Join OTJR on Monday, 17 November at 5pm for a talk by Dr. Daniel - TopicsExpress



          

Join OTJR on Monday, 17 November at 5pm for a talk by Dr. Daniel Butt, Associate Professor of Political Theory, DPIR, University of Oxford for a talk on Reparations and beyond: the lasting significance of historic injustice , Seminar Room G, Manor Road Building Abstract The subject of reparations in relation to Britains colonial past is once again surfacing on the political agenda of the UK, as a result of ongoing disputes over the payment of compensation to survivors of abuse and mistreatment in Kenya in the 1950s, and mooted legal action by 14 Caribbean countries against Britain, France and the Netherlands in relation to the wrongs of the colonial period. This paper argues that much of the existing literature on historic injustice has missed something about the way in which responsibility for past wrongdoing reaches into the present. Most writing on historic injustice is primarily concerned with the question of what present day individuals and groups owe to others in reparation as a result of past wrongdoing. The paper first outlines a particular answer to this initial question, namely, that present day states do indeed possess potentially weighty duties of rectification to others, and then thinks about the consequences of the fact that these duties have generally not been fulfilled. This is assessed from two perspectives: first, the impact of non-rectification on duties of corrective justice; and second, the impact on other policy areas which are not, on the face of things, primarily concerned with questions of reparations for past wrongdoing. It is argued that past transnational wrongdoing is important in a wide range of contexts because it problematizes and undermines the moral character of many contemporary advantaged states. Indeed, maintaining that contemporary collectives possess unfulfilled rectificatory duties to others is significant in a way that a more general belief that such collectives are failing to pursue or satisfy distributive justice is not. This is important in terms of what is owed in the present as a result of past wrongdoing, but the significance of the claim is not limited to the field of reparative justice as it is often conceived. Bio: Dr Daniel Butt is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations in Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Political Theory at Balliol College, and is Director of the MPhil in Political Theory. He has published widely on questions of historic injustice, particularly in relation to the wrongs of colonialism, and is the author of Rectifying International Injustice: Principles of Compensation and Restitution Between Nations (OUP, 2009). He is currently working on a book on reparations and public policy.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 14:16:22 +0000

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