I am currently working on a doctoral thesis titled ‘Once Were Wrongdoers: A Group-Based Approach to Historical Redress in the Context of Colonial Reparations.’ My thesis can be described as a work in analytical political theory with an applied, normative perspective. Its conclusions are relevant for politicians and policy makers dealing with reparations, as well as for any person who wants to understand what it means to be a member of an historical group that committed or suffered wrongs in the past.
Historical redress can take many forms, depending on the particular historic wrong at stake. For example, the Wiedergutmachung Agreement between Germany and Israel, reparations for American slavery, and European colonial reparations, all qualify as cases of historical redress. There is even a recent growing demand for climate reparations, with developing nations arguing that the harms they suffer due to climate change were caused by developed countries.
Whereas the reparations debate in the United States began after the Civil War, the colonial reparations debate in Europe only took off around the turn of this century — though the issue had already been addressed in the works of post-colonial authors such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon.
The notion of redress that sits at the heart of this inquiry is an expansive one, involving financial compensation, apologies as well as other reparative measures such as re-casting the national narrative. At the same time, it is argued that redress is best understood narrowly, i.e., as a kind of
redemptive action of a wrongdoer towards his victim. This bilateral relationship forms the moral basis of reparative obligations, separating them from general obligations, e.g., reducing global inequality or ensuring that people’s basic needs are met.
In particular, this project defends a group-based account of historical redress, fitted to the case of colonial
reparations. This account is developed by examining and responding to three problems, corresponding with the first three articles: the non-identity problem, the problem of unfair burdens (or collective responsibility), and the problem of luck in colonialism.
The non-identity problem focuses our attention on the victim. It is fuelled by the observation that individual descendants of colonial subjects and former subject nations would not have existed ‘but for’ colonial wrongs. The other two problems focus more on the wrongdoer. The problem of unfair burdens raise the concern that historical redress involves holding ordinary citizens responsible for something they did not do or took part in. The luck problem examines the way in which colonialism came about, emphasizing the role of different sorts of luck in colonialism and playing down the historical agency and thus moral blameworthiness of colonial powers. After discussing these problems, I devote a fourth article to the question of what an apology for colonial wrongdoing could express if we acknowledge the luck in colonialism. In doing so, I discuss moral attitudes such as guilt, regret, and agent-regret as a middle way.
Publications:
- 2021. ‘Mogen rechters speculeren?’ Actioma (2) [Find this article here.]
Dissertation articles:
- ‘Historical Redress and the Non-Identity Problem: A Tale of Two Approaches’ [Find this article here.]
- ‘Historical Redress and the Problem of Unfair Burdens: A Group-Based Approach’ [Writing in progress.]
- ‘Colonial Guilt and the Problem of Luck in Colonialism’ [Expected Fall 2023]
- ‘Apologizing for Colonial Wrongdoing: Guilt, Regret and Agent-Regret’ [Expected Spring 2024]