Convened by Jean-Benoît Falisse, The University of Edinburgh, and Felix Stein, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Reparations have become one of the defining political and economic demands of our time. They arise after wars, terrorist attacks, and institutional violence, and are increasingly central to confronting the legacies of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. Today, reparative claims extend beyond historical injustices to tackle urgent modern crises: climate change, widespread pollution, pandemics, and preventable disasters. Yet as these claims grow, so do questions about their form, purpose, and limits. What should reparations look like in a world where the ghosts of the past continue to haunt the present? And how do existing reparation programmes influence—or fail to shape—the futures of those they aim to redress?

This panel brings together researchers from different disciplines to compare reparations across both established and emerging contexts, interrogating both their promise and their contradictions. It examines the global landscape of reparation programmes, illustrating how economic forces and geopolitical power structures determine who receives redress—and who is left behind. It explores the calculative grammars of compensation, showing how legal and bureaucratic systems translate harm into monetary value, and in doing so, encode moral hierarchies that differentially value life. The panel also grapples with the politics of responsibility: How is blame assigned in transnational crises, and what happens when powerful actors evade accountability? Finally, it considers the question of the aftermath of reparations and what endures after reparation programmes are carried out. 

By analysing reparations as both material interventions and contested sites of meaning, the panel asks: Can reparations deliver justice, or do they risk becoming tools of closure that stifle more profound change? And what lessons can be drawn from their successes and failures across diverse contexts?