https://www.ids.ac.uk/events/the-caribbean-reparation-movement-and-the-p...
Join us for this Sussex Development Lecture with Professor Sonjah Stanley Niaah, who will discuss the reparation movement, including its achievements to date, the new opportunities for engagement on the issue and the outlook for the future against resistance from Governments of former colonial powers.
Since the establishment of CARICOM’s Reparation Commission and the decision to raise reparatory justice at the state and regional levels, attention has been placed on the politics of responsibility for the crimes against humanity in the form of genocide against indigenous Caribbean peoples, forced relocation of Africans, and chattel enslavement.
Quantifying reparation for chattel enslavement in the Americas such as in the Brattle Report (2023), which amounted to $100–131 trillion, provides one platform for engagement and the second UN Decade for People of African Descent (2025-2034), with its theme of ‘Recognition, Justice and Development’ provides other opportunities for the reparatory justice movement.
Recognising the wrongs of the past, understanding the need for repair and progressing beyond underdevelopment and disenfranchisement as a result of historical injustice can take many forms, but what has been achieved so far and what must the Movement’s focus be over the next ten years? What strategies of engagement must now be deployed to achieve results in a movement already weighted heavily in favour of former colonial oppressors?
About CARICOM
The CARICOM Reparation Commission is a regional body created to establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the Governments of all the former colonial powers and the relevant institutions of those countries, to the nations and people of the Caribbean Community for the Crimes against Humanity of Native Genocide, the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Africans and a racialised system of chattel Slavery.
Speaker
Sonjah Stanley Niaah is a Jamaican scholar, international speaker and Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies where she was Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies & Reggae Studies Unit (2015-2021). She is the first Ph.D. Cultural Studies graduate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the first to be appointed Lecturer, and Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies there. Prof. Stanley Niaah is also the inaugural Rhodes Trust Rex Nettleford Fellow in Cultural Studies and has distinguished herself as a pioneer in the terrain of Caribbean Cultural Studies. She is a leading author, teacher and researcher on Black Atlantic performance geographies, popular culture, and the sacred. She holds international appointments as member of the International Scientific Committee of the Slave Route Project (UNESCO), Senior Research Associate (honorary), Rhodes University, and Advisor, International Cultural Diversity Organisation.
Chair
Paul Robert Gilbert, Reader in Development, Justice and Inequality (Anthropology) School of Global Studies, University of Sussex.
How to watch
You can register to watch online on Zoom.
