By M. Amah Edoh and Liliane Umubyeyi
December 22, 2021
When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the U.S in summer 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, the ripple effect around the world was stunning. Displays of solidarity were most sizeable in Europe, where protesters’ demands were articulated on multiple fronts, ranging from the removal of monuments celebrating the slave trade and colonialism, to the restitution of artifacts looted from Africa, police reform, economic reparations, and the reform of foreign and international development policies. What has become clear in these contemporary movements for reparative justice and historical redress is the need for transnational and cross-disciplinary analysis and action: for assessing the affordances and limits of available legal and policy tools; fashioning collaborations across national borders; making visible the continuity between historical injustices and contemporary racism and discrimination; and bringing new vitality to national anti-racist movements often weakened by domestic political dynamics. Hence the composition of this series, which brings together activists, scholars, lawyers, and journalists working across eight countries in Europe, Africa, and North America. Together, the essays speak to the following questions: What mechanisms are available to pursue reparative justice today? What are their limits? What should justice look like? What will it take to sustain the momentum sparked in 2020?
By M. Amah Edoh and Liliane Umubyeyi
December 22, 2021
For a few months in 2020, the enduring reality of anti-Black racism captured attention around the world. With hundreds of thousands marching in protest of polic... More
December 22, 2021
(Voir le texte original en français ci-dessous) The eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement into the global political edifice has disrupted established syst... More
December 22, 2021
Reparations for slavery came to the forefront of the French political scene at the turn of the twenty-first century. It was between 1998 and 2001 that reparatio... More
December 22, 2021
(Voir le texte original en français ci-dessous) It has long been a challenge for Belgium to examine its colonial past. One reason for this difficulty is that a ... More
By Arnaud Dandoy and Romain Ravet
December 22, 2021
In the so-called Global South, detention as a tool of the justice system is intrinsically linked to colonialism and its legacies. While the idea of detention as... More
December 22, 2021
(Vèsyon kreyòl la pi ba la a) Linguistic discrimination may be the most insidious tool of hegemony. In my native country of Haiti, French, which is fluently spo... More
December 22, 2021
I was born in 1985 in Martinique. Along with Guadeloupe, Saint-Barthelemy, and Saint-Martin, Martinique is one of the remaining islands of the French colonial e... More
By Fania Noël
December 22, 2021
(Voir le texte original en français ci-dessous) "One cannot separate Africa from its diasporas without risking interrupting the pan-African momentum: without Af... More
By Elisa Novic
December 22, 2021
The multifaceted violence underlying colonial rule has often amounted to crimes against humanity (which may also describe the overall experience of colonization... More
December 22, 2021
The Mau Mau was a significant resistance movement of men and women from different communities in Kenya who embarked on an armed struggle against the colonial go... More
December 22, 2021
Ahead of a football championship final in 2020, a UK charity tracked the surnames of England players in a “map” of the country. Footballer Raheem Sterling “woul... More