In the context of climate change, conflicting legal claims are being articulated and adjudicated about who is owed reparations. Vulnerable individuals and states, primarily from the Global South, have advanced arguments in various forums that they are owed reparations or compensation for the harms caused by excessive emissions of high-emitting states or corporations. Yet concurrently, fossil fuel companies are utilizing international investment law and arbitration to seek compensation for government policies that promote a transition away from fossil fuels.

Reparations aim to rectify historical harms by compensating victims, or their descendants. Even when such harms have a transnational aspect, as with the case for climate change reparations, they often stem from entrenched domestic political stalemates. In a common pattern, vested interest groups oppose reforms that, although supported by majorities and beneficial to society as a whole, threaten their own material interest. Such groups hold a mobilization advantage that allows them to effectively obstruct change. Left unresolved, these domestic stalemates can compound harm over time in a way that eventually forms the basis of demands for reparations.

“La tierra está enferma”—“the territory is sick” as the result of the armed conflict, say the elders of the Awá people, one of Colombia’s Indigenous groups primarily living in the region of Nariño, who preserve their native language, the Awapit, and with it an entire spiritual and cultural relationship with its territory.1 For the Awá people, the prolonged internal armed conflict in Colombia affected not only human beings but also their Mother Earth, the Katsa Su, la gran casa—the big house. They consider their territory a living being that can experience pain and is currently sick and in need of reparation. In 2019, the Colombian Special Jurisdiction for Peace—as the court in charge of dealing with cases related to the armed conflict—embodied these views and recognized the Katsa Su as a victim of the armed conflict, with its own right to reparation.2 But what should reparations to the Katsa Su look like? And more broadly, how does the concept of repairing Indigenous territories challenge traditional anthropocentric assumptions of reparation in Colombia and beyond?

The expectation that those impacted by violations of public international law will receive a remedy has ballooned in recent years. Such expectations have shaped international legal discourse in unexpected ways and generated concrete action. In DRC v. Uganda (2022), the International Court of Justice awarded US$330 million in damages for wartime violations.1 International climate change talks are increasingly preoccupied with a controversial fund to address loss and damage.2 In 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its largest victims reparations order.3 These developments are celebrated as examples of realizing an individual’s international legal right to reparation. While an important starting point, this perspective fails to provide a full picture of these novel practices.

Breaches of international law have consequences. Under the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, the international responsibility of a state triggered by its internationally wrongful acts entails specific legal consequences, including the obligation to provide “full reparation” for the injury caused.1 However, obtaining reparations in the current international legal system often proves difficult. Existing international courts and tribunals often lack the jurisdiction to provide full reparations, especially when there are multiple and complex violations that caused injuries to numerous and diverse parties. International claims commissions can be effective instruments to provide reparations in such circumstances, including in post-conflict and other complex situations. Indeed, international claims commissions can fill the vacuum that exists between breaches and reparations due for serious violations. Their flexibility is a unique feature that can provide the missing procedural bridge between international law violations and reparation.

My parents, immigrants from Haiti, settled in Canada. I grew up in Sept-Ⓘles, a town with an Indigenous community. We were the first Black family to put down roots there. One day, Steve, an Indigenous friend, invited me to his home, a brand-new house on the reserve.1 I was shocked. The walls were covered with graffiti of despair, “red sacrifice,” and “black mourning.” As an Indigenous person assigned a house by the Federal Government, it “was living in prison.” For Steve, an Indian residential school (IRS) survivor’s descendant, it was the symbol of the “civilizing” society that wiped out his Indigenous values and culture, eradicating the foundation of his identity. The graffiti was a form of resistance.

Formerly colonized peoples and their governments have long sought repatriation of cultural heritage taken under the auspices of colonialism. Increasingly, states and museums are acknowledging ethical obligations to undertake such returns.1 This essay argues that, unless combined with other measures, repatriation represents incomplete reparation of the harms caused by the loss of such heritage. But repatriation alone does serve some reparative function. It can also operate as a necessary initial step enabling further reparative measures. The U.S. Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) illustrates these dynamics.2

Designing meaningful reparations for Indigenous communities requires grappling with the enduring effects of historical and contemporary injustices. Despite the existence of international legal frameworks such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and International Labour Organization Convention 169, Indigenous peoples around the world continue to experience systemic land dispossession, exclusion from decision making, and environmental harm tied to extractive and infrastructure projects. These harms are often compounded by the lack of formal legal recognition of Indigenous land rights and the failure to uphold principles like Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). Addressing these realities demands reparative frameworks that go beyond symbolic recognition, offering structural responses grounded in accountability, restitution, and the restoration of Indigenous autonomy over land and resources.

In this essay, we will use the Haiti Cholera case study to explore how the victims and the socioeconomic turns are increasingly pivotal in the field of reparations as part of transitional justice. On December 1, 2016, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon apologized for the cholera epidemic in Haiti, an illness which arrived with Nepalese peacekeepers deployed after the 2010 earthquake. After years of silence and denial from the UN, the UN finally established a “New Approach to Cholera in Haiti,” promising material assistance and support to the victims through a “victim-centered approach.” The essay builds on our previous matrix used to clarify the debate made of two separate dimensions: the focus of reparations—collective versus individual—and the means of reparations—symbolic versus material.1 Based on fieldwork conducted in March 2017 in the communities most affected by the cholera outbreak, we demonstrate how the tensions between reparations offered by the UN (with a preference for collective symbolic reparations) and the reparations demanded by the victims (individual material reparations) can help explain why reparations were not fully (at best) successful in providing justice for the Haiti cholera victims and hopefully inform practice in this area for other UN trust funds and victims’ rights mechanisms. The first section discusses the specifics of the cholera crisis in Haiti and the subsequent Haiti Cholera Claims, including the sudden change of position by the UN in 2016 and the nature of reparations included in the New Approach to Cholera in Haiti. The second section looks at the reparations debate and the preferences expressed by the affected communities in Haiti. The third section puts the Haiti Cholera Claims in perspective, discussing the Kosovo Lead Poisoning case and the Mothers of Srebrenica case, both third party cases involving a UN peacekeeping presence like the Haiti Cholera Claims. Finally, the last section looks at the ramifications of the Haiti Cholera Claims and how reparations debates need to take into account wider structural factors impacting the development of third world countries.

“If, therefore, we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.”1

With the end of the slave trade and the general emancipation of slaves, the problems of race did not disappear but simply were transformed.1

On the seventieth anniversary of the Bandung Asian-African Conference (Bandung Conference)—the first gathering of the leaders of Asian and African countries in history—the legacy of that historical event and its continued relevance in today’s world present interesting questions for study. The significance of the Bandung Conference undoubtedly lies in its ushering in the Non-Aligned Movement in international politics and related developments such as the “New International Economic Order” of the 1960s and 1970s.1 From a policy perspective, the Ten Principles announced at the end of the Bandung Conference (Bandung Principles) have defined Third World values in post-war international relations. This essay argues that the perspective of the People’s Republic of China (China or PRC) with regard to international law has been influenced to a considerable extent by the Bandung Principles. As a conference participant, China endorsed the outcome. Its view of the international legal order has evolved during the intervening years; indeed, it was only in 1971 that China took back its rightful seat in the UN system and began to engage with the international community at all levels. Bandung has nonetheless remained a referent throughout its rise to the status of a major world power. Tracing the evolution of Bandung’s influence on China, and vice versa, is meaningful, given that the international order is presently facing existential challenges of climate change, pandemics, and rifts in interstate relations.

Decolonization, naturally, assumes the presence of colonization. For most formerly colonized states decolonization has meant: (1) honoring the inherited colonial treaties; and (2) accepting uti possidetis juris. But what does decolonization mean for the Bandung states that were never formally colonized? For these states, colonial treaties are allegedly unequal while uti possidetis is a restriction on acquiring imagined pre-colonial territories. This essay argues that Bandung’s platitudes about Third World unity notwithstanding, states that were never colonized, or non-colonials, had a different and at times tense relation to some of Bandung’s fundamental commitments. The cases of the law of the sea (LOS) negotiations between 1972 and 1982 and China’s claims to the South China Sea show that these tensions are still unresolved.

The Final Communiqué of the Bandung conference included a set of ten principles that emphasized “respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” and “abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.”1 In this essay, I examine the impact of these emphases on the domestic law of one of the Bandung states, specifically the law of citizenship in India. Given the significance of state sovereignty and the demarcation of the domestic and international spheres, international law has only generated partial and uneasy responses to questions of citizenship and the intentional creation of statelessness through state policy.2 Using the Indian case study, I argue that Bandung’s focus on borders has facilitated the disenfranchisement of religious minorities, requiring a rethink of the nation-state as the basis of the international order.

We remember history through our own national identities, and recollections of Bandung are no exception in that respect.1 Colonialism’s “illegitimacy” had many meanings for the twenty-nine countries that joined the 1955 conference. Countries like China and Japan in Northeast Asia and ancient kingdoms in Southeast Asia like Thailand sought civilizational equality during the colonial era. China has since recovered territory such as Hong Kong which it sees as having been acquired through unequal colonial era treaties,2 but elsewhere in Asia and Africa Bandung became a declaration of liberation instead. Today, however, there is a tendency to circumvent the complications of these historical differences when advancing a unitary understanding of Bandung’s Final Communiqué.3 This essay uses the example of North Borneo and juxtaposes that against well-known Chinese views in returning to a theme I have explored elsewhere.4 It argues that while some Bandung nations might find it undesirable to reject every incident of their European creation, others might simply treat all of colonialism’s acts as illegitimate.