Week 12: Reparations as a new global politics of inequality

Week 12: Reparations as a new global politics of inequality

DVST 6901: The global politics of development (Semester 2, 2026)
October 26, 2026

Development has always been a contest between rival worldmaking projects. What if we conceived of change not as intervention but as reconstruction and transition to a new global system?

Main reading: Beckles (2025); Beckles, Chitre, and Richardson (2026); Bell and Biholar (2026)

Other reading: Morena, Krause, and Stevis (2019); Táíwò (2025)

Notes

Notes to be added later.

Tuvalu and Australia

And here is a link to a map of Tuvalu: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1isyxJY7oipkF3dG9

What will development for Oceania be in the future

• A group of small developing countries led by Vanuatu recently argued before the International Court of Justice as it was considering its advisory opinion on the obligations of states to prevent climate change.

  • They offered testimony collected from all over the world to document all the different ways people and communities have been harmed by the effects of climate change. Climate change has already created
    • Greater poverty
    • Greater risk to health
    • Lack of freedom to pursue a good life

• Tuvalu and Australia have recently negotiated a new treaty in which Australia would issue 280 visas per year to people of Tuvalu. As of 2026, 90% of Tuvaluans have applied for these visas.

  • If all of these applications are accepted and the full quota is met every year, then by 2040 more than half of Tuvalu’s population will be living outside of Tuvalu (making it not unlike Tonga and Samoa).

Question: Do these two cases have anything in common on a more general level about what they indicate about what development means now?

Restorative justice

In Tiv society of northern Nigeria, people live in patrilineal groups known as tar.

Tiv tar hold jir (courts) to hear minor criminal cases like this, including adultery and theft.

• Many matters for a jir (court) are matters that the harmed party can and does try to resolve themselves first (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 137).

• The purpose of the jir “is to ‘repair the tar’, to make the community run smoothly and peacefully” (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 213)

• The most common resolution is for the accused party to make restitution (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 130). This is binding on both sides. One gives restitution and the other accepts it, resolving the conflict.

Tiv have a theory of conflict. Every breach of a norm leads to a counteraction. Self-help sets of a cycle of reprisal. Jir restores the breach by applying a correction. Jir is a mechanism for solving conflict rather than punishing the guilty (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 151).

They also hold a “jir at home” (a moot) to address illness and other misfortune thought to be caused by curses or witchcraft (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 160).

• “One never ‘calls’ a moot, but rather ‘convenes’ or ‘invites’ it.” (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 165)

• “There is thus, in most moots, no person who is in fact the accused. There is no defendant. No one is charged.” (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 168)

The same theory of conflict is also an explanation of other injuries. The jir for spiritual conflict likewise is a counteraction for a breach in people’s relationships, and unlike revenge, successfully resolves the conflict and restores harmony.

People of one tar also say that they are people who “sit in one moot” (Bohannan [1957] 2018, 161), that is, we are a community because we solve our own conflicts, and take responsibility for each other’s wellbeing, even if it means taking responsibility for actions over which individuals have no control.

Are crimes against humanity matters that spoil the human tar

Slavery is considered a crime against humanity. What are arguments for and against treating this in a restorative frame?

Notes for class

Keywords

reparations, reconstruction, climate debt

Learning outcomes

• Be able to explain how political questions of development can be reshaped when placed in wider historical frames of reference, particularly those highlighting legacies of slavery and colonialism
• Take a stand on the need for a new world order with new institutions based on different ideas of justice, obligation, and community