This course emphasizes the vital role of reparations in the ongoing struggles against colonization, slavery, genocide, and ecocide globally. It recognizes reparations as essential work that seeks to rectify historical injustices and promote healing. Despite centuries of advocacy, calls for reparations are often dismissed by powerful entities in the global North, who fear that meeting these demands could undermine their wealth and dominance. The traditional reparative approaches, which usually focus on compensatory payments and human rights frameworks, frequently fail to tackle the root causes of these injustices.
This course encourages participants to critically examine the potential of reparations to foster radical and transformative change. It explores how reparations can confront and dismantle the systemic inequalities established through colonization, slavery, and genocide, which continue to affect marginalized communities today. Drawing on insights from activists and critical scholars worldwide, the course aims to illuminate the pathways through which reparations can contribute to creating a more just and equitable world for all.
The course was designed by Associate Professor Elise Klein as part of the Beyond Development Working Group Collective.
Curriculum
- 9 Sections
- 34 Lessons
- Lifetime
- Section 1: Welcome3
- Section 2: What are reparations?5
- 2.1Module 1: A long history of demands for reparations
- 2.2Module 2: What are Reparations?
- 2.3Module 3: Worldmaking through colonization, slavery and genocide
- 2.4Module 4: Reparations have been possible before- but for the wrong people. These payments contributed to imperial worldmaking
- 2.5Quiz: Section 25 Questions
- Section 3: Land backLand Back exemplifies the demand for the return of stolen territories, advocating for the restoration of ancestral lands to Indigenous communities. This movement seeks to address issues of dispossession and displacement while reclaiming sovereignty over natural resources. By challenging the expropriation of capital and returning land, the collective demand of land back aims to disrupt the entrenched systems of capitalism and state liberalism deeply rooted in ongoing colonization.4
- Section 4: Reparations, care and genderThis section highlights some of the gendered considerations of reparations drawing on case studies from around the world. It looks at how slavery, genocide and colonisation impact gendered lives in specific ways – broadening our considerations of what reparations are for.5
- Section 5: Debt CancellationDebt operates as a tool of oppression to perpetuate relationships of inequality, domination, expropriation, and enslavement. Debt is far from neutral; it actively exploits social differences in tangible and contextualized manners, reinforcing existing and creating new patterns of domination. As such demands for the cancellation of debt is an important site of reparative justice.5
- Section 6: Ecological Reparations5
- Section 7: Repatriation4
- Section 8: Enduring politics of reparations5
- Section 9: Achieving reparations5
