A morally contested political project has definitively entered late liberal international politics and human rights: material claims to reparatory justice for transatlantic slavery. In the absence of legal avenues with appropriate jurisdiction, claimants of redress for chattel slavery turn to an international network of political and legal forms of expertise. In anthropology and socio-legal research, studies on reparations have focused on transitional justice and redress initiatives within the framework of the nation-state. This project offers a monograph-length ethnographic study of formal reparations work across institutional scales and beyond the nation-state, showing the productive complexity of post-colonial rights-based claims for justice. Based on 18 months of qualitative research, the project explores transnational reparations work in three organizational contexts: the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, the Caribbean Community Secretariat and the Guyana Reparations Committee in Georgetown, Guyana. Regimes of Reparative Reasoning focuses on the legal-discursive political terrains that simultaneously enable and restrict the institutional circulation of reparation claims. Grounded in the belief that reparations are morally and materially imperative, this project argues: 1) formal reparations work is not principally a transformative political project but a liberal progressive project that speaks to established legal and political mechanisms; 2) to reckon with reparation claims for slavery and an emergent descent-based notion of legal personhood, we need to consider longer histories of dispossession: the beforelives of slavery. Ultimately, this study foregrounds the material multiplicity of reparation claims and how disparate national and organizational sites develop, exchange, and transform distinct forms of reparative reasoning.

Les sessions extraordinaires constituent une des innovations majeures de la réforme de 2006 qui a institué le Conseil des droits de l’homme, en tant qu’organe subsidiaire de l’Assemblée générale des Nations Unies. Alors même que le Conseil tient trois sessions régulières chaque année, les sessions extraordinaires permettent aux Etats de réagir face à une situation de crise en organisant un débat, permettant d’évaluer et de qualifier les violations commises et mettant en place des mécanismes d’enquête et de suivi. L’analyse systématique des vingt-six sessions extraordinaires organisées depuis près de douze ans éclaire ainsi non seulement les rapports de force entre les acteurs en présence mais aussi une dynamique nouvelle du droit international public, intégrant le droit international humanitaire et le droit international pénal dans le champ de compétence du Conseil des droits de l’homme. / Special sessions are one of the major innovations of the reform that established the Human Rights Council in 2006 as a subsidiary body of the United Nations General Assembly. While the Council holds three regular sessions each year, a special session allows States to respond to an urgent situation by organizing a debate, to assess and qualify violations and also to establish investigative mechanisms. The systematic analysis of the twenty-six special sessions held in nearly a period of twelve years illuminates, not only the balance of power between the actors involved, but also a new dynamic of international law, integrating international humanitarian law and international criminal law into the field of competence of the Human Rights Council.