A. The Intertemporal Impediment and Internationally Wrongful Acts

First, in the ARSIWA framework, reparations are a remedy for—and meant to correct—specific international legal wrongs. The requirement of legal wrongdoing, as a condition for reparations, is consistent with the “corrective justice focus of many ordinary legal remedies,” which generally seek “backward-looking justice through rectification of past wrongs.”Footnote ¹⁰ The goal is to restore the wrongdoer and the victim, as much as possible, to the status quo ante, had the wrongful act not been committed, not fundamentally to transform the social, political, or legal conditions within which the parties interact.

This requirement of legal wrongdoing—or fault—presents what is commonly called the “intertemporal problem”; it impedes reparations for historic practices that are internationally unlawful today but were not when they were committed. Many of the practices that provide the bases for demanding transformative reparations were not (or were not clearly) prohibited by international law at the time; they were instead encoded in and enabled by international law. Perversely, the fact that they occurred at a massive scale and through, rather than in violation of, international law, limits the opportunities not only for transformative but also for corrective reparations. As Max Huber famously wrote in the Island of Palmas, “a juridical fact must be appreciated in the light of the law contemporary with it, and not of the law in force at the time when a dispute in regard to it arises or falls to be settled.”Footnote ¹¹ This principle has had the effect, Dire Tladi writes, “of excluding from the reach of international law some of the most egregious violations of jus cogens norms in human history.”Footnote ¹²

One might argue that international law should overcome the intertemporal impediment by dropping or significantly loosening the requirement of legal wrongdoing. Even if the harms were not legally cognizable at the time, the argument might go, they were immoral and unjust and should be corrected today; and the corrective framework should be used to require remedies of comparable scale—so that they are transformative in effect. However, the more one moves from identifying and compensating for discrete, legally cognizable wrongs to broad-based and generic claims of generational harm, the more attenuated the relationship between those who receive compensation today and those who acted unjustly in the past will be. And the more one has to justify one’s claims on other grounds. In particular, without the requirement of legal wrongdoing, virtually every problematic practice of the past (of which there were many) would be open to evaluation and claims for reparation. Which of the associated harms should actually be repaired? Why them and not others? Why not, for example, the harms caused in intra-European or -African affairs? “Ultimately, what is raised here,” Jeremy Waldron explains, “is the question of whether it is possible to rectify particular injustices without undertaking a comprehensive redistribution that addresses all claims of justice that may be made.”Footnote ¹³

Of course, if the goal is not reparatory, one might advance a claim for redistributive justice on the basis of present inequalities without purporting to correct the harms of the past. But as the justification for relief shifts from repairing past harms to addressing inequitable conditions in the present, its reparatory dimension becomes even more attenuated. We question whether such efforts are best or even accurately described as “reparatory.” The issue is, again, conceptual, not terminological. Where the goal is redistributive, and the associated efforts are not focused on remedying specific unlawful actions, they lack the analytic apparatus to resolve what is the central question in any reparatory mechanism: who is owed what form of repair from whom for which past actions? This analytic vacuum again invites Waldron’s objection.

Benoit Mayer raises a similar objection in the context of climate change. He argues that the moral case for transformative reparations is weak, because although “developing states suffer the adverse consequences of [greenhouse gas] emissions occurring in developed countries,” they also “benefit from many of the activities causing these emissions, or at least from the overall economic and human development these activities have permitted.”Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, making moral judgments about who should compensate whom for past conduct that caused harmful pollution is complicated. Although Mayer’s observation also highlights problems with causation, to which we return below, he argues for imposing reparations only where there is an internationally wrongful act because doing so provides a basis for repairing particular injustices—even while leaving some transformative goals unrealized.Footnote ¹⁵

B. The Causation Impediment

Second, because the ARSIWA framework is designed to remedy specific legal wrongs, it requires a causal connection between the unlawful action of the state that is obligated to make reparations and the harm that is being repaired.Footnote ¹⁶ Specifically, the obligation to correct for past harm is based on a legal injury caused by conduct attributable to that state. The idea, again, is to hold each state responsible—and demand that it make reparations—only for the harms that it causes, not for various other ills in the world. Thus, in addition to requiring that the conduct be unlawful at the time of its commission, the corrective framework requires that the associated harm be caused by the agent or entity against which reparations are claimed.

Transformative reparations typically rely on more attenuated claims of causation, in part because they are demanded for entire groups of people that were not themselves directly harmed by the initial conduct. The specific claims vary. First, that the harms from certain conduct—for example, slavery or colonialism—are not confined to discrete events from the past; the conduct has instead generated continual harms that have been passed down to the present and that will continue to be passed down until repaired.Footnote ¹⁷ Second, that groups of living descendants of the original victims might be entitled to reparations, because they themselves suffer from harmful aftereffects of the initial injustices or because they have inherited the debts that were owed but never paid to their ancestors.Footnote ¹⁸ Finally, and reasoning backward from the present, that the current state of affairs is so evidently inequitable that it must reflect the long tail of the injustices that have undoubtedly occurred.Footnote ¹⁹

As for who should be responsible for such reparations, the causal claims are again attenuated. Take the harms associated with colonialism. If the goal is to repair these harms, where would we even begin—or end? The Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, Spanish, Russian, and British empires were all, in their time, massive and highly exploitive. But since the height of each, many intervening factors have also helped to produce the dynamics that we face today. The further back the original injustice occurred, the harder pressed one would be to identify its contemporary beneficiaries and victims, or how to restore their relations to the status quo ante. Indeed, the practices of colonialism and industrialization have so deeply affected the structure and allocation of resources, capabilities, and other forms of power around the world that we are all, in some sense, living with their aftereffects, even though we cannot draw clear causal lines from the conduct of one entity or agent to the harm of another.Footnote ²⁰

Just as one might relax the requirement of an internationally wrongful act and instead focus on contemporary distributional goals, one might drop or loosen the requirement of causation and instead focus on reversing or better allocating today’s benefits. For example, Bernard Boxill argues that large-scale historic injustices have created a system that continually distributes to members of certain groups benefits that they would not have otherwise accrued; because these passive benefactors are not in “rightful possession” of such benefits, he argues, they should pay reparations to reverse their own “unjust enrichment.”Footnote ²¹ Put differently, those who benefit from the system that has been built on a history of injustice owe a duty of reparations to those who have suffered from it; their benefits are historically rooted in, and thus causally connected to, earlier acts of injustice, even if a direct line from one to the other cannot be drawn.Footnote ²²

But again, the more attenuated the causal connection between conduct that can be attributed to one entity or agent and harms that are suffered by another, the less the former is being asked to repair the consequences of something that it should not have done or to restore the status quo ante. And the more the demands on it to address contemporary or historic injustices must be justified on other grounds. For example, as we noted in the context of the intertemporal problem, one might impose transformative obligations on those with grossly disproportionate shares of power today, so as to reduce the likelihood that certain, especially vulnerable populations continue to suffer at the rates they do.Footnote ²³ We again question whether such efforts are best conceived as reparatory. They seem to us to operate in different registers—including the registers of equity and human dignity. Moreover, because the relationship to the past is so attenuated, the efforts are limited in their capacity to identify the past injustices and injuries that must be repaired and by and toward whom. Our point is not that these justifications create too many obligations or that they are too radical or demanding.Footnote ²⁴ Instead, we question the extent to which they are reparatory in nature, and insofar as they are not, whether presenting them as such is a promising way to pursue a redistributive agenda or to promote justice today.Footnote ²⁵

A. Working Within the Corrective Framework

The contributions from Antony Anghie, Dire Tladi, Anne Orford, and Lavanya Rajamani all, to varying degrees, work within the corrective framework. For example, Anghie responds to the intertemporal problem by arguing that many acts of colonization violated the principles of trusteeship.Footnote ²⁶ Tladi suggests that violations of jus cogens norms might give special purchase to reparations claims, especially in determining the appropriate form of reparation. He argues—contrary to the ARSIWA—that reparations should not be based solely on the harm caused by unlawful conduct; reparations should also take account of the nature of that conduct. “Serious breaches of jus cogens norms such as the prohibition on the use of force, the right of self-determination, the prohibition of genocide, the prohibition of crimes against humanity,” he concludes, “cannot attract the same consequences as breaches of other rules of international law.”Footnote ²⁷ Although Tladi is promoting a justice-oriented expansion of reparations, he does so primarily through the corrective framework, rather than by openly advocating for transformative measures.

Orford and Rajamani similarly work within the corrective framework to address reparations for the harmful effects of climate change, though their goals are more explicitly redistributive. As Orford and Rajamani describe, major greenhouse gas emitters increasingly claim that the mechanism in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the only available route to state responsibility for climate-related harms. These major emitters claim that the customary international legal requirement of harm prevention either does not on its terms apply to climate change, has been replaced by the UNFCCC mechanism as the lex specialis in this area, or has exactly the same content as that mechanism.Footnote ²⁸ In any event, the major emitters argue, international law does not provide the grounds for the payment of reparations for climate-related harms.

Orford and Rajamani both challenge these arguments and maintain that international law’s “background rules” (to use Orford’s language), especially the rules that govern harm prevention, might well provide the basis for finding an “internationally wrongful act,” as the ARSIWA framework requires. For example, Orford traces the history of the international legal regulation of transboundary harm from the middle of the twentieth century forward, including in the debate about whether responsibility should be governed by nuisance or strictly imposed, without regard to fault—a debate that was especially salient in the context of nuclear testing. In the end, the Draft Articles on the Prevention of Transboundary Harm from Hazardous Activities, adopted by the International Law Commission (ILC) in 2001, did not adopt a strict liability standard. Nevertheless, Orford argues, the principle of harm prevention that the ILC did endorse applies on its terms to greenhouse gas emissions that cause transboundary harm.

Moreover, as Rajamani details, the climate effects of these emissions have been devastating, especially for vulnerable peoples and states that more generally confront serious governance challenges. Even among the most vulnerable groups, small island states face heightened, existential threats. As leaders and activists debate the metric based on which to assign responsibility—whether current or historic emissions, per capita or absolute emissions, the distribution of the associated harms and benefits, or some other factor—many vulnerable states are suffering for harms that they plainly did not cause. Both authors therefore look to reparations to correct the legally wrongful (in their telling) failures of major emitters to prevent what are now undeniable climate-related harms.

The question is whether the corrective frame is well suited to their agenda. Neither author analyzes the problem of causation or identifies which relations must be repaired or on what terms. We read Orford as advocating for “major emitters” to make reparations to “vulnerable states,”Footnote ²⁹ but as Rajamani points out, some major emitters, such as India, are also among the most vulnerable, at least in certain senses of the term. For her part, Rajamani describes the many inequities inflicted by climate harms and argues that major emitters commit an internationally wrongful act by failing to follow the harm reduction principle and that “a claim for reparations would flow naturally.”Footnote ³⁰ But she stops there, leaving unaddressed “the nature and extent of such reparations.”Footnote ³¹ Without more concretely identifying who must make reparations to whom and on what terms, it is impossible to evaluate whether using the ARSIWA framework for this category of harm would actually achieve the desired distributional effects.

To be sure, one might hope that this framework would provide for wealthy, Western, industrialized countries with high per-capita emissions to make reparations to less wealthy, non-Western, developing countries with low per-capita emissions—and in particular to small island states that are especially vulnerable to climate change. But it very well might not. Any state that “caused injury” to another through an “internationally wrongful act” would be responsible for the resultant damages. Thus, using it to demand reparations would require one first to analyze complex questions relating to the collective causation of different kinds of climate-related harms.Footnote ³² As many countries (including major emitters, like the United States) experience growing harm, and many (including China and India) have emitted and continue to emit damaging greenhouse gases, it is not at all clear that using the ARSIWA framework to define who is responsible for making reparations to whom—assuming that such causal lines could meaningfully be drawn—would correspond even to a rough sense of fairness or justice.Footnote ³³ As Steven Ratner explains, the ARSIWA framework fails to incorporate a range of redistributive and justice-based reasons to repair past harms or seek transformative change.Footnote ³⁴ This, again, is by design. The ARSIWA framework ensures that the reparations that are paid are corrective, not that all conduct that might be deserving of reparations is corrected,Footnote ³⁵ and certainly not that the (often unjust) relations within which such conduct occurs are fundamentally transformed.

Thus, although some reparations for climate-based harm or colonialism might fit within the ARSIWA framework, this framework seems mismatched to the demands for transformative—and redistributive—change to address climate inequities. Even aside from the specific limitations internal to ARSIWA, framing the agenda as reparatory arguably suggests a particular relationship to the past that involves assigning fault for identifiable harms. As Krzysztof Pelc observes, “[t]he case for reparations is most often formulated as a deontological claim about recognizing the moral rights of victims of past harms.”Footnote ³⁶

But the backward-looking search for a causal link between one actor’s conduct and another’s harm might not be the best way to realize transformative change. Indeed, Pelc argues that the harm reduction principle, which provides a legal foundation for climate reparations, might require not only backward- but also forward-looking measures, such as paying off today’s polluters—in other words, rewarding contemporary harm-doers to prevent future harm.Footnote ³⁷ These backward- and forward-looking measures are evidently in deep tension with one another; the corrective framework does not resolve this tension. Others have argued that a host of considerations unrelated to fault for past harm are relevant to justifying compensation for greenhouse gas emissions at the domestic level. Such considerations include whether the emitters are better-resourced than the victims, whether they knew of the harmful nature of their conduct when engaging in it, whether a satisfactory regulatory system for addressing the associated harms was already in place, and whether the class of compensable harms is overwhelming.Footnote ³⁸ Analogous considerations might also prove more suitable to addressing the climate crisis at the international level than are efforts to determine fault for past harms. However, such considerations fall outside the corrective framework.Footnote ³⁹

B. Dropping the Corrective Framework

Even as some of the symposium authors look to fit transformative reparations into the corrective framework, a number look to achieve transformative reparations outside that framework. For example, E. Tendayi Achiume argues for “an approach in international law to reparations that moves beyond the ARSIWA conception and instead understands reparations as an anticolonial worldmaking project.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Reparations, she writes, “must provide an adequate response to the colonial DNA of the global order, including the fundamental place of race/racism in colonial worldmaking.”Footnote ⁴¹ In other words, the “question of reparations must be refracted across the entire field of international law to the extent that this field remains a means of perpetuating ‘the world’ as constituted by colonialism, and as maintained by (post-)colonial imperialisms.”Footnote ⁴² Ratner also argues for transformative, redistributive, and justice-oriented reparations for colonial harms, although he would situate the reparative obligation as a moral, not a legal, one. Developing “a new legal duty to provide colonial-era reparations,” he maintains, would make international law “a basis for demands that operate without regard to the moral and political complexities of achieving justice for historical wrongs.”Footnote ⁴³ He thus contends that transformative reparations should be pursued through the processes of international law without having to satisfy the substantive conditions in the corrective framework. Tladi’s suggestion that intertemporal problems should perhaps be set aside when the conduct in question would today constitute a jus cogens violation can also be understood as a shift from the corrective to the transformative framework.

Anghie observes that the corrective framework was designed for corporations and other powerful actors and that its application has unsurprisingly benefitted them.Footnote ⁴⁴ It has not redressed the sorts of harms that most often ground claims for transformative reparations.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, it has sometimes been manipulated to perpetuate these harms. The reparations that France imposed on Haiti following the successful revolt of enslaved Haitians is just one, especially infamous (and egregious) example. Christopher Gevers explains that, at the time of emancipation, compensation to slaveholders and their creditors had the effect of expanding white domination over Black lives and property. To achieve these results, “extraordinary innovations took place, departing from settled principles of international law.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Today, the settled can once again be unsettled, as advocates pursue a different vision for global justice that adapts or completely discards the corrective framework and creates space for reparations to be transformative.

Transformative reparations would not be entirely new to international law. As Gevers observes, “providing material and symbolic compensation to white slaveholders was also a global legal project, a worldmaking one, and if we think of slavery and compensation for emancipation as entwined global legal regimes we can begin to map the broader production and reproduction of whiteness itself as reparations for the formal end of enslavement.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Transformative reparations have also been used in post-war settlements.Footnote ⁴⁸ Victorious states demanded reparations from losing states in part because they could. The purpose was not, in any meaningful sense, corrective; it was to entrench the victor’s position of power, along with the loser’s submission or subordination.Footnote ⁴⁹ Forcing one to compensate the other at the conclusion of a war also served other goals, including to integrate the parties economically, to settle their broader grievances, to punish the losing party, and to secure a geopolitical balance of power.Footnote ⁵⁰

The monetary reparations imposed on France in the 1815 Second Treaty of Paris, adopted after Napolean’s defeat and abdication, are illustrative. These reparations were designed to “restor[e] between France and Her Neighbours those relations of reciprocal confidence and goodwill” that “can only be obtained by an arrangement framed to secure to the Allies proper Indemnities for the Past and solid Guarantees for the Future.”Footnote ⁵¹ The treaty mandated indemnities from France, including territorial concessions in favor of Prussia and Austria and a large monetary obligation designed in part to fund fortresses along the outside of France’s border.Footnote ⁵² To cover its losses, France resorted to large-scale debt financing, underwritten through Europe, creating the desired, interdependent economic relationship between the French government and European and British financial markets.Footnote ⁵³ The reparatory scheme was at least partly transformative, because it was designed not to remedy specific harms caused by past unlawful conduct but instead to change the parties’ preexisting relationships by rebalancing their power dynamics and integrating them economically, so that they could be more secure going forward.

As discussed, transformative and corrective reparations often overlap in practice, so the line between them is not airtight. Measures to address past grievances, to compensate for the building of fortresses, or to punish for an unjust war could well be corrective in nature. But the less these measures are justified or designed to repair the harms that one party causes another, through the commission of a specific legal wrong—and the more they are instead designed to alter the nature of the parties’ relations going forward—the less corrective and more transformative they will be. Against this historical background, the ARSIWA framework reflects a shift in favor of a more purely corrective vision.

Though most of the symposium authors lament the limits of the corrective framework, it has its virtues.Footnote ⁵⁴ Because it focuses on repairing specific, legal wrongs—and not on redesigning entire relationships—it is well suited for international legal adjudication. In fact, it has provided the foundation for international courts and tribunals repeatedly to order meaningful reparations, including in human rights cases, with little controversy.Footnote ⁵⁵ Moreover, because the scope and basis of transformative reparations are malleable, they might be used more effectively by powerful states than by weaker ones, as history illustrates. Corrective reparations are, at least in theory, equally available to strong and weak alike. And though the law and practice might still in certain ways favor the interests of the strong over the weak, as Anghie and Orford argue in the context of foreign direct investment,Footnote ⁵⁶ those disparities might best be addressed by revising the substantive regimes at issue or by better ensuring that the corrective framework is broadly applied and enforcedFootnote ⁵⁷ —not by returning to the historic practices in which reparations were claimed and imposed by the party that could. Thus, before one drops the corrective framework for transformative reparations, one might want to think much more carefully about how to delimit their scope, especially given that what counts as “just deserts” in a highly pluralistic world is itself hotly contested.

C. Harnessing the Past for the Present

Finally, a number of symposium authors describe colonialism, industrialization, and slavery as practices that have caused harm not only in the past but also in the present. The claim is that these practices cause ongoing injustices that continue to define a deeply unequal global order. As such, demands for reparations are not just about adjudicating harms to past generations; they are also about ending current and ongoing harms. This claim arguably operates as a response to the corrective framework’s intertemporal impediment. But it also goes beyond that framework; it relates past practices to contemporary structural inequities in ways that exceed the requirements of a wrongful act and causation. For example, Achiume argues that, because “[t]he contemporary international order remains tethered to historical colonial injustice, in part through the contemporary meaning and operations of race, … race and racism and their contemporary global governance are priority terrain for the project of reparations.”Footnote ⁵⁸

The critical question for any agenda for transformative reparations is how exactly to tether past to present. The corrective framework answers that question for us: By insisting on an internationally wrongful act that causes the injury to be repaired, it identifies who must repair which harms to whom and for what reason. Calls for transformative reparations lack an analogous framework for answering the question, and those who make them offer different, often only unclear or partial, answers.

For example, some ground their demands for transformative reparations in claims of fault but do not then address or are unclear about how their demands relate to the corrective framework. Ratner is explicit that he envisions two distinct reparations systems. One would be based on fault for international legal violations and obligations to repair consistently with the ARSIWA framework; the other would be based only on moral, not legal, obligations, with reparations pursued through the ordinary processes of international law. However, other authors promote transformative reparations through the substantive doctrines of international law but outside of the constraints of the ARSIWA framework, apparently creating two distinct systems for international legal reparations, without clearly demarcating the relationship between them.

The three more specific possibilities that we can glean from the work still, in our view, fall short. One possibility is that characterizing these efforts as reparatory has important expressive value. The language of reparations might be a way to acknowledge that large-scale historic harms continue to manifest in and contribute to deep inequalities today. This expressive dimension can be seen, for example, in efforts to use reparations as “a politics of refusal of the status quo of international law and the colonial world systems it reproduces” so as to serve “the critical function of making alternative worlds seeable and knowable.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Such efforts might have some practical or political significance. But they appear, on their own, too ungrounded to be otherwise actionable.Footnote ⁶⁰ They do not identify who owes what reparations to whom, except in the very loose sense that those who have some connection to harmful actions in the past should make some redress to those who seem to suffer disproportionately today.Footnote ⁶¹

A second possibility is, again, to try to assign fault for past harms, with an associated obligation to repair the current manifestations of these harms, while loosening the stringent requirements of the corrective framework to realize a transformative agenda. Admittedly, we are not always sure to what extent authors who promote transformative reparations do so on the basis of fault. For example, Ratner rejects the corrective framework for colonial reparations in part because he seeks “[to] make some judgments about past conduct by today’s moral standards,” suggesting some assignment of fault (even if only by reference to today’s moral standards).Footnote ⁶² He also observes, however, that there might be a duty to make reparations “irrespective of any determination of the moral blameworthiness of colonizers.”Footnote ⁶³ The role, if any, that the assignment of fault plays in his justification for reparations is unclear. In any event, many calls for transformative reparations do appear to build in one way or another on claims of fault.Footnote ⁶⁴

Philosopher Olúfémi Táíwò’s work is instructive here, because he considers and rejects using fault or fault-based responsibility as the basis for reparations for past colonial and racial harms. Reparations, he writes, are often “tied to the ideas of collective responsibility,” by “imagin[ing] that the people who have inherited responsibility for the crimes of global racial empire and those who have inherited moral claims to reparations map neatly onto contemporary identity binaries: white/Black, settler/Indigenous, colonizer/colonized.”Footnote ⁶⁵ He questions the use of reparations to “separate the guilty from the innocent” because “the truth is that we are all morally ‘in the red’ as Dr. [Martin Luther King Jr.] put it; for better or worse, we owe to history the possibility for our choices and the resources we have to follow through on them.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Although colonialism and slavery created today’s world order, “[t]hat means everybody’s world order, not just the world order as experienced by the most marginalized.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In a corrective framework, the requirements of an internationally wrongful act and causation provide criteria for identifying those who must make reparations to whom. But again, these requirements impede redress for colonial harms and their structural reproduction today. And as Táíwò explains, “[t]he very arguments that establish the central importance of global racial empire, also” provide a powerful objection “to reparations that rely on being able to separate the stories of the marginalized from the stories of the privileged.”Footnote ⁶⁸ This insight warrants serious consideration by those who seek to ground transformative reparations in the assignment of fault.

Finally, demands for transformative reparations at times seem based on the deeply inequitable distribution of power today, with some recognition that the history of colonialism and racism has contributed to the problem. As discussed in the context of climate reparations, the corrective approach operates without regard to distributional objectives, so its capacity to address current global inequities is limited. Transformative reparations could embrace a redistributive agenda, which is “a different question altogether from one about who to blame for what has already happened.”Footnote ⁶⁹ For example, even as Táíwò argues against a model that assigns fault or responsibility for past conduct, he favors reparations based on a “historical view of distributive justice.”Footnote ⁷⁰ He argues that reparations should both recognize how “present distributions [reflect] the moral sediment of unjust processes” and reallocate resources to address how current inequities affect “the lives of the people here and now.”Footnote ⁷¹

We question whether pursing some loose connection to the past through the concept of reparations adds much value to what is fundamentally a redistributive agenda. In international law, the term “reparations” is closely associated with the corrective framework, which is based on prior wrongdoing or fault. And as we have explained, advocates for transformative reparations sometimes seem to seek the same. Without significantly more precision about what reparations are meant to achieve—to what extent they are meant to be corrective or transformative, and if transformative, on what grounds their burdens and rewards should be allocated and justified—the term carries corrective baggage. It does so for reasons that are not, and perhaps should not be, easily set aside.

At a more fundamental level, the international law on reparations does not do the work that would need to be done to transform the global order in ways that satisfy a redistributive agenda. Even accepting, as we do, that contemporary inequalities reflect historical injustices, and that explaining the connection between past and present is worthwhile, the reparations framework does not take the redistributive agenda where it needs to go. Táíwò, for example, argues that reparations for colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade must focus on climate justice, in part because groups of people who were formally colonized and enslaved will bear the brunt of harms that result from climate change.Footnote ⁷² But the argument for focusing on this particular distributive problem, as opposed to many others—such as the gross disparities in education, health, income, and wealth around the world—does not in any meaningful sense follow from a reparatory frame.