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Rising inflation has once again become a primary concern for policy makers, markets, and the general public in advanced economies. The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic was marked by increasing energy prices, and was further exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At the same time, many countries have committed to de-carbonize their economies, giving rise to concerns around the economic consequences of the climate transition, in particular regarding inflation. In 2021, Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock made headlines by predicting that policies against climate change would fuel global inflation.1 The European Central Bank (ECB) emphasized the consequences of climate change in its strategy review (see ECB 2021) and acknowledged that it could be forced to take “Greenflation”, that is, inflationary pressure arising from climate policies, into account in monetary policy operations (Schnabel 2022).

The uncertainty surrounding the economic effects of climate mitigation policies such as carbon taxes illustrates that they remain poorly understood. This paper attempts to shed light on the inflationary consequences of climate policy. We study whether past carbon taxes contributed to inflation, by drawing on a comprehensive set of carbon taxes and estimating dynamic impulse responses.

One of the more interesting aspects of the migration towards renewable energy is that many assume that the goal is to eliminate fossil fuels. That is patently impossible, as there will always be a need for more and more energy in a developing world. The key is to create the best balance of energy sources and allocate them to the loads they are best suited to serve.

Frankly, there will never be enough energy. A recent article by Kevin Bullis in Technology Review recently pointed out, the US Energy Information Administration recently posted the Annual Energy Outlook 2016 Reference case projections, which reflect that the percentage of fossil fuel use will only decline to 76.6% by 2040, even with all the alternative energy coming into the grid.

Even as Biden Pushes Clean Energy, He Seeks More Oil Production

President Biden acknowledged “it seems like an irony” that he is asking energy-rich nations to boost oil production as he implores the world to tackle climate change.

The Middle East has by far the lowest share of clean power in its electricity mix of all regions, but is starting to change that through hefty increases in renewable energy generation capacity.

Middle East renewables capacity jumped by 12.8% in 2022 from the year before, the biggest gain in percentage terms of any region last year, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

Historically a region that has relied heavily on its vast reserves of oil and gas, the Middle East, is fast becoming a leader in renewable energy.

Clean energy capacity in the region doubled between 2010 and 2020 to 40GW, with this figure set to double again by 2024.

After Russia’s February 24, 2022, re-invasion of Ukraine, all eyes turned to the brutal spectacle of Europe’s largest war since 1945. Yet, Russia’s ill-fated attempt to assert its sphere of influence in Europe has not been confined to a single battlefield. The Ukraine war continues to be embedded in a broader hybrid war Russia has waged on the West through energy blackmail, disinformation, covert tactics, and direct military confrontation.[1] One of the key battlefields: Russia’s energy war on Europe.

While the situation remains dynamic, at the start of 2023, it appears that Russia has lost its energy war on Europe. Within a year, Europe has substantially reduced its dependency on Russian fossil fuels, while prices, which quadrupled at the outset of the war, fell back to pre-war levels. Not only has Russia’s energy war on Europe been unsuccessful, but it may have the unintended consequence of accelerating Europe’s energy transition over the long term. Attempting to win recognition as Putin the Great by uniting the Slavic lands of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin may be hailed instead as Putin the Green, the man who convinced Europe to give up dependence on fossil fuels.

The United States is in the early days of a global clean energy revolution. The question facing New Jersey is whether we want to lead, follow, or be left behind while other states in our region capture the extraordinary economic, environmental, and energy benefits from renewable energy.

The clean energy transition is inevitable – yes, inevitable. And not because of any political or ideological perspective. We’re already experiencing the realities of climate change in our day-to-day lives. We have no choice but to develop scalable, affordable, reliable alternatives to oil, gas, and coal because fossil fuels are steadily becoming more expensive, less reliable, and likelier to drive geopolitical instability.

I’ve rarely felt more trepidation about writing a column than this one. But here goes: After more than a century of almost continual growth, the world’s appetite for oil is peaking, and will soon enter terminal decline.

That’s hard to write, because those who’ve called a top in oil have a forecasting record on a par with film producer Harry Warner’s skepticism that people in the 1920s wanted to see talking pictures.

A government research report produced by Finland warns that the increasingly unsustainable economics of the oil industry could derail the global financial system within the next few years.

The new report is published by the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK), which operates under the government’s Ministry of Economic Affairs. GTK is currently the European Commission’s lead coordinator of the EU’s ProMine project, its flagship mineral resources database and modeling system.

Oil prices fell by around $3 a barrel on Monday after analysts highlighted rising global supplies and concerns about demand growth just ahead of key inflation data and a U.S. Federal Reserve meeting later this week.

Brent crude futures fell $2.95, or 3.9%, to settle at $71.84 a barrel, their lowest since Dec. 2021.U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude fell $3.05, or 4.4%, to settle at $67.12 a barrel.

NEW YORK, June 27 (Reuters) - Oil prices slumped over 2% on Tuesday on signals that central banks may not be done with interest rate hikes, while industry data showed lower U.S. crude and gasoline inventories during the peak summer driving season.

Brent crude futures settled down $1.92, or 2.6%, at $72.26 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures dropped $1.67, or 2.4%, to $67.70.

HOUSTON, July 17 (Reuters) - Oil dropped by more than 1.5% on Monday after weaker than expected Chinese economic growth raised doubts over the strength of demand in the world's second biggest oil consumer, and a partial restart of halted Libyan output also pressured prices.

China's gross domestic product (GDP) grew 6.3% year-on-year in the second quarter, compared with analyst forecasts of 7.3%, as its post-pandemic recovery lost momentum.

Oil prices declined on Monday ahead of a US Federal Reserve meeting as investors tried to gauge the central bank’s appetite for further rate hikes, while concerns about China’s fuel demand growth and rising Russian crude supply weighed on the market.

Brent crude futures fell 89 cents, or 1.19 percent, to $73.90 a barrel by 9:23 a.m. Saudi time. US West Texas Intermediate crude was at $69.33 a barrel, also down 1.20 percent.

Oil prices slipped on Thursday as concerns about energy demand weighed against recent promises from Russia and Saudi Arabia to lower production.

Saudi Arabia and Russia, two of the world’s biggest producers of crude, tried to goose prices at the start of the week by announcing an extension of their voluntary output cuts. That comes on top of other pledges from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to reduce global oil supply.

Oil prices settled down 1% on Monday as worries about a slowing global economy and possible U.S. interest-rate hikes outweighed supply cuts announced for August by top exporters Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Brent crude futures settled down 1%, or 76 cents, at $74.65 a barrel while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude settled down 1.2%, or 85 cents, to $69.79.

Efforts to expose and redress violent pasts through truth commissions, the issuance of formal apologies, and various forms of compensation have emerged as desired measures used by state governments to redress historical injustices and other forms of collective violence and atrocity, especially since the of World War II.25Some argue that we are, for better or worse, in a historical moment of reparation and acknowledgment by characterizing this as an ‘age of atonement,’26an‘age of trauma,’27or an ‘age of apology,’28within which has emerged a culture of redress29and a politics of reconciliation.30A defining characteristic of this ‘era’ or ‘age’ is a central focus and value placed on truth telling processes and learning from the past. Truth telling is a concept that refers to such efforts to uncover, record and publicize in justices like the residential school system. The process is typically understood as a formal, state-sponsored, victim-centred, supportive, and emotionally difficult process31that engages survivors, truth commission representatives, civil servants, news media, and public audiences in revealing a formerly denied injustice and developing a new historical record.32The work of truth commissions, which facilitate truth telling processes, involves hearing testimony, researching, recording, and analyzing historical records, and publicly reporting theirfindings.33The process is thought by some to be a form of reparation in and of itself.34 For some, truth telling offers survivors the possibility of dignity, healing, and respect.35In the Canadian context, the TRC defines truth telling as a ‘sincere acknowledgment’ of the harm done to, and healing required by, survivors of the Indian residential school system.36A key aspect of this process involves recovering parts of the past that had been obscured, denied, and ignored by the Canadian government and churches. The TRC emphasizes that during this process, ‘Canadians must look to, and learn from, the past.’37At the same time, some have noted that truth telling produces subjects of the truth and reconciliation process. Truth telling processes narrowly define these subjects as ‘traumatized victims’ 38and ‘survivors’ 39who are ‘fixed in the lexicon of reconciliation ’40 and are inscribed in a ‘logic of healing,’41 rather than decolonization and justice. Glen Sean Coulthard emphasizes that very valid emotional expressions such as anger or resentment are deemed negative in truth telling processes by commission representatives and settlers, not only in terms of being characterized as undesired, irrational emotions, but as impediments to individual healing and national reconciliation.42Truth telling processes also tend to be one-sided. The roles, responsibilities and investments of peoples other than former students are not articulated.43Former students and their descendants are often overly burdened.44 While many former students conveyed that sharing their stories was powerful, integral to their personal healing, and in the service of educating youth, their communities, and the broader Canadian public,45 truth telling processes have also been critiqued as being wholly different from the various truth and storytelling practices of Indigenous communities.46 Jeff Corntassel, Cha-win-is and T’lakwadzi emphasize that for many Indigenous peoples, truth telling must ‘link political action and cultural teachings...to draw the focus back to community and family processes of restorying justice and history, as a means to challenge the colonial relationship with Canada;’47this entails storytelling that24J. MATSUNAGA focuses on ties to land and resilience that can be used by future generations towards decolonization and justice.48With its focus on uncovering the truth and producing new knowledge about the residential school system, the TRC’s work was additionally meant to provide context and meaning for the Common Experience Payment.49 Generally, compensation programs do not overtly or directly stake a claim in any kind of knowledge production or truth telling about historical injustice. Compensation programs are typically treated as instruments that symbolically and materially reinforce formal apologies50and truth and recon-ciliation processes.51Compensation is also meant to symbolize the commitment a government has made to correct an injustice.52 Governments take this approach because survivors and their representatives typically demand some form of compensation and because this approach, like the TRC, is in line with psychological and legal principles in restorative justice. These principles hold that if compensation is to be meaningful, it must be appropriate by way of processes that are neither too excessive nor intrusive lest they be counter-productive and infringe on the dignity of claimants.53In the case of residential schools, Jennifer Llewellyn asserts that public funds should be spent as part of a restorative justice process to make clear that this is a public issue and not simply a tort matter.54 It should be noted, however, that some survivors see compensation for historical injustice or large-scale atrocity as ‘blood money.’55 Robyn Green characterizes the compensation programs that are laid out in the IRSSA as ‘therapeutic investments’ for the Canadian government.56 A consequence of such an ‘investment,’ according to Green, is that it enables Indigenous populations to be managed ‘at a distance’. Compensation for residential schools enables the documenting and categorizing of Indigenous peoples as unable to work due to their state of health as a result of residential schools,’57and thus are in further need of state interventions. As Laura Fullenwieder emphasizes, there is a direct correlation between suffering and remuneration; by self-declaring as a former student and applying for the Common Experience Payment, applicants are folding themselves into‘a distinctive population [that has been] categorized, collated, and ascribed normative characteristics related to suffering, injustice, sickness, “healing,” and resilience.’58 Green highlights that what is often elided or perhaps overlooked in the scholarship is that the bureaucratic techniques that mobilized residential schools are likewise used in reparations practices.59 These critiques under-line that a consequence of reparation in the form of compensation is the further and continued management and categorization of Indigenous peoples as problematic.

This paper draws on the rich body of work that examines reparations in the form of truth commissions, formal apologies and compensation by interrogating the problem and limits of truth telling in the Canadian settler colonial context. As a point of departure, I am inspired by Paulette Regan’s critique that truth telling can deflect attention away from the ‘settler problem.’11 Part of the settler problem is a large-scale resistance to examining current bureaucratic systems and how they contribute to colonial violence.12 I am also inspired by Lara Fullenwieder’s point that Canada shields the specifics of settler colonial violence from its record.13Together, I take these critiques as a call to interrogate truth telling as a settler problem within the more mundane dynamics of settler colonialism14 and to turn towards the records and everyday work of the Canadian public service. With notable exceptions,15 the bulk of the literature that touches on the concept of truth telling naturalizes it as the work of truth commissions. This paper considers truth telling outside of the TRC context by interrogating sites and actors other than the TRC. I question what a compensation program like the Common Experience Payment, as briefly described above, can tell us about the possibilities and limits of truth telling. Specifi-cally, I ask, what story does the Common Experience Payment ‘tell’ in terms of a narrative about residential schools, this program’s purpose, and former students within the records of the Canadian public service? Concerned with the ‘slow genocide’ that is brought about by seemingly ‘innocuous bureaucratic practices’ 16 this paper traces how the stories and experiences of residential school survivors ‘travel by paper through the bureaucratic pathways’17of contemporary Canadian settler colonial administration. Given Canada’s role as a perpetrator of the colonial violence that was the residential school system, I emphasize the importance of examining the Common Experience Payment program as it is one measure mandated by the IRSSA which was under the responsibility of the Canadian public service to administer. I demonstrate that the Common Experience Payment program is a site that makes visible the settler colonial‘double-move’18of avowing responsibility for residential schools, while simultaneously disavowing Indigenous sovereignty.19The program makes visible that settler bureaucracy reconfigures this compensation to former students of residential schools to be a form of service provision. I argue that, through this reconfiguration, the program both produces a new Indigenous population to be governed and perpetuates longstanding settler colonial rationalities that attempt to manage and marginalize the emotion and voices of this ‘population’ while racializing them as inferior by way of being a ‘challenge to overcome’ for the bureaucracy. I demonstrate that this reconfiguration takes place first through the eleven-page application form that must be completed by former students in order to access the Common Experience Payment. The form acts as a gatekeeper that depot-liticizes the program and sidelines the voices and experiences of former students before they can enter the records of the public service. Second, the program’s finale valuation distances the public service from residential schools by recontextualizing this form of reparation as a service provided to a ‘target population’ of Canadians who present unique challenges in comparison to a ‘general population’. This paper takes seriously the TRC’s assertion that developing respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples involves ‘dismantling a centuries old political and bureaucratic culture in which, all too often, policies and programs are still based on failed notions of assimilation.’20 In taking this call to action seriously, I emphasize that efforts to assimilate Indigenous peoples are not found simply in the spectacular actions or overt policies of settler colonization, but in everyday instruments and mechanisms, such as application forms and evaluations, which are largely taken for granted as benign.

Derrida presents hauntology as part of his general theory of capital in which objects, labor and all things related through capitalism are transformed into use-value conditions in what he calls phantasmagoric or hallucinatory processes. He conceives of hallucinations as process of transformation beginning at an origin that is itself fictive or ideal, thus already purified by a certain fantastics (Derrida, 1994, 160). He names this transformation ‘limit-concept’ and suggests that it is in advance contaminated, that it is pre-occupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, namely what will be born… [which is its] commodity form, and its ghost dance (ibid.). Derrida centers a Marxist analysis in which the constructed commodity-form is distinct from yet haunted by its soon-to-be born ‘use-value’ under capitalism. Haunting, he suggests, originates in the world in which the object is about to be born “like the ghost it will become” (ibid., 161). Thus, to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology (ibid.). 32It was at this juncture, of hauntology as originating in the world in which the object is about to be born “like the ghost it will become” that I generate shape-shifting tools. It was clear to me that the haunted object is masculine hetero-normative Whiteness, produced in a phantasmagoric delusion of grandeur and entitlement, beginning at an origin that is itself fictive or ideal, thus already purified by a certain [I insert: violent] fantastics (ibid., 160). That limit-concept was more than a capitalist process of othering, it is (in the present tense) a colonial (post) modernizing endeavor, in advance contaminated… pre-occupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, chattel slavery and colonial genocide emergent yet silent in White disciplines of history, sociology, criminology, political science, biology, and so many more, in commodity form, and its ghost dance (ibid.). The ghosting of Whiteness in dominant scholarship produces work that is tragically incomplete; thus, it is destined to remain unfinished (Mathiesen, 1974). In Black Feminist Hauntology unfinished business is the result of oppression. As we know, ghosts remain because justice has not been achieved. The unfinished nature of abolitionism and resistance will continue to produce inaccurate renditions of the social world until anti-Blackness is exorcized. Short of an exorcism, this type of thought will continue to dwarf complex and liberating understandings of oppression and privilege, remaining trapped within its own lessons, reproducing its own cycles of violence, on small and grand scales simultaneously. 33As I finished Derrida’s book I found myself unwilling to engage too deeply in what would be an obvious critique of his work; it is a highly romanticized and at times uncritical representation of Karl Marx and an exaggerated affirmation of Marxism’s wide reaching ideological prowess. Derrida’s writing about ghosts was distracting and at the same time inspiring – as my mind wandered through some of his denser passages I found myself chuckling to Foucault’s French accent declaring: as far as I am concerned, Marx does not exist! (1980, 76, exclamation point added). Above Foucault’s ghost flashed images of Joy James’s (1996) Black insurrection of Foucault’s (1980) White subjugated knowledges. I kept waiting for Derrida to address the abundant critiques of Marx and Marxism, but to no real avail. My English-speaking mind wandered to a German accented Marx who had adopted from his Christian neighbors the habit of calling ideas and people he did not like ‘dirty-Jewish” whether they were Jewish or not, and when he really hated someone… Marx would call him a ‘dirty Jew of Negro blood’ (Randall, College, 1964, 9-10). And thus, Black Feminist Hauntology was born for me through these readings of Whiteness between the lines of dominant scholarship, radical and otherwise. 34The ghosted and ghosting essences of White scholarship, when assessed through Black Feminist Hauntology remerge trapped within a fragile, ponzi-scheme form of paranoid existence, always in anticipation of the ‘discovery’ of its morally bankrupt reality. With each generation of White scholars reproducing scholarship easily located within White supremacist power and abuse emerges the ensuing legacies of colonial violence and the attempted (but not fully successful) extermination of all that is not White, or not yet White. So, yes: the sociological ghost I call upon is a Black feminist. She is the voices and the intellectual contributions of Black women who have known and seen that which has not been articulated or documented in White-ologies. She (and her descendants) is a Black woman who lived hundreds of years ago on plantations, beneath the boots and belts of White men and their wives, and she (and her descendants) is the Black woman who lived thousands of years ago in societies and worlds predating racial colonialism and chattel slavery. She is the transcendent shape-shifter I locate below and she has produced metamorphic and structural shape-shifting, tools for the exorcism I invoke here.

Brishen Rogers is right that a basic income will not solve all of the problems created by the political economy of American capitalism. It will not magically solve the collective action problem among workers and the powerless vis-à-vis corporate power. But most proponents do not see it as a magic bullet. Many of us see it as one of several elements in a reimagined twenty-first-century social contract that provides economic security for all. And we get there via different political and strategic routes. Futurists and technologists come to the basic income idea via technology and automation. Libertarians come to basic income from arguments around efficiency and reducing the size of the state. Progressives come to basic income from a concern around non-domination, freedom, and redistributive justice. I come to basic income from a very different political tradition: black politics with a focus on race and political economy. It is this tradition that led both Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Panther Party to argue for full employment and a “guaranteed income” fifty years ago. Though they wanted these specifically for African Americans, they hoped they would be made available to all Americans. Five decades later it is about time the rest of us caught up to their vision. Black workers today face the exact same dual crisis of high unemployment and low-wage work that they did fifty years ago. The black unemployment rate is twice that of white workers at nearly every level of education. Thus one need not be only concerned with future trends to speculate that a basic income would help black Americans today, especially those who continue to be locked out of access to labor markets. Rogers is spot on to warn us that basic income could be “designed to serve white nationalist ends.” We know this from our own historical experience. Seemingly “universal” social policies, from the New Deal to the Great Society, have had intended and unintended consequences of maintaining or exacerbating existing racial and gender inequalities. Many supposedly “universal” policies ultimately were not. But Rogers’s rightful skepticism and warning about a white nationalist basic income comes down to a question of political power. President Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised on his New Deal programs because southern Democrats insisted on it. The race-based occupational exclusions of agricultural and domestic workers were ultimately included in Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act to appease political elites protecting the southern Jim Crow racial and economic regime over the protests of racial justice organizations. Black workers were excluded as a result of this previous iteration of white nationalism and populism. But advocates for a truly universal social policy did not give up, eventually winning racial inclusion in Social Security but not the other two major New Deal policies. Similarly we should not limit our political imaginations about the promise of a basic income because of the very perilous questions around race, immigration, and exclusion. Quite the opposite. We should imagine a robust basic income that advances racial and gender justice while simultaneously addressing the ills of twenty-first-century capitalism. I have argued that a basic income in all but a few forms—those that exclude the incarcerated or result in a net decrease in benefits—would benefit African American communities for the following reasons. First, it would provide an individual-sustaining basic floor for returning citizens caught up in the criminal justice system. Second, even an equal income could disproportionately benefit black Americans. White Americans earn more overall, so a greater percentage of their basic income would be taxed back. More importantly today’s wealthiest Americans benefit either directly from African Americans’ disadvantaged position in our political economy, or indirectly as a result of the cumulative benefits to our nation from centuries of exploiting black bodies. Black Americans either helped build the co-owned wealth of our nation (our infrastructure and banking, legal, and patent systems) or were denied access to our share of it (land, sky, and other natural resources). Even if African Americans receive an income equal to whites, tapping wealth hoarded by racist means and distributing it universally effectively amounts to targeted redistribution. Third, a basic income would be an improvement on portions of today’s current safety net. Some benefits, such as food stamps, are replete with paternalistic restrictions that rest on racist tropes about recipients and their consumption habits. Others, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), are significantly tied to work, which is problematic when structural racism continues to create so many barriers to black employment. A basic income lacks these flaws. The underlying assumption around welfare and entitlement reform has been that racial minorities do not want to work and that existing social policies provide “disincentives” to work. Basic income fundamentally decouples work from the economic right to basic needs and arguably bolsters individual-level bargaining power in the labor market. It also, by virtue of its universality, is less likely to be viewed as a program solely to benefit one racial or ethnic group. For sure, racialized attacks on cash grants will continue, but progressives are in a stronger position arguing for a universal program, knowing that it will in fact benefit African Americans greatly. There is, in fact, a model of basic income which is not only acceptable but preferable to common proposals: the Universal PLUS Basic Income. It is identical to most basic income proposals but includes a pro-rated additional amount for black Americans over a specified period of time. The Universal PLUS Basic Income draws on the concept of “targeted universalism” in designing social policies. Such a proposal would take into account the historical and cumulative disadvantages of income, wealth, and inheritance afflicting black communities, and it would recognize that potential changes in the nature of work will disproportionately hurt black Americans. It would effectively function as reparations in a grand bargain with white America: all would benefit, but those who suffered through slavery and continuing racism in the economy would benefit slightly more. Most importantly a campaign around a racially inclusive basic income is a potential opportunity for creating the political will within black communities and across racial and ethnic divides in American politics. Rogers, after all, suffers from the same limited theory of change with which he charges libertarian basic income supporters. How and under what conditions will the political will for his broad public sector program to advance economic security and human flourishing be created? Yes, there have been incredible victories by fast food, retail, and farm workers over the past decade to advance worker power, and these efforts are necessary but not yet sufficient to win national labor law reform. But public opinion around economic redistribution has always been higher among black Americans relative to the rest of the population, and initial polling and focus groups around support for a basic income in the United States suggests this pattern still holds. Thus a U+BI proposal could become a bridge to the increasingly salient demand for reparations and reinvestment emerging from the Movement for Black Lives. And, if nothing else, it serves as a stronger starting progressive bargaining position in political fights over basic income. We are not yet at a moment to argue beyond basic income. We have to build the campaign to win it first.

Despite their evidence in support for reparations for postcolonial states, the activities of these U.N. groups have not been able to convince all U.N. member states that reparations need to be issued. What they have succeeded in doing is to provide reliable information on the importance of reparations as one important element in addressing the problems that have emerged as a result of colonialism. This information has helped to inform the debate on reparations both within and outside of the U.N. One branch of the U.N. that, to date, has yet to be fully utilized in order to help answer the question of colonial reparations, is the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ represents the judiciary body of the United Nations and works to settle legal disputes between member states as well as advises the main UN bodies on international legal standards. In this forum, individual postcolonial states could bring a legal case against a former colonial power, as long as they are both members of the UN, for damages occurred under colonial rule. After examining the international legal precedence and evidence for the case, the court would then issue a binding judgement that would permanently settle the dispute between the two countries.23 The drawback to such an approach is that because the UN has no mechanism to enforce these decisions, it would be up to individual member states to enforce the decision or to impose penalties, such as economic embargos, on states that refuse to implement the court’s decision. The CARICOM group of Caribbean states have expressed their intention to bring a lawsuit against former colonial powers in this forum, however, court proceedings have yet to begin.