Call for Workshop Papers: 'Pan-Africanism Today: The Politics of Reparations'

The renewed prominence of reparations in Pan-African politics is widening both the substance of reparative claims and the political expectations attached to them. Claims rooted in slavery and colonialism increasingly intersect with contemporary struggles over economic inequality, cultural restitution, climate justice, and the distribution of global power. The scope and purposes of repair have, as a result, moved to the center of renewed political and intellectual debate.

The histories from which these claims arise transformed the societies and relationships to which reparative justice is now addressed. They reshaped political communities, economies, institutions, and relations among peoples and states, while their consequences have continued to evolve through subsequent transformations. The present therefore bears the imprint of historical injustice without being reducible to it.

Pan-Africanism offers a distinctive perspective from which to approach this problem. Across its different formations, Pan-African thought has connected racial and colonial domination to larger concerns with political freedom, economic independence, sovereignty, solidarity, and the organisation of international power. Reparations bring these concerns together around questions of responsibility, political community, and the conditions of collective freedom. They also reopen a problem that persisted beyond political independence: how substantive equality might be pursued within political and international orders shaped by longer histories of unequal power.

This debate has acquired new political momentum. The African Union's 2025 focus on reparatory justice and its designation of 2026 to 2035 as the Decade of Reparations coincide with an expanding reparations agenda led by CARICOM and wider movements across the African diaspora. In March 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted Ghana's proposal recognising the enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. In this context, questions of historical responsibility, justice, and repair have acquired an increasingly transnational political significance.

Yet the widening reach of reparative politics also exposes fundamental disagreements about what repair entails. Restitution, compensation, redistribution, recognition, reconciliation, and institutional transformation carry different understandings of the wrong, the relationship between past and present, and the justice that should follow. Historical responsibility becomes entangled with inheritance and intergenerational obligation. Reconciliation introduces questions of political coexistence and closure where the consequences of injustice endure. And as reparative claims extend to contemporary inequalities, the boundaries of repair themselves become contested: where does reparation meet wider projects of justice and political transformation?

The workshop takes these tensions as a starting point for examining reparations through Pan-African political thought and practice. It asks how African and diasporic experiences and traditions shape understandings of reparative justice, how competing claims to repair acquire political meaning, and what these debates reveal about historical injustice and contemporary inequality, responsibility and reconciliation, and the possibilities of collective freedom.

We welcome papers that develop original theoretical or empirical arguments around the politics of reparations from Pan-African perspectives. Possible areas of inquiry include:

• The changing place and meaning of reparations within Pan-African thought and practice
• Competing conceptions of repair: restitution, compensation, redistribution, recognition, reconciliation, and transformation
• Historical injustice, contemporary inequality, and responsibility across time
• Slavery, colonialism, dispossession, extraction, and their political and economic afterlives
• Intergenerational obligation, memory, apology, reconciliation, and closure
• Reparations after conflict, authoritarianism, apartheid, and genocide
• Sovereign debt, economic dependency, development, and the international political economy
• Climate justice, ecological loss, land, extraction, and historical responsibility
• Cultural restitution, heritage, archives, knowledge, and intellectual authority
• Sovereignty, international law, and unequal representation in global governance
• Political community, migration, diaspora, and competing reparative claims
• Gender, class, race, and inequalities within reparative politics
• Pan-African, anticolonial, Black radical, feminist, and other traditions of thought on repair, justice, and freedom

These themes are points of departure rather than prescribed categories. We welcome submissions from global, continental, regional, national, and community-specific perspectives. We are especially interested in contributions that bring different fields of reparative politics into conversation, question the boundaries of reparative justice, or develop new approaches to the relationship between historical injustice and contemporary political order.

The workshop will take place from 5–7 January 2027 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Please submit an extended abstract of 1,500 to 2,000 words setting out the central question and argument of the paper, its original theoretical or empirical contribution, its relationship to relevant scholarship, and the evidence, cases, or sources on which it draws. The extended abstract should also indicate how the paper contributes to understanding the politics of reparations from a Pan-African perspective and its significance for contemporary debates.

Please include a short CV and confirmation that you would be available to participate in person in Addis Ababa. Applications should be sent to cpas@soas.ac.uk by 5 October 2026, using the subject heading ‘Pan-Africanism and Reparations Workshop.’

Selected participants will be notified by mid-October 2026 and will be expected to submit a full draft chapter by early December 2026, to be circulated before the workshop for substantive discussion and feedback.

We aim to publish an edited volume of selected papers following the workshop.