Negotiating Post-Colonial Legacies: Conflicting Justice Notions in the Belgian Case

Abstract

Do parties handle conflicting justice notions when they negotiate about the legacy of a colonial past? This question is at the core of an increasing number of judicial and non-judicial processes around the world. In settler-colonial societies, this debate is far from new. The objective of this article is neither to consider the general debate about reparations nor to study theoretically how communities can digest “a past that is hard to swallow.” It is to detect the conflicting justice notions mobilized in the negotiation process when seeking to come to an agreement or other kind of conclusion to the process. Do the parties explicitly refer to these conflicting justice notions or do they avoid them? To address this question, the article focuses on one in-depth empirical case study, namely the Belgian case.