Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace, Sites of Justice: Transforming the Relational Landscape of Yogyakarta

The collaborative “Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace” project seeks to transform the relational landscape of Yogyakarta by enabling new intergenerational conversations about the 1965 politicide in Indonesia and further injustices with other marginalized communities. This community-engaged project developed walking tours of (largely unacknowledged) sites of historic violence: a colonial fort turned national museum, a derelict office building, a refurbished bank. Through these tours, sites of past suffering are activated by unheard survivor testimonies, making visible historical injustice and its contemporary and enduring significance. Unsettling the dominant spatial arrangement of Yogyakarta, the tours rewrite the city as a space where injustice and persecution are experienced. Crucially, the tour is also a relational encounter, facilitating intergenerational conversations that challenge social and political exclusionary norms. It, thereby, enables a form of relational justice, which requires active involvement from fellow citizens, not solely redress from the state.

Historical Injustice in Immigration Policy

The history of immigration policy is marked by the wrongful and discriminatory exclusion of certain groups of people. In this article, I argue that descendants of those who were wrongfully excluded have a pro tanto right to immigrate to the state in question as reparation. I begin by identifying the two main approaches theorists generally take to establish a claim for reparation: the inheritance approach and the counterfactual approach. In the first section, I argue that the inheritance approach does not offer a promising argument for reparations for descendants of those who were wrongfully excluded. In the second section, I argue that the counterfactual approach, by contrast, does. In the third section, I respond to the objection that this prima facie claim for reparation can be undermined by current circumstances. In the fourth section, I show why this reparation should be offered in the form of immigration rights.

Solidarity and The Politics of Redress: Structural Injustice, History and Counter-Finalities

This paper examines Nuti’s accounts of structural injustice and historical injustice in the light of a political dilemma that confronted Young’s work on structure injustice. The dilemma emerges from a paradox that can be stated simply: justly addressing structural injustice would require that those subject to structural injustice enjoy the kind of privileged position of decision-making power that their being subject to structural injustice denies them. The dilemma thus concerns how to justly address structural injustice. I argue that Nuti’s account is currently unable to provide an adequate theorization of how to address this dilemma because it lacks an account of political solidarity, but also that her account provides important resources for dissolving a dispute between two competing theories of solidarity in a way that facilitates the articulation of an account of political solidarity that is adequate to addressing the political dilemma.

Spaces of History and Memory: The Works on the Anti-Rightist Campaign

This chapter approaches history as a central concern in Wang Bing’s filmmaking. It deals with spaces of history and memory, in particular in relation to the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–59. It highlights Wang’s interest in unveiling the gaps and the contradictions imbued in state narratives at different epochs. A close reading of Wang’s only full-length feature film so far The Ditch (2010) and a comparative reading of it with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) are given in the first section of the chapter. The second section focuses on Wang’s mature work Dead Souls (2018) as a visual archive of witnesses on the campaign and as a way to testify to historical injustice, also recalling Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985).

Institutional Apologies and Forgiveness

Recently, many governments, universities, corporations, and other institutions have issued public apologies for the roles they played in serious instances of historical injustice. These apologies are particularly interesting in the case of wrongs that occurred in the distant past, toward individuals who are no longer living or capable of rendering forgiveness for such wrongs. When both the original perpetrators of these wrongs and their original victims are no longer living, one might have doubts about the conceptual and moral intelligibility of such apologies. The aim of this contribution is to try to answer this question, by examining the logic of such institutional apologies and their relation to questions of institutional blame and institutional forgiveness. It focuses, in particular, on whether it makes sense for American colleges and universities to offer apologies for their historical involvement with the practice of chattel slavery.

Reparations and Egalitarianism

Some claim that a commitment to egalitarianism is in tension with support for reparations for historical injustice. This tension appears to arise insofar as egalitarianism is a forward-looking approach to justice: an approach that tells us what kind of world we should aim to build, where that world is not defined in terms of the decisions or actions of previous generations. Some have claimed that egalitarianism thereby renders reparations redundant (what I will refer to as the redundancy thesis). One popular option for egalitarians who aim to reject this thesis is to insist that historical injustices demand reparations when they have caused present-day inequality (the causal approach). A promising alternative, skilfully defended by Alasia Nuti in Injustice and the Reproduction of History, is to argue that historical injustices stand in need of repair when they are reproduced into the present-day, such that some past and present injustices are in fact the same injustice. In this paper, I assess these egalitarian responses to the redundancy thesis. I find that Nuti’s account is equipped to reject this thesis, but that the same lines of reply can be adopted by proponents of the causal approach. I suggest that both approaches therefore be viewed as potential ways to conceptualise the relationship between historical injustice and our present normative circumstances; and that in choosing between them, we should understand ourselves to be engaged in an ameliorative project – a project that is guided by, and designed to help us to achieve, our legitimate purposes.

Die Idee des Schaminstinkts in Kants anthropologischen Schriften

This paper corrects a historical injustice that has been perpetrated against Kant for some time now. Mostly on good grounds, Kantian ethics have been accused of neglecting the role played by the emotions in moral deliberation and in morally informed action. However, the contemporary moral philosophers who have put forth such a claim tend to bypass textual sources, on the one hand, and to downplay the role played by the anthropological writings on Kant’s practical philosophy as a whole, on the other. Relying on highly relevant pre-critical texts in which Kant sketches future argumentative patterns and discusses the role of negative emotions like shame on the improvement of the human species, I address a mistaken conclusion about Kantian ethics as a whole that is common in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Finally, I raise some paradoxical conclusions that follow from Kant’s argument, once its implicit premises have been brought to light.

The Persistent Adivasi Demand for Land Rights and the Forest Rights Act 2006 in Kerala, India

This paper asks whether the Forest Rights Act (FRA) passed by the Government of India in 2006 could provide effective access and ownership rights to land and forests for the adivasi communities of Kerala, thereby leading to an enhancement of their entitlements. The study was conducted in Wayanad district using qualitative methods of data collection. The FRA, it would seem, raised high expectations in the State Government circles and the Adivasi community. This was at a time when the Government of Kerala was grappling with a stalemate in the implementation of its own laws on adivasi land rights, due to the organized resistance from the settler-farmers and the non-adivasi workers employed in the plantations that were established to provide employment for adivasis. Our analysis shows that due to the inherent problems within the FRA as well as its complex and contested implementation, the FRA could not achieve the promised objectives of correcting historical injustice and provide effective land rights to the adivasis of Wayanad. The role played by the conservation lobby in thwarting the efforts of the Left government is discussed. While granting nominal possession rights (Record of Rights) to the dwelling sites of a small community of adivasis (Kattunaicker, who were traditional forest dwellers), the FRA has failed to provide them with substantive access and ownership rights to land and forests. The adivasis who were able to gain some rights to land have been those who were involved in land occupation struggles. The study reiterates the importance of struggles in gaining effective rights in land.