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The discovery that loans for the payment of slave abolition compensation had not been repaid by British taxpayers until 2015 took many by surprise. But it is the financial contribution of British Afro-Caribbeans towards the emancipation of their own ancestors that is most significant, calling for a re-examination of abolition historiography. By using Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield as analytical constructs, each July 1832 to February 1833 Colonial Office abolition proposal can be analysed against the greatest good of the greatest number principle. The result involves re-conceptualising abolition as an exercise in administering distributive justice through maximising freedom within a community of enslaved, enslavers, and British taxpayers. Here, freedom is the product of policy choices over who would bear the cost of financing abolition. In addressing these issues, this essay is written as reparative history, drawing parallels between the exclusions of 1832/1833 and Afro-Caribbean historiographical diasporic exclusions within the British academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to shared colonialist histories, current economic and political struggles, and challenges in charting inclusive futures, it is, in the opinion of the authors, essential for the people of the Caribbean and Africa to unite in their advocacy for reparations and justice. This article articulates what such an alliance might look like through a comprehensive analysis of documents between the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the African Union (AU) and by building upon Robin Kelley's critical Nine Theses on Decolonisation and CARICOM's current 10-Point Plan. In assessing the current state of collective reparatory movements, the authors have identified three gaps that require further research: the representation of the Indigenous Caribbean in theory but not in practice, the overarching emphasis on the state-to-state approach to reparations, and the lack of youth participation. Their proposed expansion of the Caribbean-Africa Knowledge Programme will, argue the authors, address these gaps and further the conversation on the importance and urgency of a trans-regional call for reparations by Caribbean and African citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional arguments understand history-related disputes between Japan and China to be a result of identity politics that revolve around very different interpretations over the historical legacies of WW II. This article challenges these conventional arguments. It shows that history-related disputes between the two sides have less to do with identity politics than with efforts by the Chinese government to deflect domestic discontent over its 1972 decision to waive reparations claims against Japan in return for the Japanese government apologizing for Japan's actions in WW II. But this tacit arrangement, "the 1972 System," began to fall apart in the early 1980s. This is because it failed to establish a clear institutional framework that could provide historical justice to Chinese citizens for the actions of the Japanese military in China, embroiled the Chinese government in a chronic legitimacy deficit that can only be mitigated if Japan keeps apologizing, and perpetuated Japan's victimizer identity, which the Japanese public has found emotionally unacceptable. The result is the transformation of what originally was a domestic controversy in China over historical justice into a diplomatic dispute with Japan over historical understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article forwards an analysis about Israel/Palestine in relation to race in global context, through the case study of the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) process (2001–2011). Although the WCAR has been widely framed as "antisemitic" we demonstrate this interpretation is unfounded, through highlighting legitimate claims for Palestinian human rights and other oppressed and racialized groups – in particular African-descended peoples seeking reparations for Atlantic slavery. The argument draws on 25 interviews undertaken with civil society delegates from Canada, the US and Israel/Palestine who participated in the WCAR process. Extending the work of Charles Mills we conceptualize an Israel/Palestine Racial Contract, and argue the WCAR process can serve as a microcosm to demonstrate suppression of Palestinian claims, the resistance to this suppression, as well as the potential of civil society alliances that identify Palestinian claims in a consistent and solidaristic anti-racist framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Winthrop Bell's analysis of the idea of Canada, a pioneering account of Canadian philosophy written during World War I, Canada's essence involves intercultural interpretation. In terms familiar to the phenomenology and pragmatism in which he was trained, Bell shows how Canada, by creating a new culture founded upon intercultural respect, could replace monocultural imperialism and materialism with something better: a culturally diverse nation, serving wisdom from a unique conversation among Canadian peoples, but that is for all people. In this article, we describe Bell's philosophy of Canada as interpretation and further apply it to the idea, practice, and end of reparations to Canada's Indigenous peoples as an expression of loyalty to Canadian philosophy today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capp returns to the ideological disparity between historical ideas on Mahgrebi enslavement and its transatlantic counterpart; even "People who endured slavery", we hear, "also failed to condemn slavery and the slave trade" (p. 177). Whilst there was no "typical" experience of captivity, Capp is convincing that there was "evidence of extreme cruelty", countermanding suggestions by other scholars that most captives may have been "well treated" (pp. 39-40). It has become popular, as the entangled histories of enslavement and empire occupy an increasingly prominent position in public historical discourse, for some writers to lean on elements of "whataboutery". [Extracted from the article]

This paper brings into conversation truth telling and compensation as forms of reparation for historical injustices in the Canadian settler colonial context. I examine how settler bureaucracy engages with stories of Indian residential schools and former students through analysis of the Common Experience Payment program's application form and final evaluation. This program, which provided former students with compensation for their collective experience in residential schools, erases survivor-centred forms of truth telling within the records and practices of the public service. I argue that the Common Experience Payment process both produces a new Indigenous population to be governed and perpetuates longstanding settler colonial rationalities that attempt to manage and marginalize the emotion and voices of Indigenous peoples and racialize them as inferior by way of being a 'challenge to overcome' for the bureaucracy. I emphasize that assimilation is not located simply in the spectacular or brute acts embedded in settler colonial policy, but in the everyday procedural instruments and mechanisms of the public service such as application forms and final evaluations which are largely taken for granted as benign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These Reflections present an overview and take stock of the German-Namibian bilateral negotiations how to come to terms with the genocide committed by the German empire in the colony South West Africa between 1904 and 1908. The main actors and their specific positions/approaches are identified since in 2015 a spokesperson of the German foreign ministry recognised the term genocide as applicable. As shown, more than four years of negotiations since then have not yet produced an amicable solution based on a mutual understanding and viable compromise. The pending negotiations have also failed to include significant agencies of the Nama and Ovaherero communities, who feel not represented by the Namibian state. While progress might have taken place behind closed doors, representatives of the German state have during 2019 not advanced credibility among Namibians. In contrast, a local initiative among members of the German-speaking community in Namibia for the first time entered a dialogue with some descendants of the victim groups in an effort to come to terms with the past. There is also progress in the German discourse over the need for restitution of cultural artefacts in German museums stolen during colonial times. But counter tendencies include a reactionary backlash in German policies and public opinion with the revisionism dismissing any historical obligations for colonial crimes as promoted by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and other proponents questioning the notion of genocide. Colonial amnesia remains a significant phenomenon and challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the reparative possibilities of representing subjugated voices in historical narratives. It examines, first, the onto-epistemic conditions under which this representation becomes possible. Further, it demonstrates that the possibility of representation is contingent upon the reproduction of the subjugated subject as a signifier of onto-epistemic difference. This form of representation fails to repair the harm underlying subjugation. The paper concludes by demonstrating the need for telling more 'surprising' stories that unravel material and symbolic attachments to the given onto-epistemic order. The argument proceeds through an engagement with the figure of the woman as she circulates in the histories of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. In particular, it engages the figure of the martyred woman and the abducted woman as they emerge in testimony and film, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical trajectories of explicit disregard contribute to current day biases related to the health and well-being of Black women and girls. In the current study, a multi-faceted analysis is used to examine linkages between historical mistreatment, twenty-first-century health disparities and specific problems with quality of care, access to resources and a lack of regard for the personal agency of Black women and girls. Considering systemic biases, the author asserts six core components of intersectionality to guide six practical solutions for reducing sexual health disparities experienced by Black women and girls in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, black former professional footballer, Howard Gayle, was awarded an MBE, in recognition of his work in anti-racist education. He rejected the accolade due to its colonial associations and the experiences of his African ancestors under the British Empire. This article analyses and theorizes the geographical, cultural, political, historical and temporal contexts and consequences surrounding this refusal. While highlighting the fluid and reciprocal spatial and temporal positionalities that guide Gayle's articulations, it argues that it is essentially through and in the local spaces and places of his home city of Liverpool – a pivotal location in the historic international slave trade – that his anti-imperial consciousness is forged and enacted. The article addresses the possibilities that emerge from demands for social and reparative justice by public figures such as Gayle, in terms of decolonial thinking, anti-racist pedagogy and their status as a source rather than an object of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internal armed conflict of Peru (1980–2000), a struggle which saw the rise of various guerrilla movements, notably Shining Path, against the State, left an estimated 69,280 fatalities and countless survivors of human rights violations. Among the victims, particularly toward the end of the conflict, were over 300,000 indigenous, predominantly illiterate, women in impoverished rural communities who had been targeted by State officials and forced into undergoing sterilisation surgeries. To date, no reparation has been enacted in response. This article reviews acts of truth telling, in particular the use of oral testimony within the project of Quipu, of the victims of these enforced sterilisations, as a nonviolent method of historical justice. The article finds that calls for violent social justice (that is, the internal armed conflict) have not protected the rights of the most vulnerable (among them, indigenous women), though arms may have been taken up in an attempt to do so, but have in fact increased the forms of violence within the armed conflict. By contrast, testimony as nonviolent action protects victims' right to the truth and their right to resist, as it turns against violent histories and toward possible reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More and more museums are engaging with historically marginalized populations to better tell their stories. Developed through activist curatorship, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights' exhibition Time to Act: Rohingya Voices represents an attempt to move towards a more inclusive and democratic museum practice. It also raises important questions for institutions trying to engage ethically with historically marginalized communities. What strategies can museums adopt to better address the needs of the historically excluded people they intend to serve? Are museums meaningfully opening up spaces for new actors to participate in their work? This article describes the development of an exhibition co-curated with the Rohingya community in Canada and the challenges arising from both the lack of diversity of museum personnel involved in decision-making processes and the absence of institutional anti-oppression and social justice frameworks. This article concludes that increasing diversity in museum leadership; providing adequate anti-oppression and social justice training; openly discussing racism, implicit biases, whiteness and other forms of privilege; as well as adopting clear ethical guidelines for engaging with historically marginalized communities are a necessary starting point towards redressing historical injustices and the unequal distribution of power in museum institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work brings analytical clarity and original insights to the much-debated questions of whether and how to include violations of economic and social rights (ESRs) within the mandate of several widely used transitional justice mechanisms. First, it provides a nuanced and comprehensive framework of analysis to examine whether the inclusion of large-scale ESR violations within the powers of the studied mechanisms is in conformity with the functions they have had traditionally. Second, by analyzing the implementation of this analytical framework with respect to the power to adjudicate and provide reparations for large-scale ESR violations, it sheds new light on important aspects of these questions. It demonstrates that exercising the two mentioned powers by the analyzed mechanisms with respect to large-scale ESR violations is mostly in conformity with the functions these mechanisms have had traditionally. It also shows that most of the challenges that including these violations within the two studied powers would pose to the institutional competence and democratic legitimacy of the examined mechanisms are because these are large-scale abuses, not that they are ESR violations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies have not been able to take the role of hope in processes of transitional justice (TJ) into account, as they focus on how TJ changes institutions and the relationships between individuals and therefore conclude that failed processes of TJ have no effect. In contrast to this approach, a different understanding of power as productive helps to understand how TJ-instruments create hope and which effects this has on how people conceive of themselves and the world they live in. A framework for analysing such processes is introduced that brings together individual meaning-making of hope and hopelessness with the role of the state in the provision of hope in the context of uncertainty. Transitional justice is therefore discussed as a performative project that aims at triggering specific emotions among the persons taking part in it and the broader society and at creating a vision of a better future based on social equality through the protection and fulfilment of human rights. By applying this framework to the case of the Sierra Leone truth and reconciliation commission and the reparations programme, it is argued that hope had a mobilizing as well as a disciplining function in these instruments. The promise of support mobilized victims to provide statements to the truth commission, and therefore enabled the commission to work in the first place. However, it failed in its attempt to discipline victims in their feelings about the past violence. The reparations programme constituted the embodiment of these promises, but victims interpreted its inadequate benefits and bad management as a proof that the state still does not care for them and competition over benefits is the norm despite their entitlement to support. This experience destroyed the hopes of many victims and created social envy among them, preventing the development of solidarity among victims and the chance for resistance against this policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Canada's justice system and the lawyers that operate within it are ill prepared to comprehend or reconcile the relationship between colonial legal systems and indigenous systems of law. They do not get training in indigenous law, so vital to crafting appropriate reparations for the wrongs justified by colonial practices and prejudices, and that could open doors to reconciliation and healing. The example used in this article to illustrate how the two systems of law could successfully interact is the historic Indian Residential School Settlement – the largest settlement in Canadian history, almost entirely based on Indigenous law and legal theory, and harmonized in part with principles of the common law of tort. The Indian Residential School Settlement proves that in post-colonial societies western frameworks lack the tools necessary to remediate injuries motivated by systemic discrimination, which, in this case, was cultural genocide. Different perspectives and legal theories are necessary to craft appropriate reparations and the processes used to achieve them. Unless indigenous laws, traditions, and practices are central to the design and implementation of reparations, state responses to the cultural genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples in Canada will not open pathways to either healing or reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the experience of taking part in the Irish State's Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) and the subsequent redress scheme. The Commission was set up in 2000 with the task of investigating Industrial and Reformatory Schools that were in existence for most of the twentieth century. A redress scheme was also set up by the government to compensate those who were abused in these institutions. 25 qualitative interviews were conducted with male and female Industrial and Reformatory School survivors. The focus of this article is to understand some of the issues that this cohort of survivors faced in taking part in the inquiry and redress process, dealing with issues such as re-traumatisation, retributive justice and procedural justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was born out of the hypothesis that slavery—as historical reality, signifier, and symbol—has deep psychological implications for contemporary white Americans. Using data collected in an exploratory, qualitative study, my participants' responses serve to illuminate the psychic structure of whiteness, which functions as a distortion that gets passed down intergenerationally (and horizontally) through a white collective unconscious. Housed in individual psyches, I suggest that this distorted structure of self actively resists and prevents white Americans (as a collective) from making contact with the racialized realities, both past and present, that would potentially lead to opportunities for choice, reparation, and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the enormous relevance of its work, in recent years an intense debate has taken place regarding the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’agenda, powers and alliances. Although this experience was referred to by States as a ‘strengthening process’, when the IACHR’s work came under scrutiny in this latest reform process, tensions and political agendas dominated. The process lacked a robust discussion on how to bolster the mechanism’s agenda and tools for the protection and promotion of human rights in order to contribute to a better assessment of the region’s main problems and to achieve greater impact on concrete realities. The possibility of reorienting this focus might have re-emerged with the IACHR’s launching of the process to draft a new Strategic Plan. From a practitioner’s point of view, this article seeks to offer some reflections on the IACHR’s agenda, approaches and workings that can hopefully serve as a contribution to the development and execution of this new Plan, precisely from the perspective that was lacking during the last ‘strengthening’ debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a contribution to an area of research that remains neglected in both the literature on reparations under international law and on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights: the coexistence of reparation regimes at the international and domestic level and the problems this creates. In particular, it reflects on the jurisprudential turn of the Inter-American Court in the area of reparations as a result of considering allegations regarding Domestic Reparations Programmes (DRPs) in states undergoing transitions, particularly Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Peru. In addition to considering the role of subsidiarity in the most recent jurisprudence of the court, it addresses three questions: Why has the Inter-American Court tried to reconcile the coexistence of these reparations systems? How has it done so? And, what are the consequences of this jurisprudential turn for international law and for the institutional design of the Inter-American System? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent cases regarding Colombia, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has deferred certain components of reparations to domestic mechanisms. This article reflects on this new tendency with regard to the ability of the court to generate changes within the state parties that will ensure the long-term prevention of human rights violations. A thorough examination of the court’s decisions in various Colombian cases demonstrates the progression of how this new approach emerged and shows that it stands in sharp contrast with the approach the court had developed since 2000. The article then turns to exploring possible causes for and consequences of these changes in the Colombian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Crown has many faces both in English law and in the colonial and postcolonial law of New Zealand. This short paper identifies some of these distinct manifestations of the Crown and asks whether New Zealand can or should replicate these different conceptions in the event that it were to become a republic. Capturing the existing nuances, including those which have helped make the settlement of reparations claims with Māori possible, would be no small task and would require the invention of a new language of statehood. The paper begins by briefly setting out three core usages of the Crown in English law, discusses how these ideas were modified or attracted distinct nuances in the colonial encounter with Māori, and looks to identify central questions which would arise if a republic were in contemplation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Aotearoa New Zealand claims against the Crown by indigenous Māori for injustices perceived in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 have been enabled by the Waitangi Tribunal, and by negotiation processes via the Office of Treaty Settlements (OTS). One of the overarching aims of the settlement process, according to an early OTS guide, was to ‘reach a settlement that restores and increases the mana and rangatiratanga of the claimant group and will restore and increase the honour of the Crown’. Focusing on post-settlement experiences of Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara, this article articulates some of the barriers to achieving this aim. It highlights three of the challenges that lie ahead and the opportunities for navigating them and argues for a move away from settlement to reconciliation, drawing on insights from the recent Parihaka reconciliation process. The author attempts to show why these challenges and this move away from settlement to reconciliation remain vital to the transformation of iwi as self-determining, and for restoring and increasing the mana and rangatiratanga of Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara. She concludes that constitutional transformation is required more than simply reform, transformation that has its roots firmly in the ground of what is uniquely Aotearoa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the politics of the material commemoration of mass crime, with a focus on the Ovaherero and Nama descendants of the victims of a 1904–1908 mass ethnic killing in German Southwest Africa. My approach to monuments emphasises their place as artefacts that mark changes of regime after war or revolution, and as focal points of resistance to state regimes of commemoration. Tracing the material forms of memorialisation in Germany reveals the significance of both a ‘remembrance culture’ of the Holocaust and, at the same time, resistance to recognition of the Ovaherero/Nama genocide. In Namibia, the success of the Ovaherero/Nama activist campaign in Germany prompted the government to shift positions and take up the cause of genocide remembrance, asking Germany to officially recognise that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. By framing the mass violence of imperial Germany in terms of its enduring legacy in heritage, Ovaherero and Nama activists and their supporters were able to cross into different geographies of commemoration and bring distant wrongs, without living witnesses, into the present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Monetary redress is a developing area of human rights policy. The article examines how a redress program’s design affects the interests of program applicants. It distinguishes two program models, individual assessment and common experience, and explores their differing effects on applicants’ interests. Analyzing two Irish cases, redress for survivors of the industrial schools and the Magdalene laundries, the discussion is applicable to a wide range of redress programs including those in postconflict, transitional justice, and postcolonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many commonalities between the goals of transitional justice and domestic redress movements. We look at the movement for reparations for enslavement and Jim Crow in the United States as an example of a domestic reparations movement, and argue for the usefulness of the concept of transitional justice. We are particularly interested in showing that a future democratic transition – the end of mass incarceration – could animate a renewed push for reparations and a formal investigation into America’s legacy of racial injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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Until recently, the International Criminal Court (ICC) described its legal practices as offering a balance between retributive and restorative justice. It was held that restorative justice was progressed through its framework of victim participation in legal proceedings. However, there is little research into how, or whether, the Court metes out restorative justice. This article first considers the key pillars of restorative justice as ‘encounter’, ‘amends’ and ‘reintegration’, and the form of victim participation within these practices. It then examines how the ICC aligns to the direct participation of victims prioritised by restorative justice, and shows that victims do not hold such participatory possibilities. Instead, legal professionals take on direct participation in dialogue and decision-making processes. Using Bourdieu’s framing of the juridical field, the article identifies key reasons for the absence of direct victim participation and argues that the ICC primarily functions as a retributive approach to the resolution of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is poorly performing economies like Greece that have become synonymous with sovereign debt crises in recent times, other more deeply indebted economies remain exempt from such representations. This paper builds on an argument made elsewhere that sovereign debt crises are implicated in the expansion of colonial power through austerity, in both their overt and covert manifestations. While the 2015 Greek referendum in a climate of austerity attempted to cover over the imperializing will of the European Union through the referendum device, in Australia the referendum campaign seeking ‘recognition’ of Aboriginal people in the Constitution effaces the foundational debts of dispossession that structure both economy and sovereignty. While the referendums in both crises are invoked to resolve different legal, economic and cultural issues, they are indissociably connected in that they operate to legitimize the expansion of global colonial power. Referendums more generally are becoming increasingly visible as governance devices and yet their cultural-legal and racial meanings are yet to be tracked. I begin this task by bringing together a range of heterogeneous texts and literatures. By analysing and interconnecting these seemingly disparate texts, I argue that the Greek and Australian referendums are both techniques of colonial power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we aim to draw attention to the hopes, frustrations and disillusions that so-called ‘transitional justice’ projects produce in drastically poor, war-torn, historically marginalized but politicized Indigenous communities. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research we conducted separately between 1982 and 2010 in Guatemala and Mexico, we describe the ways in which the world came to know about Finca San Francisco’s massacre, committed by the Guatemalan army on 17 July 1982, as part of its scorched earth policy. We then look at the various forms of reparations its survivors have been the subject of. In so doing, we focus more specifically on how the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), the non-governmental human rights organization that was behind the Ríos Montt genocide case, mobilized Finca San Francisco’s massacre survivors to become participants in the trial. After examining how the survivors of Finca San Francisco responded to CALDH’s mobilization efforts, we reflect on the kind of ‘gift’ these survivors expected in return for their stories of annihilation and destruction. Our goal is to bring to light the ‘economy of testimony’ that human rights activists, journalists or social scientists become entangled in once they ask genocide survivors to testify about the brutal deaths of their loved ones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of formerde factoGuatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress. Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by arguing that women survivors' desire for repair requires attention to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article critically examines the nature, role and function of official apologies with respect to conflict-related deaths in Northern Ireland. It draws on empirical research of investigations carried out by the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) in state involvement cases and in particular a sample of unpublished reports that prompted official apologies. These reports also contain individual ‘perpetrator’ apologies or expressions of regret. Apologies are promoted as an important transitional justice tool, and the topic has generated considerable literature. However, while that literature has touched upon the possible adverse effects of apologies, there has been less focus on examining the empirical evidence of situations where apologies have turned out to have negative effects. This article addresses aspects of this research gap through the lens of three key transitional justice themes: redress, reparation and victims’ agency. Pivotal questions are raised about the value of apology to the victim on the one hand and the state on the other. The conceding or withholding of official apologies is examined: who qualifies and why, and whether certain victims are deemed ‘undeserving’ of an apology. The article concludes by suggesting that a pattern of official apologies without accountability and acceptance of responsibility is emerging in Northern Ireland; that official apologies can function as a way to shield state institutions, deflect further scrutiny, deny culpability, avoid effective redress and placate and silence victims. In this context historical injustice may be intensified rather than rectified, causing more harm than good, at best glossing over past wrongs and at worst facilitating impunity and re-traumatising victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memories of slavery have long been a contentious subject, but no more so than when the question of reparations is raised. This article investigates French media and political responses to reparations within the context of international movements that are pressurising European and US governments to engage more actively with the legacies of their slave pasts. The particular reference here is to the citizen-led activist group, the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires, whose call for a national debate on reparations in 2012 and 2013 was rejected by the French state and misrepresented by the French media. These responses are placed within the context of both the (first) Taubira law (2001), which recognised slavery as a ‘crime against humanity’, and the ‘memory war’ of 2005–2006. Nostalgia is shown to intersect with state and media responses in a number of ways. First and foremost, reparations are seen as anti-republican in nature, being misunderstood as the divisive work of ethnic minorities. Fears of communitarian fracture invoke nostalgia for an imagined wholeness that preceded the state's act of recognition. Secondly, reparations are defined as ‘impossible’ by appealing to their ‘divine’ irreparability. This article challenges the inertia of state nostalgia and the limitations of media representations by reconnecting reparations to a recognition struggle against racial discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines some recent Canadian projects of historical narrative revision in light of Canada's broader redress culture: the recurring norms and assumptions that govern its apportionment of causal and reparative responsibility for historic wrongs. To this end, it studies several grassroots commemorative projects funded under the Community Historical Recognition Program. It asks whether these projects contribute to forging a broader culture of redress capable of contributing to a goal that this article identifies as a central underlying justification for enterprises of historical justice in general: democratizing citizenship. Thus, the article aims to fulfil two main objectives. First, it offers an empirical analysis of some important Canadian historical justice initiatives, thus contributing to our understanding of a case often seen as a leader in redress politics. Second, by developing and then applying its own account of how historical justice projects can contribute to goals of democratic citizenship, the article offers what I hope is a suggestive model for analysing and evaluating particular acts or policies of historical redress more generally. A key conclusion from this analysis is that the Canadian example is much less inspiring than often assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1988, the US and Canadian governments extended an official apology and issued financial compensation to persons of Japanese ancestry (Nikkei) for their removal from the West Coast and confinement without trial during World War II. Whereas many US public institutions have since participated in educational projects that emphasize the historical significance of Japanese American confinement, efforts to inform the public about the Japanese Canadian WWII experience have frequently encountered resistance. These developments stem from critical distinctions in the wartime and post-WWII Nikkei experience in Canada and the US, but also to point to important differences in American and Canadian approaches to addressing past wrongs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses how Finnish upper secondary school students ponder upon the questions of transgenerational responsibility and historical reparation. These questions have got a prominent place in the history culture in many societies in the last 20 years. The philosophical and political dimensions of reparations for historical injustices have been analysed in numerous studies but there is little research on what citizens think of the notion of historical reparation. The article is based on focus group interviews of 53 upper secondary school students, carried out in 2008–2009. It suggests that the students’ reflections on the questions of transgenerational moral responsibility and historical reparation open a view on their historical consciousness which is a relevant subject to consider when developing the school history curriculum. The key theme in the analysis is how the students conceive the preconditions of responsibility and the limits of historical continuity. The article discusses the implications of the findings for the history curriculum. It also urges for comparative studies on the subject, giving as an example a project where similar focus groups have been carried out in five other European countries, in 2011–2012. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses three twenty-first-century reinstallations of African objects in the United States and South Africa that use gallery space to explicitly address and symbolically redress an institutional history of problematic representations of Africa, and by extension, of blackness. Each project has updated its interpretation to reflect black cultural studies scholarship that emphasizes dynamism within diasporas and attempts to intervene on the ways that museums produce knowledge. While each institution has used its African displays to engage local black communities, this paper inverts the notion that appeals to ‘the community’ are intrinsically anti-authoritative and that objects are necessarily static by suggesting the reparative potential in objects and the paradoxical logic of authenticity that undergirds the museological turn to community. Drawing on gallery observations, interviews and visual analysis, the particularities of each approach reveal that it is not the specific curatorial techniques – whether object-based or community-focused – but the relationships encircling those strategies that mediate reception. Offering a museological window into ongoing discussions of how cultural producers/curators and the audiences they presume/produce interface, these case studies signal the centrality of trust to reparative projects and to transforming social relations within the museum and beyond it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, transitional justice has featured on the political agenda of many post-authoritarian states. In Myanmar, where a partial but palpable transition is currently taking place, accounting for a dark past and securing a democratic future are key demands of opposition groups. However, elite-led reforms implemented after a March 2011 switch to quasi-civilian rule pay little attention to justice. This article thus surveys the possibilities for transitional justice in Myanmar, highlighting six major options: criminal prosecutions, a truth commission, a lustration programme, a reparations programme, a memory project and symbolic measures. Procedurally, the paper argues for local leadership supported by external engagement designed to ensure that basic global standards are met. Substantively, it explores tensions within transitional justice and across the wider reform process when such an agenda is pursued. To close, it holds that, while transitional justice may take years to gain a secure foothold in Myanmar, robust foundations should be laid now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instituted to try serious crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge period, including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has been heralded as an historic opportunity for the Court to develop international jurisprudence on reparations and to provide a workable model for how best to address victims’ rights in international criminal trials. At the end of Case 001, however, the Court seems to have fallen well short of those expectations. This article examines how and why the ECCC failed to live up to the high expectations that accompanied its institution. It argues that political pressure, financial constraints, and the absence of a clear understanding of what “collective and moral reparations” entail have all contributed to the Court's failure to realize its original intention to advance the international reparations agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, a number of museums have incorporated the term ‘human rights’ into their titles. This approach provides a certain indication of the subject matter these institutions take up in their mandate and mission and, when paired with other telling attributes – the museum ofholocaustand human rights, or the museum ofmemoryand human rights – suggests the particular frame through which narratives will be represented. Given that many museums before these have also clearly invested in the work of human rights, this article proposes a reading of this museological phenomenon in light of recent universal discourses on human rights, notably those by the United Nations and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Through a case study analysis of the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile, this article examines the significance of this new generation of museums in light of a broader global shift in accountability toward human rights violations. If the human rights museum is to be considered an instrument or technology of communication, in what ways are these museums pedagogical exercises in human rights work, and to what ends? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the racial and temporal formations that render Indigenous suicide comprehensible in legal and representational regimes of reparative justice in settler colonialism. I trace governmental, non-governmental and community responses to suicide and explore biopolitical and necropolitical reparative governance concerning self-harm and suicide among Indigenous peoples in liberal settler states. I argue that the visual and written archive pertaining to suicide and self-harm is a time-space construction that is fused by a 'grammar' of racial difference.2 In particular, I suggest that the frameworks of persistence (continuing despite or because of obstacles) memorialisation form some of the most significant ways in which inquiries and reports characterise the problem of suicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strengthening of international criminal law through an increased focus on the right to reparation and rehabilitation for victims of crimes against humanity represents an important challenge to health professionals, particularly to those in the field of trauma research and treatment. A brief outline of some developments in the field of international law and justice for victims of gross human rights violations is presented, with a focus on the right to reparation including the means for rehabilitation. The fulfillment of this right is a complex endeavor which raises many questions. The road to justice and reparation for those whose rights have been brutally violated is long and burdensome. The active presence of trauma-informed health professionals in this process is a priority. Some of the issues raised within the context of states' obligations to provide and ensure redress and rehabilitation to those subjected to torture and gross human rights violations are discussed, and in particular how rehabilitation can be understood and responded to by health professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-World War II German reparative measures had originally been created for the benefit of European Jews. The April 2004 official German compensation programme for Jews who were interned in World War II included reparations to Algerians Jews of North Africa who were involved in a history of German indemnification superimposed upon a prior history of French restitution. Post-war German reparations since 1952 continue to be rooted in ongoing vibrant debates about coming to terms with Germany's Nazi past. In contrast, France's attitudes and policies towards the Vichy past in France and Algeria foreclosed its financial responsibility to Algerian Jews (or for that matter Algerian Muslims) for what Frantz Fanon would call a ‘just reparation’ for the crimes of colonialism. Consequently, the case of Algerian Jewry and what happened to the community from the beginning of World War II through Algeria's 1962 independence, and into the era of their settlement en masse in France (where they received reparations as Pieds-Noirs, or ‘repatriated’ European colonial settlers), draws on Holocaust studies, post-colonial studies, Algerian Jewish diasporic history and the dynamic unfolding of French–Algerian decolonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Weimar Germany's economic plight has oftentimes been blamed on reparations in simplistic fashion. Alternative interpretations ignored reparations entirely, instead emphasizing gold standard constraints or wage increases in excess of productivity growth. This paper argues for a strong but subtle link between Germany's slump and these policies. Based on sovereign debt theory, it provides an incentive-based interpretation of the transfer problem, the compensation of reparations by counteracting capital inflows. I argue that the German transfer problem resulted from transfer protection under the Dawes Plan, which gave commercial credits seniority over reparations. This gave Germany a strategic incentive to drive out reparations through foreign borrowing. The Young Plan of 1929 implied a reversal of this seniority scheme, causing a sudden stop in the balance of payments that lasted to the late 1930s. The Young Plan could only have worked in the absence of an international recession; attempts to salvage it in 1931 were necessarily futile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a neglected strand in assessments of the failure of ‘delivery’ in South Africa's land reform programme, through an examination of the institutional obstacles to success in the restitution programme between 1995 and 2000. Here it looks in particular at the impact of ‘the sunset clause’ on initial staffing and the definition of claims, at persistent weaknesses in information management, and at conflicts among and within the implementing agencies. While it can be shown that these problems affected implementation negatively, the difficulties facing the restitution programme cannot be reduced to ‘capacity constraints’ and bureaucratic in-fighting. Understanding the shortcomings of the state's programme, it is argued, also requires an appreciation of the incomplete institutionalisation of restitution as a ‘social field’ (as a domain of shared meanings), and the diversity and malleability of the meaning of land in contemporary South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to provide a perspective on biographical writing from the vantage point of politics, that is, the way historical personalities and their life cycles are utilised within political discourse. In this endeavour, the perspective from which a historical figure may be viewed is oppositional to that which biographers tend to take: the aim is not to establish biography as a means of humanising and/or providing nuance to the knowledge of historical processes, or indeed to interweave distinct disciplinary perspectives in order to provide a multifaceted account of a historical subject's significance. Rather, this article aims to demonstrate the way biography has become a site for symbolic political struggles by introducing two cases of political debate during Hungary's post-Communist period. By doing so, it contributes to the scholarly literature on the dynamics of how politics defines and narrates historical subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shame and guilt are often theorized to differ on a self versus behavior focus. However, we propose that this is not true when taking a group perspective. In our field study, 196 communal participants were confronted with historical ingroup immorality. Results showed that participants who were old enough to have understood what happened in that time-period felt more guilt and shame than did those who were too young. Partly due to their ingroup anger, shame motivated an intention to change the ingroup self and behavior. In contrast, partly due to personal anger, guilt motivated an intention to change personal self and behavior. This suggests that the distinction between shame and guilt are not as clear-cut as previous research have assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]