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I have spoken at consecutive Reparations Marches held on the 1st of August in Brixton in 2021 and 2020 to audiences at the request of Esther Stanford-Xosei on my reparations research and movement building. My training is in the field of capitalism, imperialism and political economy and I am currently writing about movement building for reparations and Planet Repairs through the dismantling of the financial and commodity markets.
Keval Bharadia, 'Fighting the inequality pandemic: the case for a super-tax', Red Pepper, 29 May 2020.
Keval Bharadia, 'The IFS is a Mouthpiece for the Status Quo, including on Financial Transactions Taxes – and It’s Time to Call That Out', New Socialist, 3 December 2019.
Keval Bharadia, 'Labour Against the Finance Lobby', Tribune, 24 November 2019,
Joe Ware and Keval Bharadia, 'No Exceptions: Why HSBC’s new coal policy could fuel climate change', Christian Aid, 2018.
Reparations seek to repair harm, loss and damage caused by enslavement and colonisation. Reparations is not just a legal case or a political claim but also a social movement. In 'An Approach to reparations', Human Rights Watch maintain that 'when addressing relatively old wrongs, claims of reparations should not be based on the past abuses of enslavement and colonisation solely, but on its contemporary effects'. They point out that people today, i.e. the descendants of the enslaved who can reasonably claim that today they suffer personally from the effects of past human rights violations through continuing economic or social deprivation, are deserving of reparations.
A common misconception promulgated by opponents of reparations is that they refer merely to financial compensation. Reparations is a principle, a framework, a concept and a holistic movement which carefully builds upon centuries of philosophy and culture to emancipate one’s self, repair and heal internally and externally, from genocidal trauma and erasure from humanity.
Reparations movements also demand cognitive justice in order to assert non-Eurocentric forms of knowledge. The concept of cognitive justice is based on the recognition of the plurality of knowledges and expresses the right of different forms of knowledge to co-exist. Cognitive justice evidences the damaging impact of hegemonic Western knowledge and demands that we take great care to position ourselves with those who cannot speak or be heard.