What Is to Be Repaired?

Abstract

This article proposes a definition of the concept of postcolonial justice in view of elaborating a fruitful theoretical framework for connecting distinct demands for racial, cultural, epistemic, memorial, and spatial justice that have been emerging on a global scale in the last two decades. The article conceives postcolonial justice as both critical and reparative, maintaining that reparation claims must be considered a crucial pillar in a theory of postcolonial justice. It also argues that postcolonial justice is better understood as a complement to a radically egalitarian conception of global social justice, which is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. Finally, it concludes that while reparations are relevant for an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial theory of global social justice, the reparative grammar of postcolonial justice is not sufficient to target current distributive inequalities that depend on existing infrastructures of domination. The latter cannot be repaired and should instead be abolished.

Postcolonial societies are haunted by the symbolic and material legacy of past historical atrocities—such as slavery, colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous populations—that have perpetuated injustice and urgently need to be repaired. Doing justice to our postcolonial societies translates into the challenge of repairing the irreparable (Bessone 2019), a challenge that depends on the legitimacy of contemporary democratic institutions.

This article raises the question of whether frameworks of reparative justice are adequate to advance the cause of social justice on a global scale, as suggested in recent literature on reparations (Bessone 2019; Immler 2021; Lu 2017; Taiwo 2022). It then explains why reparative justice is better understood as a complement to a radically egalitarian conception of global social justice, which is anti-capitalist and anti-colonial. Lastly, the article makes a case for postcolonial justice, a concept that has been very poorly explored in postcolonial scholarship (Bartels et al. 2017; Kohn 2013). Such concept could serve as a theoretical framework to connect proper claims for reparations with decolonial demands for racial, cultural, epistemic, memorial, and spatial justice (Fricker 2009; Mills 2018; Soja 2010; Thompson 2001). In the end, it suggests that reparations, in a broad variety of forms, are a crucial pillar of postcolonial justice which is defined as backward-looking, critical and reparative.

The Pandora's Box of Reparations

Reparations have become a pressing matter in transnational and domestic politics, civil society, and academia. Borrowing from W.E.B. Dubois, one could argue that reparations are the problem of the twenty-first century. While efforts to obtain reparations have a long-standing history, dating back even before the abolition era (Araujo 2017; Bittker 1972), only recently reparation movements are gaining recognition and support from larger segments of the global community.

Scholarly literature on reparations investigates what ought to be done to remedy historical injustices whose effects and consequences are perpetuated in the present (Brennan and Packer 2012; De Greiff 2006; Howard-Hassmann and Lombardo 2008; Miller and Kumar 2007). It revolves around the question of whether or not reparations for past wrongs are necessary or morally justifiable, and to what extent they may be helpful for restoring social trust and fostering political reconciliation. Divergent approaches to reparations stem from different answers to the question of what is to be repaired. Even among reparations advocates, there is no consensus about what reparative strategies should consist of. Claimants across the globe are currently fighting for many different things at the same time: apologies and acknowledgments, truth-finding inquiries, memorial initiatives, monetary compensations, welfare interventions, interstate debt cancellations, transnational aids for development, land redistribution, restitution of objects, and repatriation of individuals.

A firm point for partisans of reparations is the universally shared moral intuition that wrongs must be repaired, a view that is embedded in human rights discourse and has also been extensively promoted by transitional justice frameworks (Adler 2018; De Greiff 2012). In the case of mass-scale atrocities that are remote in time, objections to the simple evidence that harm must be remedied in the name of justice are predicated on the grounds that history per se cannot create obligations or entitlements to reparations for three main reasons. The first is the untraceability of an incontestable causal nexus between past injustices and current inequalities. The second is the impossibility of determining the status quo ante and hence of providing a restitutio ad integrum. The third is that no liability can be imposed for historical wrongs that are so distant in time and for which prosecution would be therefore impossible. Most of these objections are raised from the perspective of retributive justice. Different arguments against reparations have been brought forward by proponents of liberal theories of justice whose focus on individual rights make it difficult to rectify the collective intergenerational suffering caused by enduring injustices, as Jeff Spinner-Halev has highlighted, arguing that efforts to repair historical injustices may require temporary detours from liberal justice (2012). Moreover, proponents of social justice, while recognizing the persistent impact of past injustices, also maintain that material reparations cannot be claimed on historical grounds as counterfactual scenarios—what might have happened if a past event that did occur had not taken place—cannot be verified and lack normative validity. Lastly, a relevant concern that has been raised is the necessity that reparations align with fair distributive principles and do not conflict with the distributive goals of social justice (Waldron 1992).

We can thus group anti-reparation arguments into two main clusters, distinguishing those developed from a retributive justice perspective from those that have been raised from a distributive justice perspective. While the former usually stress the lack of valid justifications that makes reparations claims impracticable for the descendants of the victims of mass historical wrongs, the latter focus on the unjust consequences that may follow from the implementation of reparations programs—reparative justice, in other words, may endanger social justice.

Reparations advocates, on the other hand, do not represent a unanimous voice. Accepting the view that historical wrongs need to be remedied does not put an end to the complex and multifaceted debate on reparations but is only the premise on which different approaches to reparations can be discussed further to envision which are the most suitable and fruitful reparative strategies. Determining who is to be repaired—who has a right to reparations, who is accountable for past harm and who should do the repairing—is a fundamental step to establish if and how reparations should be implemented (Thompson 2002).

The question raised in the title of this article—What is to be repaired?—is an attempt to understand both the object and the objectives of reparative justice: Is it aimed at repairing specific groups, or society as a whole? Is it aimed at repairing the past, or the present with a view to a just and equitable future? Is it a matter of liability attached to clearly identifiable moral agents, or is it rather a question of social collective responsibility to deal with the legacy of past injustices?

The Reparative Turn

As a general trend, recent reparations debates have been shifting from corrective justice approaches to social justice frameworks (Walker 2006). Reparation advocacies and many recent scholarly interventions have gradually departed from corrective justice to overcome the limits and restrictions that its retributive logic poses to the legitimacy of reparations claims, and have turned to the socio-political field, making reparations an issue of social justice (Thompson 2015). Emphasis has been placed on reconciliation instead of retribution and on the current responsibility of contemporary societies and institutions, rather than on historically based liability and fault-finding approaches, while reparations have been consistently framed as a future-oriented, not a backward-looking issue. Catherine Lu's work, for instance, attempts to translate “the struggle for victim-centric reparations” into “struggles for redressing structural injustice, and for distributive domestic and global justice” (2017: 219). The notion of structural injustice is crucial to her proposal, insofar as she claims that “acknowledging the centrality of structural injustice in the production of political catastrophes is important for making appropriate normative judgments about the responsibility of culpable agents for wrongdoing, as well as about the responsibility of a broader group of agents for transforming unjust or alienating features of contemporary global and international social structures” (Lu 2017: 250). In her Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (ibid.), Lu thus suggests leaving behind individual-centric interactional approaches to reparations when dealing with long-lasting historical injustices, to embrace a responsibility-based and forward-looking perspective (Young 2011). In her view, the normative ground for reparative interventions is not to be found on “the rectification of historic injustice but [on] a certain conception of reconciliation that entails the nonalienation of contemporary agents in their social relations with each other and with the social/political order that organizes and mediates their activities” (Lu 2017: 251). Stressing the commitment of contemporary agents to promote reconciliation and build a fairer socio-political order that is capable of redressing the harmful and alienating effects of structural injustices, Lu relocates reparations into a responsibility paradigm in which the formulation of guilty verdicts that is so essential to the retributive model has very little relevance. Repairing society as a whole by redressing the injustices suffered by some of its members, therefore, becomes an issue of collective responsibility for all members. On a global scale, international actors must become fully aware of their responsibilities for structural injustices to create “mutually affirmable and affirmed social and political orders for nonalienated human flourishing” (ibid.: 280).

Likewise, in Faire justice de l'irreparable (2019), Magali Bessone outlines a theory of reparations based on a non-retributive recognitive framework. Focusing her analysis on the French context and drawing on paradigms of transitional and racial justice, Bessone maintains that corrective justice may be of no help in promoting reparations for slavery and colonialism. Since the historical continuity of past injustices is structural, rather than based on individual relations, in Bessone's view reparations for historical wrongs should not be considered on individually based compensational terms, nor can their purpose be to repair past crimes and compensate their victims (or their descendants) according to a strict genealogical model. Instead, a theory of reparations should be committed to the goal of repairing in the present the persisting effects of historical injustices, a goal for which all current members of society are considered responsible.

Acknowledging the limits of transitional justice to deal with mass-scale historical atrocities, Nicole Immler embraces the paradigm of transformative justice that expands the framework of reparations for past wrongs into a broader conception of social repair. Investigating debates on reparations in the Dutch context, Immler argues that the notion of “social repair” can make reparations claims less controversial and more acceptable, because it “allow[s] a broader part of Dutch society to identify with particular reparatory instruments as part of a joint struggle for a fairer and more equal society for all citizens” (Immler 2021). In her call for transformative justice, reparations for past violations are blended with elements of distributive justice, and the notion of social repair as a civic task is intended to overcome the “blame-and-guilt” pattern that is traditionally associated with reparations and generates skepticism in the public sphere.

An even more resolute attempt at reconfiguring and recoding reparations in distributive terms has been made by Olufemi Taiwo in his recent book Reconsidering Reparations (2022). The book not only centers on Black reparations in the United States but also expands to a broader global perspective. According to Taiwo, a constructive approach to reparations is needed to overcome the limitations of traditional models of harm repair and relationship repair. Reparations for Taiwo do not simply address the injustices of the past but aim at remaking the world system by transforming unjust social relations through the prism of a “historically informed view of distributive justice” (2022: 74). In this perspective, reparative obligations and entitlements are globally distributed across dividing lines that separate those who have benefited from and those who have been damaged by historical infrastructures of domination. Reparations are meant as a bridge between a shared history of unfairness and the project of a just future and are therefore forward-looking. Moreover, for Taiwo, the very vision of a just future cannot but take on both distributive justice and climate justice, for which reparations become foundational.

The scholarly contributions previously mentioned reflect some relevant changes that have occurred over the past decade in the global reparations movement, where advocacies have reduced their efforts in the legal field and have instead sought to enhance the political legitimacy of reparations discourses. Beyond their nuances, Lu, Bessone, Immler, and Taiwo share a similar understanding of the goals and outcomes of reparative interventions. Their views of reparative justice exceed the scope of solely redressing historical injustice to challenge existing inequalities, restore fair distributive patterns, and foster social and political reconciliation. These approaches that seem to extend reparative justice to encompass broader distributive goals epitomize a reparative turn within debates on global social justice.

Relying on a commonly accepted understanding of justice qua redress, reparations seem to be particularly appealing for building a large consensus beyond traditional divisions between egalitarians and libertarians on issues of social justice. From this perspective, reparative demands appear to be the most suitable tools for promoting the socio-economic distributive goals of global justice, including environmental and climate justice. As Taiwo most explicitly claims: “since the injustice that reparations respond to is global and distributive, . . . what reparations need to accomplish . . . is building a just distribution” (2022: 10).

However, as reparative justice implicitly assumes that present injustices to be repaired must be traced back to historical violations, the question is to what extent reparative justice may be capable of targeting socio-economic injustices that are newly reproduced and not simply historically inherited. Can reparative justice repair ongoing capitalist exploitation and neocolonial extractivism?¹

Reparations and Social Justice: Elective Affinities

Analyzing the relationship between reparative claims and theories of justice, Janna Thompson poses the following question: “Why do those who in earlier times might have rested their case on forward-looking appeals to requirements of social justice now favour an appeal to rectification of past wrongs?” (2015: 47). In response, she offers a compelling argument that connects the growing appeal of reparative demands to the “declining fortunes” of social justice (ibid.: 48). First, Thompson frames the relatively recent twilight of social justice and of the ideal of equality as a consequence of the rise of neoliberalism and, secondly, she stresses that the “increased popularity” of human rights discourse in the last decades “parallels the increasing emphasis on historical injustice and reparative demands” (ibid.). While exploring the reasons why reparations claims have become so attractive in contemporary society, Thompson also raises a valid concern about the sustainability of the turn to reparative justice: “Is it likely to lead to an unmanageable plethora of reparative claims as more individuals and groups and subgroups see it to their advantage to identify injustices in their history for which they can demand rectification?” (ibid.: 51). She thus wonders whether such demands may become too difficult or impossible to fulfill and considers the place reparative justice might occupy within a broader understanding of justice.

I agree with Thompson that recent configurations of reparative justice tend to incorporate social justice demands within their reparative framework. In this respect, I am worried about the danger of making reparative justice the new grammar of social justice, reformulating social justice demands into the language of reparations for historical wrongs. Beyond the potential for endless growth of reparative claims that worries Thompson, my primary concern is whether reparative frameworks possess the capacity to effectively address the challenges of global social justice and align with radically egalitarian objectives.² Although I recognize the need for reparations to address historical injustices and their persisting impact, which may result in the encroachment of reparative justice into the realm of distributive justice, I argue that an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial approach is necessary for eliminating distributive inequalities and achieving global social justice.³ Therefore, while reparations are relevant for an anti-capitalist theory of global social justice—as I will explain later—they may not be sufficient to target current distributive inequalities that depend on existing infrastructures of domination.

Regarding the potential overlap between claims for reparations and demands for social justice, Thompson argues that “since many of the individuals and groups that make these [reparative] demands suffer from disadvantages, obtaining what they demand would also serve the ends of social justice” (2015: 46). At the same time, she acknowledges that reparative demands may be claimed by groups of people who are relatively advantaged from a socio-economic standpoint so that reparative demands may end up “challeng[ing] present distributions of resources—including those regarded as equitable” (ibidem). On the other hand, Thompson stresses that no normative criteria or general principles exist to resolve conflicts between reparations claims and social justice demands. Since reparative and social justice are both morally relevant, in her view “one cannot be sacrificed or subordinated to the other” and compromises need to be found in practice (ibid.: 61). Instead, I propose some general principles for differentiating the domains, tasks, and goals of reparative justice and the purposes of a radically egalitarian framework of global social justice premised on a critique of capitalist injustices and their neocolonial implications. My notion of anti-capitalist justice concerns the rights and obligations that stem from the aim of guaranteeing to each and everybody their due as conceived through the prism of Marx's famous principle in the Critique of the Gotha Program (2008: 27): “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This means that resources and opportunities should be distributed according to the needs of individuals, rather than based on inheritance, economic power or social status. Anti-capitalist and anti-colonial justice is committed to redressing what Iris Marion Young has called “the five faces of oppression”, which are still responsible for the injustices inflicted upon much of the world population, namely exploitation, violence, marginalization, cultural imperialism, and powerlessness (1990: 39–65). To face, counter, and remedy these interlocking systems of oppression, social justice needs to be framed simultaneously on a domestic and global scale.

Anti-capitalist justice posits that inequality is inherently unjust and that the goal of society should be to eliminate it. Therefore, not only does it stress the importance of achieving a society where all individuals have equal access to resources, opportunities, and basic rights, but it also challenges capitalist exploitation, profit, property rights, and wealth accumulation, arguing that these structures perpetuate inequality. Marx's conception of justice aims at ending exploitation and creating a classless society grounded on collective ownership, planning, and resource distribution. Accordingly, anti-capitalist justice is based on the idea that justice can only be achieved by addressing the underlying economic and social infrastructures that are responsible for the reproduction of inequality and exploitation.

Since theories of social justice in general—including anti-capitalist approaches to justice—are history-blind and do not address historical injustice as a matter to be repaired; they must be supplemented by a postcolonial justice framework centered around reparative principles. To that extent, it is important to identify and circumscribe postcolonial justice, emphasizing its unique purpose and perspectives, with the aim of bringing attention to the historical genealogy of the injustices that shape the present postcolonial condition. I therefore maintain that distinguishing between postcolonial (reparative) justice and global (distributive) justice is necessary: while the task of postcolonial justice is to repair historical injustices, global anti-capitalist justice is responsible for distributive goals that cannot be accomplished solely through reparations. I will revisit this division after exploring the implications that arise when using reparative frameworks to articulate demands for distributive justice.

Society Must Be Repaired?

What I proposed to call the “reparative turn” in discussions about justice, suggests abandoning demands for global social justice in favor of reparative justice. I wonder if this is a viable option, namely whether recasting distributive demands in the form of reparations is effective from the standpoint of an anti-capitalist conception of justice.

Olufemi Taiwo presents perhaps the most radical version of the “reparative turn” since his constructive view of reparations seeks to integrate the aims and responsibilities of global justice. Taiwo states that “reparations are a worldmaking project” and one that “involves thinking about justice and injustice in distributive terms: that is, as a matter of who gets what” (2022: 20). He thus convincingly argues that “we should intervene in distributions of goods, resources, and rights in order to make people's lives better [.. . .. And we] should also be concerned with present distributions as the moral sediment of unjust processes, or even as the continued moral life of those processes” (ibid.: 86). He concludes that “global racial empire, and its history of slavery and colonial domination, will be fully conquered only when their effects on the accumulation of advantages and disadvantages are also conquered” (ibid.: 87).

Taiwo also suggests “drop[ping] the language of equality altogether and go[ing] with justice as the moral yardstick” (2022: 101). Alternatively, I argue that a framework of global justice that is radically egalitarian and anti-capitalist may be more appropriate for pursuing justice without dropping the language of equality. Shifting away from the language of equality could be detrimental to the fight against inequalities. It is therefore important to consider alternatives that allow us to uphold this perspective. Is Taiwo's proposal of embracing global justice and rejecting its grammar of equality to replace it with reparations a sustainable path to follow, to borrow again from Thompson (2015: 51)?

I believe that prioritizing reparations over egalitarian demands may not be a sustainable path if the goal is to achieve equality. In the long run, reparations alone are not sufficient. Furthermore, failing to uphold equality as a non-negotiable principle could result in reparative interventions intended to address historical injustices actually contradicting equitable distribution, a possibility that cannot be contemplated by a theory of global justice that is committed to radical egalitarianism.

Additionally, while reparative justice can remedy our unjust past by addressing its impact and effects in the present, it cannot effectively target nor rectify current injustices that are continuously re-created independently of their historical root causes (Nuti 2021). As the third pillar of transitional justice—a framework that has been crucial for laying the foundations of reparative justice (De Greiff 2007), reparations refer to the actions taken to address and confront an irreversible harm, a catastrophe, or a significant damage that cannot be undone. The need for reparations, in other words, only comes ex post when the die has already been cast. Conversely, achieving justice in the present, beyond the scope of redressing historical injustices, necessitates substantial structural changes designed to confront the burning system of inequalities produced by global capitalism. These injustices must be eradicated to break the vicious circle of harm they engender.

In my opinion, the essence of reparative justice lies in its attempts to redress irreparable damages that have occurred. Paradoxically, because the past is irreparable and nothing can be done to undo it, it must be repaired. In contrast, the harm caused by global capitalism continues to burgeon and persistently replicate; it must be ended.

I acknowledge that the distinction I suggest between current injustices that stem from past historical wrongs and those that are ingrained in present power structures is founded on a temporal division that is difficult to substantiate empirically. A few concrete examples may assist in clarifying my argument and elucidating the conceptual limitations of reparative frameworks in comprehending and addressing present-day inequalities.

Consider the migratory flows and numerous deaths that result from the necropolitical management of European border regimes. Although each death could and should be rectified in some manner, continuous reparative efforts will not dismantle the border regime as a whole or prevent further fatalities. What should be targeted, indeed, is the very existence of an exclusionary border regime that results in humanitarian disasters. The demand for abolishing the EU border regime could conceivably be framed in reparative terms—as explicitly suggested in the slogan “We're here, because you were there”—but such a demand invokes a logic of historical accountability that may not be applicable to all EU member states. Instead, an approach based on a radically egalitarian logic would assert that the freedom of movement and residency for all human beings is a cornerstone of global democratic citizenship.

Another example that illustrates the limits of reparative justice involves the environmental degradation caused by ongoing neocolonial extractivism. For instance, the Dutch oil company Shell has been operating in the Niger Delta since the 1960s, causing significant harm to the region and to the Ogoni people in particular. While Shell has been required to provide reparations for the catastrophic consequences of oil spills, these obligations have not halted the company's activity in Nigeria or its damaging effects. Thus, it is worth questioning what a reparative strategy can truly achieve when dealing with an existing infrastructure of power and domination, where reparations can be provided without necessarily breaking the damaging cycle. Environmental justice cannot rely on reparations alone and should additionally demand the end of neocolonial extractivism on the basis of the fundamental right of all human beings to live in a healthy and sustainable environment.

A third example can be drawn from the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice (2013), whose tenth and last point calls for debt cancellation. It argues that “Caribbean governments that emerged from slavery and colonialism have inherited the massive crisis of community poverty and institutional unpreparedness for development. These governments still daily engage in the business of cleaning up the colonial mess in order to prepare for development.. . .. This process has resulted in states accumulating unsustainable levels of public debt that now constitute their fiscal entrapment. This debt cycle properly belongs to the imperial governments who have made no sustained attempt to deal with debilitating colonial legacies. Support for the payment of domestic debt and cancellation of international debt are necessary reparatory actions” (CRC 2013). The demand for debt relief is intended as a reparative measure to compensate for the devastating effects of Western colonial rule in CARICOM countries. This debt, as historian David Scott has pointed out, is the flip side of European theft (Scott 2014: ix). The majority of the world's largest debts is owed by Global South countries to Western governments and global financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, where voting power is allocated on the basis of financial contributions. Canceling unpayable debts is a much-needed intervention to alleviate the burden on the world's poorest economies. However, within the same inequitable and unjust economic order, the only available option for the least developed countries continues to be the credit offered by international financial institutions, which entails restarting the endless regeneration of debt.

The examples examined here suggest that reparations cannot guarantee the prevention of future repetitions. While Jacqueline Bhabha argues that reparations are meant to prevent future injustice, or at least strengthen efforts to do so, I contend that reparations alone may not suffice for this purpose (Bhabha et al. 2021). Undoubtedly, reparations for slavery and colonialism are also intended to guarantee non-repetition, but repetition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the “scramble for Africa” is highly unlikely. Alternatively, what must be interrupted is the perpetuation of neocolonial exploitative mechanisms of wealth transfer as well as the current proliferation of socio-economic inequalities and racial injustices, which can only be partially and indirectly addressed through reparative justice.

While reparations for historical injustices may help mitigate current inequalities, the latter cannot be solely interpreted as resulting from past injustices. The commitment to facing and fighting economic, political, social, racial, and environmental inequalities thus requires a conception of justice that goes beyond reparations. In this respect, a radically egalitarian conception of social justice offers an alternative logic, which we may call abolitionist, that aims to put an end to infrastructures of domination enabling the reproduction of inequalities and other injustices in the present. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive and can be readily combined. For this purpose, and contrary to Thompson's viewpoint, a general principle is required to connect and arrange them.

In my view, reparative justice should function as a positive and constructive complement to the pursuit of social justice on a global level from a radically egalitarian and anti-capitalist standpoint. As argued by Nancy Fraser in her final argument about the tension between recognition and redistribution, which may parallel the tension between reparative and social justice, “we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality” (1995: 69). In line with Fraser's argument, the goal here is to create a critical theory of reparations aligned with a broader agenda that promotes an anti-capitalist politics of equality. This framework can be referred to as postcolonial justice.

Why We Need Reparations and Postcolonial Justice

One may question why I am advocating for reparations even as I emphasize the limitations of reparative justice in fostering the goals of social justice. The answer is straightforward: reparations are required to address what global social justice cannot repair. As Taiwo remarks, “we have to respond not only to today's injustices in distribution but also to the accumulated result of history's distributive injustices” (2022: 11). To that extent, he argues, we should adopt a historical perspective on distributive justice.

Reparations serve to repair the past and its enduring effects precisely because they recall the long-standing history of injustice that has reverberated through contemporary societies at various levels. In contrast, to remedy socio-economic inequalities it may not be necessary to mobilize history, since egalitarian principles and rationales would suffice. However, targeting current inequalities in the name of equality alone implies omitting the recognition of their origins and historical context—a history of systemic expropriation and exploitation, of slavery and genocide, of epistemicide and cultural devaluation, of racism and extractivism. It is vital to investigate and acknowledge this history to ensure that the heirs of historical injustices are fully and fairly repaired.

Reparations bring recognition of the root causes of inequality to the project of redressing the present, and without this recognition, any distributive interventions would not be properly reparative. In other words, reparations named as such are the only means to require and achieve a thorough consideration of history and its causality: it is their engagement with history that makes reparations truly reparative. Reparations are thus backward-looking, as they look at history to ground their claims for justice. As has been noted, “the value of backward-looking reparations is that they ensure that historical perpetrators do not evade their reparative obligations and that affected communities are taken seriously” (McKeown 2021: 771). Reparative demands thus assert the accountability of the state and other institutions—banks, firms, insurance companies, and universities—as intergenerational moral agents that bear responsibility for their involvement in historical wrongs. This approach acknowledges both past liability and present responsibility as equally necessary to confront the legacy of past crimes, while still having forward-looking goals.

What types of reparations would be the most the effective means to fulfill the promise of reparative justice, invoking both liability and responsibility models? Traditionally, reparations are categorized as either “material” (such as financial compensation, land restitution, and services like education, healthcare, and housing) or “symbolic” (such as official apologies, public commemorations and cultural initiatives). However, material reparations are often symbolic in nature, like the UK government's compensation for the torture and abuse inflicted on the Mau Mau during British colonial rule in Kenya, which amounted to £3,000 per victim and only applied to living survivors. Similarly, symbolic reparations also come with costs. For instance, Georgetown University's investment in the Reconciliation Fund that awards $400,000 annually to community-based projects having a direct impact on descendant communities whose ancestors were once enslaved on the Maryland Jesuit plantations.

Bearing this in mind, I suggest that a comprehensive reparation agenda should include both “material” and “symbolic” interventions. However, to be compatible with the goals of global social justice and not to contradict egalitarian principles of fair redistribution, state reparations programs should not be based on demonstrable descent or bloodlines but rather on current disadvantage (this means that Oprah Winfrey will not receive compensation). Additionally, state welfare programs and socio-economic reforms should address inequality for all disadvantaged population rather than focus exclusively on those who may claim reparations for historical injustices (this means that land which is restored as an act of reparation by means of an agrarian reform may also be distributed to disadvantaged groups whose genealogy cannot be strictly traced back to land expropriation).

In the Global North, reparations, whether funded by the state or by private institutions, should support affirmative action policies for marginalized afro-descendant and postcolonial groups, promote memorial policies and commemoration events, facilitate restitutions and repatriations, increase research into historical wrongs, and disseminate decolonial practices in art, culture, and education. Decolonial claims should be regarded as inherently reparative claims that contribute to the mainstreaming of new historical counternarratives acknowledging and exposing past wrongdoings. My suggestion is to place both demands for reparations and decolonial claims under the umbrella of postcolonial justice and to assign to the latter the critical responsibility of doing justice to history and memory by generating social and cultural transformations aimed at establishing more equitable and just foundations for our present-day postcolonial societies.

Besides the “material” and “symbolic” interventions mentioned earlier, postcolonial justice also encompasses retributive measures on a domestic and transnational level, as it recognizes the liability of intergenerational agents—both state and corporate institutions—and values the possibility of holding them accountable for past harm and damage. In this respect, reparations may ensue from the prosecution of institutional agents that were historically involved in and largely benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and other colonial crimes. As Maeve McKeown (2021) has compellingly pointed out, numerous countries, including Canada, Ireland, South Africa, and Germany, are either currently providing or have provided reparations in situations where both victims and perpetrators are still alive, as part of their transitional justice efforts. Consequently, and in a similar vein to the tenets of the CARICOM plan, addressing remote past injustices requires a “backward-looking liability model” to identify contemporary agents as bearing “outstanding historical reparative obligations” (ibid.: 789-790).

My conception of postcolonial justice therefore rests on the four pillars of transitional justice—prosecution of the perpetrators where possible, investigation of facts, reparations, and reforms as a guarantee of non-repetition; however, as a mosaic of reparative interventions, postcolonial justice does not have a single agenda. It seeks to pursue all paths which may contribute to publicly and collectively engage with the weighty legacy of modernity, dispensing justice to past generations who depend on posterity for their life and memory—as Walter Benjamin suggests (2003)—and restoring the dignity of their descendants, who continue to suffer from multiple ongoing injustices.

While postcolonial justice has global ambitions, it is spatially bound and must be tailored to the specific contexts of different societies. Not only will reparations for different historical wrongs be different, but reparations for the colonization of Algeria and the Algerian War will not be articulated through the same demands in France and Algeria, where memory and history may require different forms of repair. Similarly, reparations for slavery may take on different forms in Minneapolis, Amsterdam, and Cotonou, as they will seek to address varying experiences and legacies of a shared history.

My perspective on postcolonial justice aims to offer a framework for considering, linking, and justifying ongoing efforts and movements toward retributive and distributive reparations, as well as grassroots decolonial activism that in my view deploys an intrinsically reparative logic. All of these endeavors are grounded in history and its continuing repercussions in the present. That being the case, it can be argued that postcolonial justice is primarily concerned with history and is principally backward-looking, not only in its rationale, but also in relation to its object—the past—although its projected outcomes are forward-looking (McKeown 2021).

Postcolonial Justice: A Room of Its Own

The framework of postcolonial justice I propose combines retributive and distributive approaches, offering a wide array of multiscale reparative strategies to remedy the injustices experienced by those still impacted by the persisting consequences of long-lasting historical damages.

As I have argued, postcolonial justice focuses on rectifying past injustices; however, its principles and outcomes are not incompatible with the objectives of global social justice (Tan 2007). To that extent, postcolonial justice crucially complements global social justice with its emphasis on historical wrongs and the obligation to redress them. If inequalities were tackled solely from an anti-capitalist and egalitarian perspective within the framework of global social justice, what would be lost in repair is precisely the legacy of past injustices, a history of imperial domination, colonial exploitation, and racial oppression that has been long denied. But this is what needs to be repaired. Conversely, not everything can be repaired, and the eradication of inequalities can be more effectively achieved by a call for global anti-capitalist justice that appeals to ideals of radical egalitarianism, which question the legitimacy of ongoing capitalist and neocolonial exploitation.

Unlike global social justice, which does not require the consideration of history to affirm its egalitarian principles, postcolonial justice is compelled to look at the past and relies on history to support its backward-looking claims. By doing so, postcolonial justice provides strong rationales for a radical critique of contemporary capitalism based on a historical examination of the large-scale injustices the current economic system has inflicted and continues to inflict worldwide. Thus, postcolonial justice offers additional grounds to support global social justice's critical views of capitalist inherent unfairness. Furthermore, by linking the history of capitalism to early modern colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which are considered the primary sources of capitalist primitive accumulation—or “racial-colonial primitive accumulation” (Issar 2021; Singh 2016)—postcolonial justice reveals that there is more at stake in capitalism than the unjust exploitation of workers by capital. From its beginnings, racial-colonial capitalism was not just an exploitative mode of production but also a global machinery for intensive dehumanization.

One may still wonder what the specific reparative scope of postcolonial justice consists of, and why I advocate for a room of its own, if, as I previously argued, my conception of postcolonial justice is compatible with global social justice approaches. First, I maintain that postcolonial justice movements have an autonomous political validity and claims for reparations that do not explicitly pursue anti-capitalist goals are still worth endorsing unless they explicitly counter anti-capitalist principles (building up on previous examples, it would be inappropriate to advocate for compensation for Oprah Winfrey, but it would be fair to support claims for decolonizing the museums that per se do not display any immediate anti-capitalist outcome). Secondly, and most importantly, I argue that postcolonial justice needs to be framed and named as such for its tasks and purposes to be expressly acknowledged, since recognition is a constitutive requirement for postcolonial justice's ability to repair.

The reparative mission of postcolonial justice consists, first and foremost, in retrieving and recoding historical injuries as cases of injustice. By generating reparative counternarratives, postcolonial justice legitimizes grassroots efforts to decolonize postcolonial societies and pave the way for public validation of further reparative interventions. Postcolonial justice's ability to repair primarily relies on its critical capacity. In other words, postcolonial justice is reparative precisely because it is critical, as the critique it develops and disseminates produces a reparative acknowledgment of historical injustices: by exposing the harm that has historically been inflicted on a vast number of world populations, postcolonial justice affirms a critical view of the past, which is per se reparative. Moreover, by questioning historical truths and hegemonic memories, the critique postcolonial justice conveys challenges the epistemic and cultural setting underlying postcolonial societies.

While postcolonial justice repairs by way of its critique, it also substantiates its critical insights by seeking justice for past wrongdoings and supporting claims for reparations. Reparations alone, however, should be viewed as an insufficient (albeit necessary) means for achieving global social justice.