Ole Andreas Brekke

In this paper, the policy process concerning reparation to victims of coercive sterilisation in Norway is investigated. Involuntary sterilisations were quite common practice within the Norwegian health care system from the 1930s until the 1970s. Although largely abolished by a new sterilisation Act in 1977, these previous practices did not come under public attack before the mid 1990s. In 1998, a formal apology to victims of coercive sterilisation was issued by the Government, and in 2005 Parliament issued a compensatory ex gratia payment scheme to victims of coercive sterilisations.

In some ways this process can be seen as a political learning process. Past abuses have been condemned and reparation claims have been acknowledged by virtually all political parties. However, at the same time there are traits of the process indicating that learning has been more superficial and 'ritual´ than substantial, and marked more by a distancing from rather than a reconciliation with past abuses. The paper specifically deals with the role of consensus and conflict in facilitating societal and political learning processes. 

Natalia Gerodetti

This paper is mapped against the history of eugenic practices and their enduring impact in relation to socio-legal perspectives on gender and sexuality. Historical consciousness and memory construction have been changing legal-moral landscapes for a number of states and recognition and compensation of historic injustices have been part of an emerging politics of reparation with attempts at reconciliation and redemption. Cases in relation to past eugenic practices have in recent years gained political salience in a number of countries and offer a prompt to rethink "biopolitics" in relation to the shaping of historical consciousness and policy making. National governments have been forced to face and deal with reparation claims in relation to historical injustice and often judicial recourse is used as a means to redress, through legislation, the legacy of historical wrongs in which nation states have been implicated. Yet despite testimonies to a proliferation of apologies, memorials, commemorations and other means of dealing with past practices, some claims regarding historical wrongs remain unaddressed, unsuccessful or unheard. This paper provides an analysis of discourses of eugenic legacies and reparation claims in relation to eugenic practices in Switzerland and compares in particular the different trajectories of the claims surrounding child removal policies of Yenisch children and sterilisation practices in the 20^th century. Whilst the former could be argued to have been more successful than the later, the legal-political discourses around compensating for sterilisation and providing new legislating regarding sterilisation in particular raise questions about historic wrongs and future wrongs.

Svea Luise Herrmann

The paper focuses on the construction of victims in reparations policies and public debates on reparations in post war Germany and the consequences thereof for victims of the Nazi-German sterilization programme. In particular it will discuss framing processes that lead to what I call de-victimization of certain types of victims.

In post-war Germany reparations politics were framed in terms of "Nazi-injustice" legally defined in the Federal Indemnification Law of 1953. The Law at the same time defined who is and who is not a victim of "Nazi-persecution" and thus entitled to reparations: including in the reparations scheme those persons who were persecuted for reasons of political opposition, religion, ideology or "race" while excluding any other person who suffered from Nazi-crimes and did not fit into this scheme. Processes of framing "Nazi injustice" prescribed that victims belong to certain pre-defined groups (such as political opponents or a certain "race") in order to be acknowledged as a victim, rather than focussing on the atrocities done to them. While this reflects a similar focus within studies on reparations politics or transitional justice, i.e. a focus on human rights violations done to "national minorities", "ethnic groups" or "minority cultures" the empirical analysis of the politics of reparations for coercive sterilisations challenges this focus: Programmes of involuntary sterilization were not necessarily directed at certain pre-set "homogeneous" groups but indeed targeted very different people for very different reasons, such as e.g. "public health", "homelessness", "poverty" or "demography".  If at all, victims of involuntary sterilization only become a "group" through their violation. A focus on groups within reparations politics or research thereof is thus prone to fail with regard to acknowledging victims of sterilizations programmes but indeed leads to their de-victimization.

Matt James

Using a postpositivist and critical policy studies approach, this paper seeks to understand the impact of the Canadian government's new reparation policy on social movement framings and public understandings of injustice. Originally called the Acknowledgment, Commemoration, and Education Program and since renamed the Community Historical Recognition Program, the policy is now the state's overall framework for handling all non-Aboriginal redress claims.  The paper studies the policy's historical development; its framework, instruments, and rules; its funded projects; the sorts of discourses that participants are officially allowed to convey; and the relevant political engagement of groups through interviews, media interventions and participation in parliamentary hearings. 

The policy itself embodies an approach to historical injustice that I call neoliberal heritage redress.  On the one hand, it uses the characteristic tools and tactics of neoliberal interest intermediation, such as conditional project funding.  This approach turns the recipient into the junior entity in a sort of public-private partnership, thus helping to boost the civic profiles of apolitical "service-provider" organizations while disciplining and constraining more activist ones.  At the same time, the new redress program proscribes the possibility of individual, politically negotiated redress settlements by forcing redress-seekers to participate in a far more formalized system.  The ensuing eligibility and funding rules serve to construct a sanitized field of official remembrance that helps to tame the past's politically disruptive potential by re-situating past wrongs as simply some aspects among others within a common Canadian "heritage"-one in which the bad and good alike commingle in a common scheme of official commemoration.  In this latter sense, the neoliberal heritage redress policy follows what the sociologist Jeffrey Olick calls the historical "normalization" strategies of the mainstream German right:  subjecting the past to a smoothly repetitive ritualization that helps to remove past wrongs from the arena of contemporary political conflict and debate. 

 One important finding is that the groups that have been generously funded under the policy are those that refuse to use reparation-seeking as an opportunity to shine a critical spotlight on ongoing, contemporary injustices.  Conversely, redress-seeking groups that have attempted to show the continuities between past wrongs and contemporary injustices have been deliberately marginalized and excluded.  For all these reasons, therefore, the policy appears to be helping to foster an interest intermediation landscape in which past and present are starkly differentiated and in which the most audible discourses of Canadian wrongdoing are those that locate injustice most firmly in the past. 

Angelika von Wahl

The paper compares governmental attempts to provide material and symbolic reparation after cases of severe human rights abuse. While many states have participated in the infliction of injustice and in atrocities it seems that relatively few cases of human rights abuse have produced reparations. What factors lead governments to agree to pay reparations and/or apologize and, more specifically, what kind of reparations and to whom? 

This paper focuses specifically on the question of how and why the same state (here Germany) treats claimants of human rights abuses that occurred under National Socialism very differently. Theoretically I do not concentrate on the relevance of legal or institutional explanations but on the agency of claimants. In an intra-state cross-movement comparison two German post-World War II cases are presented: social mobilization of German Jews and homosexual men. One can be considered a relative successful case of mobilization and claims making while the other has been a failure. This paper is interested in the starkly different outcome between two cases. The analysis shows the importance of political factors in explaining governments willingness to make redress. I argue that beyond the severity of the abuses organizational, identificatory, and discursive factors play a crucial role in the treatment and success or failure of survivors' claims making.

Renaud Hourcade

Putting an end to decades of amnesia, Bordeaux and Nantes have recently decided to "cope"

with their past as former slave trade cities, organizing memory events, building memorials

and museums. Claims from local racial and ethnic groups, associated in Bordeaux's case with

a pressuring national and international memory context, triggered this change. But it is clear

that in this process Bordeaux and Nantes have had to face the particular problem of

culpability and debt, given their historic role at the forefront of the transatlantic slave trade.

While in Africa, America and the Caribbean, the memory of slavery has involved many

burning debates about the morality and possibility of a reparation, the collective memory

processes launched by the French former slave trade cities have never allowed such a

discussion. Why ? What are the sociological, political or moral reasons that make claims for a

redress so unacceptable in the French context ?

I will argue that if both cities accepted to acknowledge the past, they nevertheless proved very

reluctant to address it in terms of justice, putting forward two main reasons. First, a policy of

redress needs perpetrators, whereas the cities' official discourse says that today's Nantes and

Bordeaux inhabitants should bear no collective or individual responsibility for their ancestors'

deeds. A reparation scheme also needs victims identified as such. Does the category of "slavedescendant"

have any legitimacy in this respect ? Second, it is said that thinking in terms of

guilt and debt would not be justice but "repentance", and would precisely perpetuate

stigmatizing identities as victims (Black people) or as perpetrators (Nantes and Bordeaux

citizens). Such a discourse finally draws an anti-culpability frame for the memory process that

deters the memory entrepreneurs from expressing claims regarding the possibility of an

official apology or, even more, of a redress. I will review the reasons why this perspective is

actually widely accepted by the various agents of memory, and I will try to assess the role of

the French "republican" conceptions on social identities in this respect. I will finally argue,

the dominant discourses notwithstanding, that justice lies behind the whole memory process,

albeit in a different perspective: justice through historical truth instead of justice through

indictment, conviction, and reparation.

Noémi Michel

Over the last decade, the French colonial past has come back into the French public space under the

form of highly controversial debates. Polemics over the use of torture during the Algerian war or over

the creation of a national Museum dedicated to the memory of slavery have, among others, contributed

to form a new contentious field, namely the field of the "politics of colonial memory". This paper

consists of a case study of one of the constitutive debates of this field. It analyses the discursive

construction of the controversy over the so called "article 4", namely a legal article aiming to inscribe

the "positive role" of the French colonisation in history programs in schools. Adopted in February

2005 by the French national Assembly, this article was cancelled one year later on the initiative of the

president Chirac after a controversial, highly mediatised, and very broad public debate. Indeed, the

"article 4" was mainly discussed during two parliamentary debates, through the official declarations of

key executive actors, through petitions of historians and through public mobilisations of the

descendants of the colonised. The corpus formed by these claims over the "article 4" is analysed in

two stages, in order to grasp which normative issues, collective identities and power relations are at

stake in the emergence of the French colonial past as a public problem.

A first section shows how this debate is structured through two main lines of contestation by staging

competing claims over the legitimate role of the French State within the field of the politics of colonial

memory on the on hand, and over the legitimate public narratives of the French colonial past on the

other hand. A second section deals with the specific power relations (re-)produced in this debate and

implied by the dominant rhetoric of the fear of a "war of memories". It is shown that this rhetoric

contribute to powerfully disqualify the claims of the descendants of the colonised as it perpetuates

authorized forms of "republican claims" excluding their forms of subjectivity and their claims. This

discussion leads me to conclude with an attempt to disclose the democratic possibilities implied by

these excluded subjectivities and claims. I argue that a public re-connexion of the colonial history to

contemporary practices, relations and identities - for example to current modes of discriminations -

could ground an alternative politics of colonial memory truly oriented towards democratic inclusion.