International Workshop ‘Reimagining victims' reparation: building new perspectives on empathy, dignity, and justice for victims of serious human rights violations in the Global South’

Conventionally, efforts to reimagine the ways in which international organisations, multilateral bodies, nation-states, private actors, NGOs, grassroots movements, and civic associations can deliver reparations to victims of serious human rights violations have been focused on legalistic approaches, viewing victims as ‘objects’ of reparation rather than ‘subjects’ with their own agency, organisational capability, and initiatives. Some outcomes of this institutionalisation of reparation processes are a dominant legalism, privileging state-led prosecutions over victims-based reparations, and socio-cultural and economic rights being usually ignored by reparative mechanisms.

Thus, traditionally, victims have had little influence or involvement in state-led reparative processes, participating as instruments of those processes rather than on their own terms. It is argued that rather than being driven by victims, reparation is a consequence of global neoliberal governance, driven by complicated international bureaucracy and developing systems that themselves create many of the needs that victims articulate.

For this reason, the aim of this international workshop is to reimagine victims' reparation from novel perspectives in order to contribute to the development of more critical reparatory theories and practices, which have victims’ needs, initiatives, and expectations at the centre of the process.