Reimagining Victims’ Reparation Global Network

RVRGN-II aims to strengthen communication and collaboration among an interdisciplinary team of scholars and practitioners working on novel ways to address reparations for victims of widespread human rights abuses. The project’s emphasis on grassroots initiatives and a shift toward socio-cultural and economic rights in reparative mechanisms may diverge significantly from the priorities and criteria of mainstream funding bodies that favor state-led procedures, making it less likely to receive their financial support.

The requested funding will support the project’s second phase launched in Huddersfield (UK) in May 2023. There, a group of like-minded and interdisciplinary scholars and activists met to discuss their work with victims of serious human rights violations in the Global South. Some of us have devoted decades to this cause. We believe a significant challenge in victim reparations lies in inadequate plan implementation. Plans can be overly ambitious or neglectful, often leaving significant victim groups unseen, as observed amid young victims in Iraq, one of our case studies. Other cases in our team include Colombia, Mexico, Kenya, and Tunisia. This initial meeting prompted the need for a network focused on grassroots reparations studies.

Consequently, our focus has been on designing an innovative theoretical and methodological framework applicable to diverse Global South cases, particularly those grappling with post-conflict societal reconstruction. We emphasize the significance of victim-led organizations, grassroots movements, and values often marginalized in state-led reparations, such as dignity, solidarity, and compassion.

We aim to create a follow-up version of our workshop. We established our collaborative work’s theoretical and methodological underpinnings during the first version. In the second version, we will develop a proposal for a collection of cartographies of reparation, where instead of focusing on geographical accuracy or traditional cartography, we focus on individuals’ or communities’ personal experiences, perspectives, memories, and emotions related to our case studies.