Articles for tag: colonialism, Erinnerung, Geschichte, Verantwortung

Diachrone Verantwortung statt „schuldig gesprochener Vergangenheit“

Diese Woche druckte die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung einen Text des emeritierten Alt-Historikers Egon Flaig ab. Unter dem Titel „Schuldig gesprochene Vergangenheit“ versucht sich der Autor an einer Dekonstruktion der „postkolonialen Debatte“ und wirft dafür sämtliche Gewalttaten der Menschheitsgeschichte zusammen. Die Anliegen postkolonialer Debatten seien „absurd“ und “historische Gerechtigkeit“ ein „Unbegriff, ein Nonsense-Postulat“. Dass solch oberflächliche und reißerische Diskreditierung sämtlicher postkolonialer Ansätze in den Rechtswissenschaften nicht verfängt, ist ein Anliegen dieser Replik.

14. Oktober 2022

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Indigenous Climate Litigation in Anglophone Settler-Colonial States

The legacy of colonialism suggests a shared affinity between climate litigation in the Global South, and climate litigation brought by Indigenous peoples in the settler-colonial states of the Global North. This blog post focuses on claims brought by Indigenous peoples in the Anglophone settler-colonial states of Australia, Canada, the United States and Aotearoa/New Zealand. I begin by setting out the disproportionate impact of climate change experienced by Indigenous peoples, as well as Indigenous movements of resistance and adaptation. In doing so, I draw on claims brought by various Indigenous groups and individuals in the course of climate litigation. Framing climate litigation as part of this response, I then survey Indigenous climate litigation across the four jurisdictions. I end with some notes of caution regarding the essentializing and exploitation of Indigenous peoples by the climate litigation movement, cautions which may be applicable to litigation in the Global South.

25. März 2022

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Shifts in Historiography 

Today, there appears to be more consensus about the unjust nature of the Dutch/Indonesian war. As a scholar who has studied the evolution of the discourse on this topic, being asked to contribute to a symposium about the relation between decolonisation and human rights, is the perfect occasion to look back.

3. Februar 2022

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The Racialized Borders of the Netherlands

The principal function of borders in immigration law is to distinguish between persons and goods which are permitted to enter a territory and those which are not. I call this the filtering function of the border. In this short contribution, I enquire into how this filtering function of the border operates in the context of border controls in the Netherlands. More specifically, I argue that the way border controls are performed in the Netherlands structurally produces racialized subjects.

29. Januar 2022

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International Migration Law and Coloniality

In European human rights law, it is taken for granted that states have the sovereign right to regulate migration. A right to be admitted to a country of which one is not a national, or a right not to be expelled, exists only in exceptional cases. In this blogpost, I look at the origins of “the right to control the entry of non-nationals”. These are to be found in a shift in the colonial labour system which occurred in the second half of the 19th century. It is this history which explains the inequality represented on the map above.

28. Januar 2022

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Postcolonial Migration and Citizenship in the Netherlands

Can formerly colonized subjects and their descendants be full and equal citizens of the former metropoles – and if so, what would that look like? In this blogpost, we explore these politics of belonging in European postcolonial polities by looking at different conceptualizations of the relationship between the Dutch state and Surinamese-Dutch citizens and immigrants. While Dutch government discourses tend to represent Surinamese-Dutch as too different to belong to the Dutch Nation, Surinamese-Dutch organisations claimed postcolonial citizenship as different and equal.

28. Januar 2022

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Rights for Others, Firing Back?

Colonialism and decolonization have importantly shaped the constitutional trajectories of not only the colonized states, but also those of the colonizers. For the Netherlands, decolonization did not only dictate the pace of various constitutional reforms in the mid-20th century that were ‘needed’ to erase Indonesia (1948) and New Guinea (1963) from the text of the constitution, but also introduced new constitutional documents, such as the 1949 Dutch-Indonesian Union Charter and the 1954 Charter of the Kingdom. While it is necessary to critically analyze the impact of these postcolonial arrangements on former colonies, it is equally urgent to fill the profound gap in knowledge about the impact of colonialism and decolonization on domestic constitutional arrangements.

27. Januar 2022

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The European Convention of Human Rights’ Colonial Clause and the End of Empire

In this post, I would like to shed light on an important, yet generally overlooked aspect of the European Convention of Human Rights, namely that it was drafted at a time when many of the member states of the Council of Europe were still important colonial powers. While European empires in Asia were in decline and the Netherlands was in the process of withdrawing from Indonesia, this was not the case in what was then called New Guinea, Surinam or the Antilles. Colonial empires in Africa, for their part, were still well established and the question of the territorial application of the Convention was hotly debated in the drafting process. What were the implications of this link between human rights and empire?

26. Januar 2022

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Police Action or War?

The conflict in Indonesia in 1945–1949 was not a police action against insurgents in the context of a colonial territory in which domestic law alone was applicable; it was an international armed conflict in the context of independence in which international law should have played its role. The crimes committed during the conflict from both sides were war crimes and crimes against humanity.

26. Januar 2022

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Aggression, War Crimes, and the Indonesian Revolution

The specter of the Indonesian Revolution is still haunting our understanding of Dutch imperial violence. In this blog post, I want to highlight two central issues regarding the conflict’s legal history – one involving the alleged non-application of the laws of war to the conflict which has been a mainstay argument in Dutch official narratives, and the other regarding the ways in which we delineate today our legal-moral reasoning with respect to Dutch transgression.

25. Januar 2022

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