This dissertation explains how international disputes over the legal foundations of United States imperial expansion became sites of unanticipated struggle over the legitimacy of the American justice system. Between the mid nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the United States submitted to a series of international tribunals designed to award monetary compensation for loss of life and property resulting from the wave of territorial acquisitions that transformed the nation into a global empire. These claims commissions depoliticized the dispossession that resulted from annexation by characterizing it as a form of exchange that could be retroactively settled through arbitration. The model of justifying expansion through claims settlement came into crisis when foreign nationals from Panama, the West Indies, and Mexico who were living in United States territories turned to these tribunals to argue that the US government authorized forms of state violence and labor coercion in violation of the international norms known as the “standard of civilization.” By demonstrating how claimants used seemingly technical calculations of market value compensation to question the government’s ability to protect life and property within its borders, the dissertation uncovers a forgotten moment of struggle over the limits and possibilities of international law to address structural injustices within the American legal system.

Thesis (doctoral)--Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [343]-373) and index.

Berlin, Phil. Diss. v. 6. März 1930.

This dissertation advances a new argumentative approach to the political problem of black reparations in the contemporary United States appealing to the normative principle of fair play. Among its core presumptions is the view that getting appreciable numbers of white Americans to acknowledge what I call the primary normative case for black reparations will require, among other things, a new kind of discursive move, namely: the deployment of an intermediary case designed to facilitate recognition of the primary one. The two central tasks of my dissertation are to establish the need for such an intermediary case, and to make it via my novel fair play argument. My approach to fair play reasoning involves three main innovations: First, I introduce the possibility of deploying that framework in a corrective mode, to ground redistributive obligations on the part of members of systemically advantaged groups, but which do not imply guilt or blame. Second, in arguing for that deployment, I offer a novel conception of free-riding which I call externalist insofar as it defines the latter without reference to the relevant agents’ mental states. Third, I argue that in a range of cases those corrective obligations of fair play can qualify as reparative despite the fact that their normative force is not determined by direct reference to any discrete wrong, or what I call extrinsically reparative. A key plank of my proposal is the empirical claim that the lens of fair play is better suited to overcoming many of the moral and social psychological obstacles that have long plagued political progress on black reparations in the U.S. I defend this claim by drawing upon various strands of the empirical literature on white racial identity in connection with attitudes toward race-sensitive social policies generally. I argue that it is only upon being safely confronted with the details of how their very whiteness precipitates the nonvoluntary receipt of various unearned material advantages that white Americans will begin to perceive their own personal involvement in America’s long history of racial injustice, and feel a new kind of pressure to do something about it. / 2021-10-29T00:00:00Z

The purpose of the thesis is to investigate what circumstances supports inherited responsibility to afford reparations. The general arguments for and against inherited obligations are presented and discussed. Hereafter, Denmark and Australia’s forced assimilation policies are examined in order to establish their responsibilities to correct the past injustice. The general arguments are applied when scrutinizing the cases. It is visible that it remains difficult to determine a nation’s responsibilities to correct past injustices, however, once considering the continuance of communities as well as inherited benefits and desert-claims, it seems justified that nations also inherit liabilities. The thesis is argumentative and normative in nature, entailing suggestions both for and against inherited responsibility. Once nations recognize that the purpose is to correct an injustice, and not take responsibility for its occurrence, it becomes clear that nations ought to accept inherited responsibility to afford reparations.

No description available.

This paper explores the issue of reparation and how institutionalized racism in the United States has influenced the outcome for the following ethnic groups - Japanese Americans, Black Americans and Native Americans.

Thesis (M.M.A.S.)--U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2009. / "AD-A512 385." "11 Dec 2009." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral), Universität, Düsseldorf, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-257).

Objectives : This study focused, unusually, on the experience of people who gave testimony in person to the TRC many years previously. The study’s objectives were firstly to explore the personal, social and political events that participants recounted as motivating them to testify to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and secondly to analyse the meanings that participants gave retrospectively, about fourteen years later, to testifying before the TRC. METHOD: 30 participants were recruited, from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, in Gauteng and Western Cape provinces, South Africa. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in participants’ preferred SA languages. Data were analysed using principles of modified grounded theory. Findings: Participants from the two provinces testified through shared hopes for change but differed in the specific political and violent events that they wished to make public. Looking back, many participants expressed disillusionment with the TRC’s effectiveness. Participants were concerned by unfulfilled promises, inadequate reparations and lack of socioeconomic improvement. Memories of horrific abuses were still vivid, and most doubted that the TRC process could result in forgiveness, amnesty, reconciliation and healing. Participants felt unacknowledged, invalidated and inadequately recompensed, symbolically and monetarily. Nonetheless, participants expressed suspended hope, if not for themselves but for the future generations. ‘Misrecognition’ emerged as the overarching theme, an experience of feeling ignored and dismissed, finding promises for material recompense broken, and their contribution to the seemingly successful TRC processes not recognised. Conclusion: The TRC process neglected the abuse of the apartheid period, which has left a legacy. This study has shown that many participants continue to struggle with the legacy of a very unequal society, and further follow-up research is vital to review participants’ long-term needs. Lack of improvement in social and economic conditions has led some people in South Africa to question the effectiveness of the TRC.