In recent decades, the field of transitional justice has matured into one of the most vibrant and contested areas of human rights scholarship and practice. Yet amid the proliferation of truth commissions, tribunals, and official reparations schemes, a quiet sense of frustration persists. Victims of political violence, displacement, and structural injustice, those whose dignity these mechanisms are meant to restore, often remain unheard, unseen, and unhealed.

Against this backdrop, the Reimagining Victims’ Reparations Global Network (RVRGN) was created. This interdisciplinary and international initiative brings together scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists committed to rethinking what reparations can and should mean in the 21st century. Our shared conviction is that reparations must be reimagined from below, as processes rooted in the voices, agency, and creative energies of victims themselves.

Why Reimagine Reparations?

The question of reparations has always carried a moral and political weight disproportionate to its institutional visibility. To repair is to make whole, to restore justice, to acknowledge that harm has occurred, and to act upon that recognition. But what happens when the harms are irreparable, when the wounds inflicted are not just individual but collective, cultural, and historical? Can compensation, however generous, ever substitute for recognition, solidarity, or transformation?

Legal scholars have long noted that reparations are a ‘legal fiction’: a symbolic attempt to measure and redress human suffering through administrative mechanisms and monetary value. The problem, however, is that the field has too often taken this fiction at face value. Over time, reparations have become constrained within an ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic rationality, dominated by legalistic language, technocratic procedures, and state-centric frameworks that leave little room for imagination, empathy, or grassroots agency.

Reparations are frequently framed as one element of a wider transitional justice package, alongside truth-seeking, criminal accountability, and institutional reform. Yet they are often the least implemented and the least transformative. In many contexts, financial payments are distributed without consultation; symbolic gestures are offered without sustained dialogue; and programmes designed to restore dignity instead reproduce dependency. Victims, once more, are treated as objects of benevolence rather than as subjects of political agency.

This is the context from which the RVRGN emerged. We recognise that reparations, as currently conceived, are trapped between the moral ideal of justice and the institutional reality of neoliberal governance. However, our goal is not only to deconstruct and critique but also to foster dialogues between participants and scholars that propose new conceptual, methodological, and reflective tools. Our aim is not to abandon the concept of reparations, but to reimagine it, to recover its transformative potential by situating it within the everyday practices of communities who continue to resist, remember, and rebuild in the aftermath of violence. Three interrelated principles thus guide the RVRGN’s work:

1) Dignification, placing victims’ voices, experiences, and agency at the centre of reparative processes.

2) Emancipatory participation, fostering meaningful involvement that enables victims to shape reparations in ways that matter to their communities.

3) Transformative repair, linking reparations to broader struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice.

From Legalism to Life: A Call for Emancipatory Participation 

One of the key insights driving the RVRGN is that the dominant model of reparations, grounded in liberal legalism, often depoliticises victims’ struggles. By translating complex histories of structural violence into discrete legal claims, it strips reparations of their social and political meaning. The result is a form of ‘magical legalism’, the belief that justice can be achieved through procedural mechanisms alone.

Our approach challenges this paradigm by emphasising emancipatory participation, socio-economic transformations and broader livelihood support using evidence from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including criminology, sociology, anthropology, law, and cultural studies, among others. Victims’ involvement in reparative processes should not be limited to consultation or symbolic inclusion. It must instead be transformative, allowing survivors to define what repair means for them and their communities. As Nicole Immler has argued in her work on colonial reparations in the Netherlands, meaningful repair requires strengthening the collective capacities of communities before any reparation process begins. This is not about empowerment as self-help but about enabling social repair through solidarity, recognition, and dialogue.

At the heart of emancipatory participation lies the principle of dignification. Dignity, unlike compensation, cannot be quantified; it must be lived and recognised through relationships of respect. Processes of dignification might take the form of art, storytelling, memory activism, or the creation of new spaces for dialogue between victims and the state. They might also include digital memorials, community archives, or initiatives that challenge dominant narratives of victimhood, as well as the creation of material conditions that allow people to live with dignity. The key is that such processes emerge organically from below rather than being imposed from above.

Reparations Beyond the State: Grassroots Practices of Repair

To understand what reparations from below might look like, we must look beyond official institutions to the creativity and resilience of grassroots movements. Across the Global South, and increasingly in the Global North, victims’ groups, artists, and civil society organisations are forging new ways to repair social fabrics torn by conflict, colonialism, and systemic exclusion.

One example comes from Colombia, where the Ruta Pacífica de las Mujeres (Women’s Peace Route) has reclaimed public spaces through art, performance, and collective testimony. Their murals and public interventions transform streets into living memorials that confront patriarchal and militarised violence, turning pain into collective agency. Here, reparation is not an endpoint but a process of continuous resistance and transformation, a form of social repair that connects personal healing to political change.

^{Photo via Camilo Tamayo Gómez (ISRF blog, non-commercial use)}

In Iraq, the Coalition for Just Reparations (C4JR) has worked alongside survivors of sexual slavery and violence under ISIS to shape the Yazidi Female Survivors Law. This initiative, supported by civil society mobilisation and survivor advocacy, exemplifies how legal frameworks can be informed and transformed by grassroots agency. It also demonstrates that reparations can, and must, address gendered harm and intersectional inequalities.

Elsewhere, in the Netherlands, scholars and activists have initiated dialogues on colonial slavery reparations that blend historical research with community-based conversations. In Mexico, the families of the disappeared in Mexicali highlight the emotional and epistemic dimensions of reparation, focusing on the relational ties between memory, mourning, and justice. Similarly, the novel concept of “mnemoeconomics” in South Africa connects economic justice to the politics of dignity, suggesting that reparations must also confront the material inequalities that sustain racial and social hierarchies.

These diverse examples, many of which were shared during the RVRGN’s workshops in Huddersfield (UK), Middelburg (NL) and York (UK), reveal that reparations are not merely a matter of compensation or legal closure. It is a dynamic field of practice that extends across art, ecology, education, and community building. Reparations, in this sense, become acts of world-making, ways of reimagining what justice looks like in everyday life.

Intersectionality and the Politics of Recognition

A key commitment of the RVRGN is to place intersectionality at the centre of reparations thinking. Traditional models have often treated victims as a homogeneous category, overlooking how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape both experiences of harm and access to justice. Yet the realities of victimhood are always situated, relational, and intersectional.

Incorporating intersectionality means recognising that women, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, LGBTQ+ groups, and other marginalised populations often bear the heaviest burdens of violence and exclusion. It also means understanding that reparations cannot be achieved through universal models but must be adapted to local histories, cultural meanings, and social relations.

This perspective aligns with feminist and decolonial approaches that see reparations not as isolated interventions but as part of broader struggles for social transformation. It challenges the reduction of reparations to financial or symbolic gestures and insists on linking them to economic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political participation. True repair, in this sense, involves confronting the structures of inequality that produced harm in the first place.

Reparations as Memory and Imagination

Reparations are not only about redressing the past but also about shaping the future. This requires an imaginative leap, a capacity to envision forms of justice that go beyond restitution and toward transformation. The RVRGN draws inspiration from creative and artistic practices that mobilise memory as a tool of resistance and hope.

In Colombia, for instance, community-based museums and memory houses have become laboratories for reimagining justice. They bring together survivors, artists, and young people to co-create exhibitions that tell stories of survival and solidarity. These spaces transform memory into a living practice of care, turning commemoration into a platform for civic engagement.

Digital technologies also play an increasingly vital role in this process. From online archives of human rights documentation to virtual memorials and participatory mapping projects, digital tools can help amplify victims’ voices and connect local struggles to global audiences. However, they also raise questions about accessibility, ownership, and security, issues that require careful ethical reflection.

The concept of memory ecologies, developed by Andrew Hoskins, is particularly relevant here. It reminds us that memory today circulates across multiple media, blending the digital and the embodied, the individual and the collective. Reparations, therefore, must operate within these hybrid spaces, fostering what Claire Taylor calls mnemonic solidarity, a form of collective remembering that bridges divides and sustains empathy across communities.

Towards a Transformative Vision of Reparations

Reimagining reparations demands more than critique; it requires a transformative vision. The RVRGN seeks to build a platform where scholars, practitioners, and activists can co-create such visions through dialogue, research, and shared practice. Our ambition is not to produce a unified model but to foster a plural, dynamic conversation that reflects the diversity of contexts and experiences worldwide.

This involves questioning the boundaries of transitional justice itself. Too often, transitional justice is conceived as a temporal and spatial process: a transition from conflict to peace, from dictatorship to democracy. Yet as scholars like Paul Gready argue, justice is not a moment of transition but a continuous struggle for transformation. Reparations, similarly, must be seen not as the endpoint of transition but as part of an ongoing process of social repair and democratic deepening.

Building a Global Community of Knowledge and Practice

Since its establishment, as previously mentioned, the RVRGN has convened three international workshops. These gatherings have brought together participants from across the Global South and North, creating a vibrant community of knowledge and practice that bridges academic research and grassroots activism. The workshops have highlighted a shared need to create horizontal spaces of exchange, platforms where local experiences of repair can inform global debates, and where the everyday practices of communities can challenge the normative assumptions of international justice. They have also generated collaborations that are now shaping new research projects, art exhibitions, and public dialogues.

Beyond academic collaboration, the RVRGN aims to influence policy and advocacy by foregrounding victims’ lived experiences. We envision partnerships with more civil society organisations, international agencies, and local governments that can translate these insights into more inclusive and responsive reparation frameworks. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a wider movement for what we call transformative reparation, an approach that sees justice not as a legal outcome but as a collective endeavour of repair, recognition, and solidarity.

Reimagining the Possible

The Reimagining Victims’ Reparations Global Network is more than a research initiative; it is an invitation to think differently, to act collectively, and to believe that reparations can be more than symbolic gestures or bureaucratic routines. By grounding our work in the experiences of victims and communities, we aim to restore the imaginative, ethical, and political dimensions of reparation as a practice of hope.

Reparations are not about returning to a pre-violence ‘normality’, for that normality was often built on inequality and exclusion. They are about creating new forms of coexistence, new solidarities, and new possibilities for living together with dignity after harm. They ask us not only to remember the past but also to reimagine the future.