The project

The problem

When and to what extent can reparations contribute to justice and redress in the aftermath of the most serious crimes — war crimes, crimes against humanity, and grave violations of human rights? Despite substantial legal and philosophical scholarship on reparations, and a rich historical and social-science literature on the struggles that surround reparation claims, the question of what reparation programmes actually produce remains largely unanswered.

The lacuna is structural rather than accidental. Reparations are theorised and adjudicated ex ante: the literature establishes what reparations ought to be, what forms they may take, and what entitlements they create. It rarely returns to ask what they have done. The result is a field in which normative commitments and programme design rest on assumptions about consequences that have not been examined — and in which victims are asked to participate, often at considerable personal cost, on the same unexamined basis.

AFTER-REP addresses this by moving the analytic centre of gravity from ex ante reasoning to the consequences of reparations over time. It asks how the empirical, material and embodied experience of reparations challenges the norms and expectations built into them, and treats that challenge as the ground on which the foundational principles of reparation should be refined, reimagined and recast.

Research objectives

1. To map and critically analyse existing assessments of the empirical, material and embodied consequences of reparations.
2. To understand how knowledge about those consequences is produced, by whom, with what resources, and to what ends.
3. To generate in-depth empirical accounts of the consequences of reparations across distinct domains of crime, and to theorise them comparatively.

Research questions

1. How have reparations been understood and evaluated, and what are the ways of knowing about their consequences, for victims' lives and their sense of justice?
2. Who produces evidence, and more broadly knowledge, about the consequences of reparations — how, and for what purpose? What is regarded as evidence and as valid knowledge?
3. What are the consequences of reparations ordered in the aftermath of the most serious crimes?
4. How do those consequences differ for different groups of victims — by the crime suffered, the time elapsed before reparation, and the nature of the reparation itself?
5. How can knowledge about the consequences of reparations shape current and future reparation processes?

Conceptual approach

The project's central conceptual ambition is to reopen the question of what repair is, and to answer it from the consequences rather than from the ordering instrument. This entails three commitments.

First, consequences are understood across scales — individual, household, community, institutional — and across dimensions that reparation orders do not necessarily anticipate: well-being, livelihoods, social relations, community integration, relations with institutions, and the sense of whether justice was done. The analytical toolbox the project develops is in part an attempt to specify where and what to look at, informed by practice rather than derived from doctrine.

Second, the project takes seriously that what counts as repair may be articulated in vernacular terms that map poorly onto legal categories. Victims of atrocity are typically also subject to harms the reparation does not address, and do not experience their lives in the units in which reparation is awarded. Methods that cannot register this will not find it.

Third, 'evidence' is used in a deliberately broad sense — claims about the consequences of reparations — without a priori epistemological preference among the forms it takes. Evidence qualifies where it rests on empirical observation or experience, speaks to the shared experience of victims or a subgroup of them, and draws some causal link, direct or indirect, attributive or contributory, between a reparation and what is reported.

Evidence and its politics

The academic literature on consequences is thin, but the field is not a blank sheet. Knowledge exists in dispersed and partial forms: reports from trust funds to trial chambers, progressively declassified; monitoring by international and national NGOs; in-house monitoring, evaluation and learning functions within reparation bodies; assessments produced by legal representatives and victims' associations; journalism, film and other media.

The project's first phase compiles this material into an open-access database of evidence on the consequences of reparation rulings, policies and programmes since 1945. The aim is not to rank the evidence. Legal findings, participatory appraisals and international monitoring data proceed from different paradigms and different modes of knowing, and ranking them against one another would impose precisely the hierarchy the project means to examine. The aim is instead to establish the conditions under which such evidence can be critically understood: what is claimed, on what observational basis, by what method, against what benchmark, by whom, with what resources, and to what subsequent use.

This makes the political economy of knowledge production an object of study in its own right rather than a caveat. Drawing on work on the politics and usage of evidence, the project asks who is positioned to produce knowledge about reparations, and how that positioning shapes what becomes known. The mapping is complemented by vignette studies, built on interviews with those who produce such evidence, which examine the relationships among the actors involved.

Comparative design

The second phase examines three reparation processes in depth: the Lubanga and Ntaganda reparations ordered by the International Criminal Court in Ituri, DR Congo; the 2013 Mau Mau settlement in Kenya; and the reparations ordered in Lhaka Honhat v Argentina by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. They correspond to three domains — war crimes, colonial crimes, environmental crimes — central to contemporary reparation claims.

The design is case-oriented rather than variable-oriented. Reparation programmes are markedly idiosyncratic, even when ordered by the same court, and the aim is not to isolate the effect of particular factors but to put programmes that share underlying challenges — enduring harm, difficult victim participation, protracted legal process — into dialogue across domains that are ordinarily studied separately. That juxtaposition is the point: it is what makes it possible to ask what reparations do in practice, rather than what reparations for a given category of crime do.

Methods

Each case study follows a sequential mixed-methods design: qualitative work to establish locally meaningful questions and categories, a survey, and further qualitative work to interpret what the survey shows, with triangulation across data types throughout. The question of causality is approached from two directions — process tracing in interviews and focus group discussions with beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, and survey methods using comparison groups that arise from the structure of each programme, since each reached only some of those eligible. These comparisons have evident limitations; analysed jointly with the qualitative material, they allow the validity of causal claims to be assessed while keeping the relevance of the cases in view.

The qualitative work includes participatory mapping, well suited to surfacing themes the research has not anticipated, and collaborative ethnographic filmmaking, through which participants co-create material retracing their reparation journeys. Fieldwork in each country is led by research teams based there, who take part in designing the instruments.

Integration

The final phase reads findings across the three cases, revisiting tensions identified theoretically in the literature — between efficiency and equity, individual and collective repair, recognition and redistribution — in light of what the cases show. It also examines how reparative practices travel: beyond the legal influence that reparation decisions exert on one another, elements drawn from the practice and assessment of programmes, which appear in no order or implementation plan, may nonetheless move between jurisdictions. Findings are brought into frontier debates in global justice, transitional justice and development studies, and taken to practitioners through a high-level workshop and an international conference.

Interdisciplinarity

Reparations are a field in which lawyers, political scientists, anthropologists, historians, economists and public health researchers are all active, and no single discipline holds the tools to study what reparations produce. The toolbox the project develops is therefore intended to be not merely multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary but transdisciplinary: it builds on several disciplines to construct approaches that belong to none of them. Interdisciplinarity being notoriously easier to advocate than to practise, the toolbox pays particular attention to making explicit the ontological and epistemological foundations of the methods and concepts it draws together.

Funding

AFTER-REP is funded by the European Research Council under a Consolidator Grant (ERC-2025-COG, project 101231122), hosted by the Centre of African Studies, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, and runs for sixty months from 1 September 2026.