Decolonisation

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    Black Justice, White Fear: when Reparations are framed as Genocide
    (Self-Published on 𝘚𝘶𝘣𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬, 2025) Mickens, Jasmine
    This month, in an unprecedented move in U.S. refugee policy, the United States granted refugee status to Afrikaners on the grounds that the white minority in South Africa is facing racial persecution—even genocide. American officials welcomed the first wave of at least 49—citing claims that they are, “being brutally killed,” and “their land confiscated.” This narrative is unsubstantiated, historically dishonest, and morally corrosive. Let’s be clear: There is no campaign of extermination against Afrikaners. There are no mass land seizures. There is no humanitarian crisis. What exists is a shared vulnerability to crime that affects both Black and White rural South African farmers—driven by geography, poverty, and policing gaps, not race. There is unfinished business of South Africa’s democratic transition that left land reform untouched. The South African government finally seeks to correct what colonial conquest and apartheid codified: the violent dispossession of land that engineered Black landlessness into a permanent system of poverty and racial capitalism. There is a growing, global discomfort among formerly unassailable white communities whose inherited privileges are finally—symbolically more than materially—being named, questioned, and historicized. And there is a symbolic shift among conscious African youth—moving the ideological center of gravity toward justice, repair, and Black political self-determination. That shift alone has proven intolerable to some.
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    Peremptory norms as an aspect of constitutionalisation in the international legal system
    (Hague Academic Press, 2009) Orakhelashvili, Alexander
    The phenomenon of constitutionalisation occupies increasing place in the discourse on international law, even though the international legal system contains no formal and express constitutional arrangement. The two basic features of constitution are that it regulates the issues of basic importance for the relevant community, and it prevails over ordinary laws. The phenomenon of peremptory norms of international law (jus cogens) satisfies both these requirements. The ground covered by jus cogens relates to the area of interests of the international community as a whole, safeguarding which is the concern for all. It is also a natural function of jus cogens to prevail over ordinary norms of international law. Thus, whether or not jus cogens is part of constitution of the international society, it performs the functions of it, compatibly with its other principal function as public order (public policy) of the international society. The expressions of this constitutional element relate to the possibilities of invoking its primacy over ordinary laws in international and national courts, on matters such as the immunity of States or the powers of international organizations. The interaction between the powers of the UN Security Council and jus cogens demonstrates how the original public policy aspect of jus cogens - its non-derogability - could generate the classical constitutional supremacy over treaty-based institutional arrangements.
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    ItemOpen Access
    The reality of reparations: an exploration of neo-colonialism, morality and control in the Caribbean
    (Caribbean Studies Students' Union, 2021) Khan, Amna
    Reparations are widely understood as the process by which compensation is given or amends made for previous wrongdoing. In the context of the Caribbean, it may refer to official actions taken by former colonial powers to acknowledge and recompense states affected by colonialism and slavery. This paper seeks to analyse discussions of reparations in the region and consider how the lack of com- pensation may be perceived as demonstrating that modern power relations are merely repackaged propagations of imperialism. Fundamentally, this paper argues that the notion that colonisation was left behind in the 19th century with the abolition of slavery or mid-20th Century with the political indepen- dence of Caribbean nation-states is a facade and uses reparations discourse as the foremost example of such. This is demonstrated through the following questions: Why do reparations need to be paid? Why are they not being paid? And What needs to change?