities compared with employment (t= 816), age (t=123) and level of education (t=482). In addition, the qualitative data indicated that immaturity and poor parental background influence youth gang violence. The social interventionist should encourage the family, youths and community members to get involved in decision making, adequate youth development programme should be encouraged and youth should develop act of self-creativity and innovation toward promoting self-image in Nigeria

新时代高校培养好青年的路径探究

Youth is the hope of a country and the future of a nation. Training good young people in the new era is of great significance, which is conducive to improving the quality of young people in colleges and universities, helping young people to take up the historical mission and promote national rejuvenation. Therefore, colleges and universities should take the training of the new era ideal, the new era of responsibility, the new era of hardship and the new era of strugglers as the goal and main content. But there are many problems in the process of training young people. Therefore, colleges and universities should form the cultivation mode of cooperative development, set up a well-structured cultivation mechanism and perfect network training system. The cultivation of good young people in colleges and universities in the new era helps to enhance the sense of historical mission and responsibility of Chinese youth, and plays a significant and far-reaching significance for the future development of the Party and the country and the construction of socialism.

数字时代下无产阶级何以生存与联合

Entering the digital age, capitalism further realizes the externalization and transfer of its internal contradictions through the deep combination of digital technologies such as big data and intelligent algorithms. With more powerful and flexible means of exploitation, it leads to the alienation of human labor and the loss of proletarian revolutionary consciousness, and makes human civilization face a huge crisis. But the essence of “capitalist crisis” or “capitalism in crisis” is not beyond Marx’s critical vision of alienated labor. Therefore, under today’s digital capitalism, it is particularly urgent and important to re-examine and analyze the living state of the proletariat under digital capitalism from Marx’s perspective of alienated labor, and propose solutions to promote the historical process of the communist revolution. In this sense, China, as an important revolutionary force that promotes the historical transformation of the world situation, leads the new practice of the proletarian revolution with the new form of digital civilization, assumes the historical responsibility of promoting human happiness and liberation, and provides a Chinese solution for implementing the Marxist internationalist position and promoting the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Archaeology and the public perception of a Soviet prisoner of war cemetery

Between July 2021 and November 2022, the federal archaeological office of Bremen (Landesarchäologie) excavated the site of a former cemetery for Soviet Prisoners of War and forced labourers. The remains had officially been reinterred at an honorary cemetery in Bremen in 1948. Only a small part of this article is about what the excavation revealed and rather its purpose is to reflect on the situation that has arisen between the federal archaeological office, the politics of Bremen versus two citizen's initiatives at the time of the official closure of the excavation. We set out how local conflicts can emerge from such a highly political topic in an archaeological excavation. We also explore how to manage the public interest while, at the same time, attempting to protect the personal dignity of the buried individuals. We engaged with the historical responsibility the city takes for its industrial sites and its past of profiting from forced labour and with the (often unfamiliar) societal function of the work of archaeologists. The research project aims to identify the people buried and to find out about the status of health provision, food supply and overall daily living in the Soviet POW-camps in Bremen by linking the results of archaeology, bioanthropology and historical sources in a database.

The Perpetuation of Muslim–Hindu Divide in British India Through the (Ab)Use of Historical Memory

This article seeks to highlight the extent to which recounting historical narratives can determine the nature of relations between racial and ethnic groups, through examining the case of Muslims and Hindus in British India. Throughout the 19th century, the process of the religious communalization of the subcontinent was set in motion, which ultimately led to the bifurcation of the local society into two self-conscious, mutually antagonistic groups: a Hindu majority versus a Muslim minority. This study argues that such schism would not have taken place without the instrumentalization of a colonially ‘constructed’ past by Hindu communalists who, in the process of mobilizing their co-religionists through mythmaking and a hostile discourse fraught with subjectively interpreted historical facts, alienated the members of the other group. This article also underscores that besides imperial scholars, Hindutva activists should bear the historical responsibility for the divide.

Achieving the 1.5 °C goal with equitable mitigation in Latin American countries

During the past years, the impact of climate change in Latin America has become more evident. It is affecting its natural resources and delaying sustainable development. Achieving the 1.5 °C long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement while ensuring the right to sustainable development is of particular interest to regions with high vulnerability and low adaptation capacity for climate change, such as Latin America. This article analyzes whether the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted within the Paris Agreement framework by Latin American countries align with achieving the 1.5 °C goal. For this analysis, the global carbon budget from 2020 onwards, compatible with the 1.5 °C global temperature scenario, is distributed among countries using two dimensions of equity (equality and historical responsibility). Then, the carbon budget allocated to Latin American countries is compared with the cumulative emissions implied in two scenarios. The first one is the NDC scenario that assumes the implementation of the NDCs submitted until December 31, 2022. The second scenario adds the goal of ending deforestation by 2030, signed by several countries of this region in the Global Leaders Declaration on Forest. Two main conclusions are obtained from the analysis of the cited scenarios. First, Latin American countries will consume 77% of their carbon budget in 2030 by implementing their NDCs. Second, this percentage could be reduced to 58% if Latin American countries reach zero emissions from the Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry sector by 2030. If achieved, the region would be on track to reach the 1.5 °C global goal.

Protest sentiments of the Russian peasantry at the beginning of the XX century as a factor of destructive influence on the stable development of society

The article is devoted to a protest sentiment of Russian peasants as one of the problems of society in Russian Empire at the beginning of XX century. The Russian peasantry influenced the path of development of the country objectively as being the majority of the population of Russia. The protest sentiments of the Russian peasants were one of the important elements that influenced the destructive processes in the Russian Empire. The article draws attention to the motivation of the peasant protest and raises the question of the historical responsibility of the peasantry for the revolutionary events of 1917. The authors noted that the traditions of communalism, collective ownership of land, a “moral” rather than a market economy, and the rejection of individualism among peasants were in conflict with the modernization processes that began in post-reform Russia, based on opposing values. In the 1880–1890s an unprecedented industrial boom begins and, as a result, a significant numerical reduction of the peasantry due to the city’s need for labor and the mechanization of agricultural labor. The peasant community also had to become an inevitable victim of the modernization process. The authors concluded, that disruption of the centuries-old way of life became a natural source of protest reaction from the peasantry beginning at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries. Stolypin's government briefly restored stability in the country. The Great War aggravated the existing problems and the protest of the peasants destroyed the old society.