Material Reparations Research Articles

Migration as Reparation for Colonialism

AbstractIt is commonly accepted that former European colonising states ought to make reparations for the many harmful legacies of colonialism. I defend an undertheorised case for migration as reparation for one harmful legacy of colonialism in particular, that of exploitation. Making reparations for the harmful legacy of colonial exploitation requires, among other measures, a redistribution of wealth from former colonising states to their former colonies, and for former colonising states to make symbolic reparations, acknowledging the wrong of exploitation. Often it is assumed that the reparative redistribution can occur through in situ monetary transfers, and that symbolic reparations can involve measures such as apologies. But I highlight an overlooked additional option that should be added to the reparative package: migration rights. Firstly, migration would constitute material reparations, as it is well established that migration from poorer to richer states is an effective mechanism of redistributing wealth, both to the individuals who migrate, but also to those who choose not to migrate through remittances. Secondly, offering postcolonial migrants not only the right to work in their former colonising states, but substantive rights, including immediate access to public funds, would be a powerful means of making symbolic reparations, of former colonising states acknowledging that their key institutions are funded with colonially extracted wealth.

Images from Exile

This roundtable discussion brings together the teams of two online participatory photography projects with exiled victims of the Colombian conflict, Tejiendo Vidas [Weaving Lives] in Spain and Fotodiásporas [Diaspora Photos] in the USA. Both projects were linked, in distinct ways, to the Colombian state’s efforts to provide recognition and reparations to victims of the country’s armed conflict as part of wider transitional justice and peacebuilding processes underway since the signing of the historic Colombian peace accord in 2016. The participants in these projects were some of the estimated one million people who have left Colombia as a result of the armed conflict between 1982 and 2020. They used photography as a means to process and make sense of their experiences, to heal through building connection and dialogue and to be seen. Bringing together the multi-disciplinary teams made up of photographic facilitators, psychotherapists and transitional justice researchers who ran these two projects, this roundtable discusses the responsive methods, logistics and dynamics of virtual and hybrid projects that fused participatory and therapeutic photography approaches. Reflecting on the outcomes, similarities and differences between the two projects, the conversation explores, in a context where economic and material reparations are slow to emerge, the role that participatory photography projects have to play in enabling symbolic reparations for Colombians whose lives have been permanently changed by conflict.

Negócios e Direitos Humanos: um Terreno Tenso, Minado e Contestado

Abstract This essay aims to critically analyze the recent field of studies known as Business and Human Rights, which addresses the negative impacts of human rights violations at the corporate level, covering theoretical discussions, principles, guidelines, standards, and regulations. We developed the essay focusing on three key topics: the business activities of transnational corporations negatively impact human rights all around the world; the initiatives created in order to address the impacts of business over human rights are discursive and, therefore, distant from the practices; companies and corporations make various attempts to abstain from their responsibility, even if they make symbolic and material reparations. For this, we illustrate the abstention from corporate responsibility through the human rights violations in the case of João Alberto de Freitas’ murder committed by Carrefour security guards in the parking lot of one of its stores in Porto Alegre, in 2020. Throughout the text, we argue that this field reveals the tensions between business and respect for human rights, understanding that this involves a minefield susceptible to being contested. Our contribution lies in indicating paths for the heavier involvement of researchers from the field of management with the real problems that challenge societies, such as human rights violations at the organizational level.

The role of civil servants in the dignification of victims in Meta, Colombia

Dignification of victims is understood as the process of restoring their dignity, which is their full and equal status as human beings with autonomy and material, social and natural conditions for a good or dignified life. We discuss how civil servants’ understanding of a dignified victim affects how they implement material reparations. In turn, we explore how the implementation of material reparation affects the dignification of victims, according to victims. Using a life-story approach, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews with civil servants and victims’ leaders. This sample allowed us to analyse a cumulation of over 20 years of dedicated work with victims in the region. We identified four themes that civil servants consider necessary for a process of victim dignification: participation, empowerment, de-stigmatisation and dignified listening. We explain how these themes can have the non-intended consequence of ignoring or denying some important elements for the recognition of victims’ dignity.

Race, memory and implication in Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising

This article analyses the new Greenwood Rising museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which tells the largely forgotten story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Greenwood Rising is influenced by the broader global proliferation of memorial museums created to confront historical violence vis-à-vis today’s ‘politics of regret’ and works to centre slavery and racial inequality in American history as well as in contemporary society, representing a new intervention in the mnemonic struggles over slavery and its legacies in the United States. In its adherence to global memorial ethics, Greenwood Rising also places (White) visitors in the position of what Michael Rothberg has theorized as the ‘implicated subject’. However, Greenwood Rising has been highly controversial among Tulsa’s African American community, many of whom see the museum as a ‘symbolic gesture’ intended to obscure ongoing racism and replace material reparations. This controversy raises questions about the limits of memory in the face of ongoing injustice and highlights tensions between increasingly globalized ethics of remembrance and local mnemonic struggles.

Appraising the Socio-Economic Turn in Reparations: Transitional Justice for Cholera Victims in Haiti

Abstract∞ After belatedly apologizing for the cholera epidemic in Haiti, the ‘New Approach to Cholera in Haiti’ by the UN and the promise of material assistance to victims through a ‘victim-centred approach’ highlight how the victims turn and the socio-economic turn are increasingly pivotal in the field of transitional justice. In light of these growing calls, we suggest a matrix to clarify the debate made of two separate dimensions: the focus of reparations – collective versus individual – and the means of reparations – symbolic versus material. Based on fieldwork conducted in March 2017 in the communities most affected by the cholera outbreak, this article demonstrates how the tensions between reparations offered by the UN (with a preference for collective symbolic reparations) and the reparations demanded by the victims (individual material reparations) can help understand the current stalemate in Haiti, and hopefully inform the next steps in the process of remedy for the victims.

Decolonizing Critical Theory?

AbstractTheorists working within the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory have not been immune to calls to “decolonize” that have been circulating in and beyond the academic world. This article asks what it means to seek to decolonize a tradition of thought that has never explicitly acknowledged colonial histories. What is needed, instead, this article suggests, is consideration of the very implications of the “colonial modern”—that is, an acknowledgement of the colonial constitution of modernity—for Frankfurt School critical theory's idea of historical progress. The issue is more extensive than simply acknowledging the substantive neglect of colonialism within the tradition; rather, this article suggests that its categories of critique and their associated normative claims are also necessarily implicated by this neglect and require transformation. Acknowledgment of colonial histories requires material reparations for the substantive inequalities bequeathed as legacies of the past, but these reparations also require a transformation of understandings and a recognition of “epistemological justice.”

The limits of post-genocide justice in Rwanda: assessing gacaca from the perspective of survivors

ABSTRACT In 2002 the Rwandan government asked thousands of untrained civilians to organize, staff, and operate the largest judicial experiment in human history: the gacaca courts. For nearly a decade, community residents met weekly to judge the fates of accused genocidaires. Critical to this process were survivors who acted as judges, provided testimony, and bore witness to the Rwandan government’s response to genocide. This paper documents the findings from qualitative fieldwork in Rwanda exploring survivor perceptions of the gacaca process and outcomes. In total, 57 stakeholders were interviewed and asked about their perspectives on the court’s procedures, limitations, accomplishments, and legacy. Results from this study indicate that although survivors desired and expected a variety of justice-related outcomes from the courts, including punishment for those responsible, material and symbolic reparations, peace and security, in the end, many were disappointed. Nevertheless, as the process wore on, many survivors continued to support gacaca’s operation because they believed it was the only way they could shape post-genocide narratives about Rwanda’s past, present and future. Ultimately this paper presents a more complex picture of how those on the ground understood the gacaca process.

O Caso Plan de Sánchez e a tutela dos direitos fundamentais da Etnia Maia Achí na Corte Interamericana de Direitos Humanos

Nesse artigo será analisado o caso do massacre de cerca de 268 pessoas da Etnia Maia Achí, em Plan de Sánchez, na República de Guatemala, ocorrido em 1982 e o julgamento daquele Estado pela Corte Interamericana de Direitos Humanos realizado em 2004. Na sua sentença, a Corte, por unanimidade, responsabilizou o Estado, determinou reparações materiais e o estabelecimento de uma política de respeito aos direitos fundamentais no país. Contudo, a punição dos responsáveis, apesar dos esforços, ficou aquém do esperado, ressaltando a sensação de impunidade dos autores desse genocídio. Utilizou-se na pesquisa o método dedutivo-normativo, com técnica histórica.

Recognition and Reparations Reconsidered: Lessons from Germany

Racial justice in the United States, and indeed throughout the Americas, can be achieved only by addressing and rectifying the wrongs done in the past to the descendants of African slaves. This is so because under conditions of free market competition, past inequalities and disparities in wealth and asset holding tend to be reproduced and even reinforced in the present. As the US economist Fred Hirsch has shown, under free market conditions, there is no catching up with those who entered competitive markets earlier or with more assets. The benefits of addressing past wrongs with policies of material reparations and symbolic recognition can be understood by comparing the United States to Germany, which has not only paid reparations to Holocaust survivors and the descendants of Jewish slave laborers but also outlawed any public display of any symbols glorifying the horrors enacted in the past.

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Long Live the Old Flesh: AIDS and the Americans with Disabilities Act at Quarter-Century

Long Live the Old Flesh:AIDS and the Americans with Disabilities Act at Quarter-Century1 Travis Alexander (bio) This is…this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat—this stinks, this is politics…the game of being alive. And you think you're… What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! In the clouds! You're on earth, goddamnit! Plant a foot, stay a while. —Roy Cohn, from Angels in America (Kushner 1992, 68) When the Americans with Disabilities Act passed into law in 1990, it delivered unimpeachable material reparations to the disabled community in the U.S. But as some observers remind us, the Act's pursuit of social justice wasn't strictly material. It also initiated a representational therapeutic in adopting a constructivist definition of the term "disabled," according to which narratives of disablement were to be as constitutive of a disabled subjectivity, legally speaking, as the latter's material dimension.2 As of July 26, 1990, "being regarded" as having an impairment would be no less constitutive of disablement than "having" a physical or mental impairment. What the ADA brought online in this sensitivity to the discursive inflection of materiality is in fact largely continuous with the academic conceptions of identity that were being elaborated in the social sciences and humanities at the time of its passage. Just as the Act locates disability at the intersection of material contingency and social discourse, so poststructural theorists locate identity at the crossroads of material or phentoypic contingency, social- or State-based discourses of normalization, and performance. At bottom, neither disability as defined by the ADA nor identity as defined by poststructural theory are essentially determined or exhausted by their material dimension. Given [End Page 251] such theoretical commerce with progressive academic concepts, it might surprise us to recall that the ADA was signed into law by a Republican president: George H.W. Bush. Even more confounding, perhaps, is the fact that the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) of 2008 signed into law by the second Bush was designed in order to reaffirm precisely the constructivist aspect of the original Act's conception of disability ("Fact Sheet" 2011). Through the 1990s and 2000s a series of Supreme Court decisions established precedents which made remedies more difficult to attain. That is to say, ADA protections were deemed appropriate only for increasingly severe impairments.3 The Amendments Act both rolled back the stringency of these requirements and augmented the original Act's list of "major life activities" that, if limited by an individual's impairment, would qualify her/him for ADA protections. Most saliently among these new activities were "caring for oneself," learning, reading, thinking, and communicating. Through such revisions the Amendments Act ratified the 1990 legislation's convergence with progressive academic imperatives in legitimizing the affective and theoretical dimensions of subjectivity. The Republican affiliation with the original Act, then, wasn't so aberrant after all, since the next Republican in office doubled down on precisely the most progressive commitments of that earlier legislation. Thus, perhaps there is less explanatory purchase in deploying the ADA(AA) to evidence a right-wing openness to identity politics than there is in leveraging it to underscore the bipartisan investment in such imperatives. After all, the ADA and the ADAAA are about as bipartisan as domestic legislation is likely to ever be in this country. Originally introduced by Democratic Senator Tom Harkin (IA), the Act ultimately cleared the upper chamber by a vote of 91 to 6 and passed in the House 377 to 28, before moving on to Bush's desk ("Actions Overview" 1990). Eighteen years later, the Amendments Act was passed by an even wider margin of 402 to 17 in the House and was approved in the Senate by unanimous consent ("H.R.3195" 2008). Despite opposition from an insignificant cluster of religious and business lobbies, the Act seemed to augur political consensus.4 Thus, we might be on safer ground in not glossing the ADA(AA)'s convergence with identity politics as emerging from an isolated evolution of Republican politics, but rather in framing this convergence as...

Might Makes Right: War-Related Payments in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACTThis article explores the patterns of distribution of material reparations (compensation) for victims and veterans in post-1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing on bottom-up approaches to reparative justice and critical peacebuilding, it explains the existing material reparation schemes in Bosnia as outcomes of the post-war transition and interests of the main transitional actors. It first explores the different approaches to war-related compensation for victim and veteran groups and then demonstrates that veterans have formed powerful pressure groups, drawing on extensive political and economic resources. Their organizations have been receiving socioeconomic support in exchange for electoral endorsement and public political support. As victims are fragmented ethno-nationally, by categories, and also lack capacities, their means to leverage the authorities for change are limited, even when matched with NGO and international support. This paper argues that unless material reparation is distributed in a transparent and consistent manner, it may create additional social cleavages and tensions.

When reconciliation means reparations: Tasmania's compensation to the stolen generations

Reconciliation is the dominant discourse surrounding Australia's response to historical injustices Aborigines have suffered. However, debate persists about what the concept means and how effective it is when addressing past harms. It is particularly criticised for focusing on symbolic and social justice measures, rather than material reparations enshrined in law. This article examines the case study of Tasmania, which has been the only jurisdiction to compensate the Stolen Generations. It questions why there was an understanding of reconciliation as reparations at the state but not at the national level. Drawing on interviews with Tasmanian political and Aboriginal leaders, this investigation found that a shared discourse of reconciliation created a space where a momentum of community support grew for legal redress. Alongside this analysis, the article argues that studies on reconciliation should go beyond the nation to examine how these debates play out in state legislatures.

Victims’ responses after mass atrocities: a note on empirical findings

Empirical research has shown that in the aftermath of mass atrocities, a large majority of the victims of gross human rights violations are much more concerned with their immediate needs than with the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators of these violations. The focus must shift from the perpetrators to the victims and that, in order to bring about desirable compensating improvements in the lives of those victims who are directly affected by these gross human rights violations, greater weight must be given to the interests and concerns expressed by them about matters fundamental to their well-being. The attention of legal scholars, policy analysts, and human rights campaigners and activists of the imperativeness of material reparations to meet the crying needs of a society emerging from political violence, comparative to criminal prosecution of the perpetrators must be engaged.

The International Criminal Court and the Failure to Mention Symbolic Reparations

The International Criminal Court (ICC)'s reparations regime seems very geared towards material reparations such as restitution, compensation and rehabilitation. However, a growing number of international instruments, particularly in the human rights field, anticipate that more symbolic forms of reparation such as satisfaction and non-repetition are mandatory. The Article explores what reasons may have led the ICC drafters to not even at least mention symbolic reparations and finds that, apart from a possible trend towards commodification of reparations in general, the perception was probably that only states can grant symbolic reparations, and that ordering individuals to do so might raise human rights problems. None of these arguments are conclusive. Individuals can provide symbolic reparations, and these could be encouraged rather than ordered to avoid the human rights issue. More importantly, the role of the ICC and the Victims Trust Fund will be to use monies as reparation, and nothing will prevent them from using awards so made for symbolic purposes. In fact, strong principle and policy arguments militate in favor of granting a larger role to symbolic reparations in the ICC context, thus helping to make the Court into more of an institution of transitional justice.

A Tarnished Silver Lining: Victim Suffering and Support for Reparations

Groups around the world are seeking reparations for historical harms. In three studies, the authors examined if people are more inclined to support a historical victim group if the group continues to suffer today because of an earlier harm. In Study 1, participants perceived greater victim suffering when the harm was recent and the degree of perceived suffering positively related to victim group support. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors manipulated continued victim suffering and the feasibility of material reparations. Both variables affected victim group support, but experienced sympathy and injustice judgments mediated their effects. Suffering victims elicited more compassion when reparations seemed feasible but were treated the same as nonsuffering victims when reparations seemed unfeasible. Suffering victims were also treated equally irrespective of feasibility of reparations, whereas nonsuffering victims were treated significantly less favorably when reparations seemed feasible, versus unfeasible.

Reparations and Symbolic Restitution

Claims to symbolic restitution and material reparations for historical injustices are based on the moral quality of the deeds of previously living people and the lasting impact of their deeds on the well-being of currently living people, respectively. These grounds for claims to redressing historical injustices differ and raise different questions of interpretation. Currently living people can claim reparations for being indirect victims of historical injustices owing to their impact on their well-being. Such a justification of reparations raises two main questions of interpretation. First, how can currently living people be understood to be negatively affected by historical injustices even though the past injustices are among the necessary conditions for their very existence and identity? In response to so-called Non-Identity Problem I explicate (section I. 1), first, the idea of people being harmed since conception owing to the lack of (sufficient) compensation to their predecessors who were direct victims of historical injustice and, second, the notion of harm according to which people can be understood to be indirect victims due to their falling below a threshold level of well-being as a consequence of the historical injustice committed against previously living people. We also need to address, second, the question of whether this justification of reparations presupposes an indefensible interpretation of property entitlements—on that basis some have argued that claims owing to the impact of historical injustices should be considered superseded by the passage of time and changes of circumstances. I show that the conditions for the supersession of historical injustices are often not met (I. 2). Currently living people can claim symbolic reparation on behalf of the direct victims of historical injustice—namely owing to the wrongs they suffered. Such a justification for reparations raises the question of, inter alia, the moral status of deceased persons and dead victims of injustice in particular. I explicate—in section II. 1—the notion of surviving duties vis-a-vis deceased persons. I defend, in particular, the idea of a general surviving duty to bring about the posthumous reputation that people deserve (II. 2). Commemorative acts of symbolic reparation can be understood at aiming to fulfill this duty vis-a-vis dead victims of injustice. Finally—and in suggesting an answer to the question who might plausibly be thought to stand under the so understood and distinguished duties to provide