Reparations for Past Harms

Reparations involve applying the logic of restorative justice to the negotiation and resolution of intergroup conflicts, which increasingly since the end of World War II has been regarded as an effective method for redressing historical injustice. Reparations have been understood narrowly, as material compensation for losses that could not otherwise be recovered, and historically these strictures were imposed on history's “losers” (for example, in the case of war reparations). Recently, the concept has come to encompass a range of voluntary mechanisms to rectify past harms. These include monetary compensation; restitution (return of expropriated goods or properties); apology and commemoration (acknowledgment of a moral transgression and a commitment to reverse or ameliorate the enduring consequences of that transgression); and the implementation of group-sensitive measures for the protection and preservation of minority cultures and minority rights (positive discrimination, as in the antigambling exemptions that some Native American tribes have been granted in the United States).

Where rival groups confront each other over some past conflict, the reparations principle will entail noncoerced dialogue aimed at healing the wounds of the victims and mending whatever perceived damage has been done to the moral standing of the perpetrators. Reparations are often pursued in lieu of retributive measures and may unfold in extralegal arenas (for example, as part of the work of historical commissions), although they do not preclude the logic of retribution entirely. With reparations, however, there is less emphasis on punishing perpetrators for their misdeeds and more emphasis on relieving the suffering of victims (whether psychological, social, or economic), and on forging new and productive relations between groups accustomed to viewing each other as outsiders and antagonists. For this reason, some scholars view the reparations discourse as an alternative to “victor's history” and as the mark of a new global morality.

For the proponents of reparations, negotiations between victims and perpetrators (or their descendants) are viewed as a way of removing the past as an obstacle to coexistence and cooperation. The restorative discourse recognizes that injustice cannot be reduced to mere violation of principle. Instead, it posits that individuals and groups come to real harm through the misdeeds of others and that efforts to relieve suffering on both sides of a historical conflict ought to unfold alongside, or even supersede, the more restrictive notion of justice as delivering “just deserts” to the offenders. Because the proponents of reparations often address historical injustice as an assault against both the bodies and the identity of the group, there has developed an important link between restorative justice and the discourse of group rights. One can therefore understand reparations as a complement to the traditional liberal framework that views acts of injustice as instances of harm committed only by individual actors against other individuals.