Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2025
Abstract
This special issue of the American Journal of International Law — devoted entirely to reparations in international law — offers a range of perspectives on reparations for large-scale harms relating to colonialism, slavery, industrialization, and transboundary pollution. As the symposium authors describe, the gap between the reparations that justice might demand and the ones that international law provides is enormous. The international law for reparations does not come close to remedying such harms and is not poised to do so anytime soon.
Although the gap between international law and the demands of justice is frequently explained by power politics, identity-based biases, or self-interest, it is also conceptual. Claims for reparations in international law commonly reflect two competing visions — one transformative and a second corrective. The transformative vision emphasizes that large-scale historical harms continue to generate massive structural inequalities. Redressing these harms in systemic ways is, in the transformative vision, necessary to end the patterns and practices that developed in the past but continue to disadvantage entire groups today. What makes this vision “transformative” — or to use another word, “worldmaking” — is that it looks to use reparations to end the long tail of injustices associated with large-scale historic harms, to improve the lives of those who still suffer from them, and in the process to transform, rather dramatically, a now unequal global order that is said systematically to perpetuate them.
Disciplines
International Law | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Ingrid Brunk & Monica Hakimi,
Transforming the World with Reparations?,
119
Am. J. Int'l L.
380
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4700