Reparative-justice means acknowledging past-wrongs - only way to understand the ways they underpin and contribute to current inequalities.

We thus contend that a reparations way of thinking is needed within calls for universal distributory justice. This way of thinking also allows us to look beyond race to other ways in which certain groups of people have been exploited and expropriated by others — namely, via gender. We do not have the scope to address the question of reparations and gender in this article, but given the historical and ongoing harms of patriarchy, in particular the ongoing free-riding and expropriation of women’s unpaid care work and social reproduction (Fraser, 2016, 2018), and indeed the central role of patriarchy within capitalist production and accumulation (Bhattacharyya, 2018), a reparative way of thinking is also useful when considering what is rightful through a gendered lens (Rubio-Marin, 2009; Wells, 2014). Recognition and redress through reparations are important for acknowledging not just past wrongs, but also the ways these wrongs underpin contemporary inequalities. Such historical wrongs engender race and class (and gender) relations that still have material and affective impacts today. In the post-independence case, we examined how unequal global systems set up under colonialism continue to underpin divisions between the majority world and its former colonizers. In the settler colonial case, we showed how dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples continues through racialized punitive welfare programmes, the continued dispossession of lands and the denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. Racialized systems in the US set up under slavery still impact Black communities today, for example through mass incarceration, employment and educational outcomes and broader inequalities of both income and wealth. There are intersections between redistributory universalism and reparative redress. In many cases, the links between class and race can be reflected in statistics of poverty. However, this can also hide the way in which race has been the grammar of unequal relations and has justified expropriation and exploitation in places like the US since colonization. This is also the case in Australia, where ignoring the ways in which race and coloniality have impacted and continue to impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ignores aspects of settler colonialism that are not only about economic dispossession, but also about racism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Yet (re)distribution must be as much a key part of reparatory justice as is recognition. As Nancy Fraser (2003, 2005) has pointed out, recognition without redistribution holds the danger of displacing struggles for economic justice — an issue that Fraser argues has plagued feminism in recent decades (Fraser, 2005: 298). The negotiations between Namibia and Germany around the Herero-Nama genocide are another example: while Germany is willing to recognize the genocide, and give some additional development aid as part of this recognition, it has declined to term the accompanying payment ‘reparations’, fearing to set a precedent for other or larger redistributive claims to reparative payments. Fraser has argued that both recognition and substantive redistribution are equally essential parts of social justice; one cannot be forsaken in favour of the other. Here we have built on that argument to make the case that the two are in fact intertwined in justice-based claims for shares of collective wealth. All three cases illustrate common themes. While the US is a post-slavery society, it is also a settler colonial state, and insights from the Australian case have resonance for Native Americans in the US who also have substantive claims for reparative justice. The US case gave us one possibility on how mechanisms of distributive justice can also do some measure of reparative work via universal, redistributive and individual payments framed as a rightful share. A U+BI contends with some of the issues of recognition and redress raised in this article. While it is universal in scope and rightful in framing, the addition of the plus includes recognition of specific historical ills in need of reparative justice. The Australian case also suggested avenues that could accompany reparations, showing how not just recognition but also sovereignty could include specific national truth-telling processes, returning of land rights and self-determination, along with a U+BI or other forms of reparative redistribution. These reparative packages would need to be directed by Indigenous peoples themselves. Decentralized and decolonial cosmopolitanism — such as a global UBI framed as reparations for colonialism and its after-effects — may help fulfil reparations for postindependence injustice. However, these payments need to also transcend nation state boundaries and connect with people that are stateless, or diaspora dispersed because of colonialism and slavery.