Responsibilities for Climate Damage within Borders: Reconciling Liability with Shared Responsibility

The literature on climate justice has primarily focused on distributing the benefits and burdens of climate change, particularly those related to the costs of mitigation and adaptation. As such, less attention has been paid to emerging political issues surrounding loss and damage caused by the failure of mitigation and adaptation. This paper aims to fill this gap through discussions on reparative justice, which is correlated with the concept of liability. Since the concept of liability has controversial implications in climate politics and theory, investigating reparative justice for climate damage must clarify how the concept of liability can reconcile with the normative theory of political responsibility. This paper begins with the question of how the distributive justice scheme fails to discuss climate damage, by arguing that the scheme does not necessarily recognise a prior injustice and misses the need for reparation for the extensive scope of climate loss and damage. Then, it shows that the concept of reparation, which differs from compensation, holds more promise in giving the proper due for climate loss and damage. Finally, after comparing the liability model and the shared responsibility model proposed by Iris Young, this paper concludes by proposing that the hybrid model of liability and shared responsibility can be used to avoid limitations of the concept of liability.

Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures

This essay reviews Aaron Kamugisha’s reading of the works of C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter in his 2019 book Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition. Kamugisha issues a resounding call to reenergize the radical Caribbean intellectual tradition, saving us from our own alienation, colonization, and ambivalence. This essay takes inspiration from Beyond Coloniality to respond to the climate-political-social-cultural crisis in the Caribbean and to think through the possibilities for futurity in relation to reparative justice and ecological repair. It considers how the multiple devastations of recent “unnatural disasters” in the Caribbean are the outcome of the coloniality of climate, the deadly logics of racial capitalism, and the persistence of antiblack racism globally. The coloniality of climate calls for attention to repair, care, and reparations. We need to ask, Who is responsible, who is harmed, and who should be accountable?

Reparative justice: The final stage of decolonization

Taking inspiration from Neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism, by Kwame Nkrumah of the thesis by Lenin that Imperialism (is) the highest stage of capitalism, I postulate that reparative justice is the final stage of decolonization (Nkrumah 1968). Based on the argument in Counter-Colonial Criminology that imperialism is the general form of all types of deviance in the sense that all acts of deviance seek to invade and colonize the private and public spaces of others, I conclude that reparative justice programs addressing the legacies of crimes committed by empires and corporations would signal the final stages of decolonization. Contrary to the conventional assumptions in criminology that poverty and powerlessness are the major causes of deviance, I suggest that power, not powerlessness, is a more significant cause of all deviance by the powerful and by the relatively powerless alike because the relatively powerless prey on those even more powerless in the community while the majority of the poor remain overwhelmingly law abiding and the rich get away with bloody murder, as Steve Box and Jeffrey Reiman theorized (Box, 1993; Reiman and Leighton, 2020). Accordingly, the preferred societal response to deviance should be reparative rather than punitive justice in keeping with the decolonization paradigm in criminology and justice towards a more humane world devoid of immigration control, repressive policing, the prison-industrial complex, racism-sexism-imperialism, militarism, homophobia, the war on drugs, capital punishment, homelessness, illiteracy, and without state power as class domination to make way for the principles of taking from all according to their abilities and giving to all according to their needs (Pfohl, 1994).