Sara Amighetti

This paper offers a philosophical appraisal of the role truth commissions might play in addressing the legacy of colonial injustice in contexts that do not fit the paradigmatic model of transitional justice. In recent years, calls for redress in democratic settler states have prompted interest in the extension of transitional justice mechanisms beyond post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies. Yet this extension raises two important challenges. The scope challenge concerns whether transitional justice is conceptually suited to settings without political rupture, while the bootstrapping challenge questions whether institutions shaped by liberal assumptions can adequately respond to structural and ongoing forms of colonial violence. The paper analyses the normative and conceptual stakes of these challenges, drawing on recent work in political theory and Indigenous studies. While acknowledging the limits of the transitional justice paradigm, it argues that truth commissions may still contribute to processes of historical reckoning—particularly by enabling practices of collective unlearning and public confrontation with inherited structures.

What are the responsibilities of the EU in the context of asylum? This paper distinguishes between two possible different answers to this question. A first answer understands the responsibilities of the EU as the shared responsibilities that member states have towards refugees and vis-á-vis each other by virtue of their membership in the EU. This is also the prevalent answer in the current literature on the EU and refugees. We develop a second and novel answer by putting forward an account of the EU as a group agent to which responsibility can be attributed over and above the responsibility that attaches to its member states. On the corporate responsibility account, the three grounds commonly used to justify the responsibilities that states have towards refugees (humanity, legitimacy, contribution to harm) can also ground the protective responsibility of the EU towards refugees.

This essay contends that postcolonial migrants have a right to enter their former colonizing nations, and that these should accept them. Our novel argument challenges well-established justifications for restrictions in immigration-policies advanced in liberal nationalism, which links immigration controls to the nation’s self-determination and the legitimate preservation of national identity. To do so, we draw on postcolonial analyses of colonialism, in particular on Edward Said’s notion of “intertwined histories,” and we offer a more sophisticated account of national identity than that of liberal nationalists. In our view, the national identity of former colonizing nations cannot be understood in isolation from their ex-colonies. This entails that liberal nationalists cannot justify the restriction on the entrance of members of the nation’s former colonies by resorting to an argument about the preservation of national identity: the former colonized constitute an inseparable element of that national identity, because they are already historically part of it.