The Politics Of Redress

First published in 1990, The Politics of Redress is a product of and commentary on significant developments in critical criminology. It shifts the emphasis from the criminologist as a police agent to a fighter for social justice. The author focuses on the role of punishment in society, in general, and in criminology, in particular, urging the reader to reimagine the concept of punishment, especially penal punishment. The arguments addressed in this book range from a comparative analysis of penal policies in various countries to philosophical debates about whether punishment is compatible with a just social order. With the Black Lives Matter movement, the topic of prison abolition has, once again, gripped society’s conscience making this text a vital read for students of law, criminology, sociology, philosophy, and history.

This book focuses on the aftermath of World War II in Asia as described in a sobering and insightful history of two types of redress: compensation for material war damage and restitution of looted property. Japanese Army units and citizens stole goods while shelling and bombardment by all sides destroyed factories, offices and residential neighbourhoods. How were these cases of material damage and loss to be rectified, and who was to rectify them? What financial means and legal precedents were there to fall back on at a time of decolonization, independence struggle, and shifting alliances on the brink of the Cold War? The politics of redress makes an important contribution to the study of law and society in Southeast Asia. It lays bare the complex web of interconnections between politics, law and economy from a comparative historical perspective.

Truth and reconciliation commissions and official governmental apologies continue to surface worldwide as mechanisms for coming to terms with human rights violations and social atrocities. As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state. In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada’s ‘culture of redress,’ broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents – including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements – prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.

This book looks at what a critical understanding of constitutional, labour and European Union law entails under conditions of globalisation.

Develops a new account of historical injustice and redress, demonstrating why a consideration of history is crucial for gender equality.

Canada’s recent sesquicentennial celebrations were the latest in a long, steady progression of Canadian cultural memory projects. Unbecoming Nationalism investigates the power of commemorative performances in the production of nationalist narratives. Using “unbecoming” as a theoretical framework to unsettle or decolonize nationalist narratives, Helene Vosters examines an eclectic range of both state-sponsored social memory projects and counter-memorial projects to reveal and unravel the threads connecting reverential military commemoration, celebratory cultural nationalism, and white settler-colonial nationalism. Vosters brings readings of institutional, aesthetic, and activist performances of Canadian military commemoration, settler-colonial nationalism, and redress into conversation with literature that examines the relationship between memory, violence, and nationalism from the disciplinary arenas of performance studies, Canadian studies, critical race and Indigenous studies, memory studies, and queer and gender studies. In addition to using performance as a theoretical framework, Vosters uses performance to enact a philosophy of praxis and embodied theory.

The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War is the first book to fully document the politics behind the 1942 expulsion order that saw 20,000 Japanese Canadians evicted from their homes in British Columbia and sent inland to work camps, detention centres and farms in Alberta and Manitoba. The book details the relationship between racism and political expediency, and shows how political parties and the affairs of the nation were controlled by a small group of politicians who scapegoated minorities to hang on to power. Most alarmingly, The Politics of Racism shows how easily Canadians allowed themselves to be manipulated by a political process that used fear and war hysteria in a very cynical and calculated way. Ann Sunahara has used previously classified government documents and the wartime records of the Liberal government to reveal a startling new portrait of political connivance that shows Mackenzie King bowing to the pressures of a small number of B.C. politicians who saw the “Japanese problem” as a useful tool to enhance their status and win favours in Ottawa. Branded as traitors in the eyes of many of their countrymen, unaware that the military had opposed their uprooting, without political friends and allies except for the CCF, the Japanese Canadians were powerless – a muffled minority within a country at war. Ann Sunahara has woven together her analysis of government documents with the personal memories of victims of that shameful period. The accounts of the victims and the official records provide a poignant and powerful indictment of the politicians who used racism and fear to further their own careers and of a society whose indifference let it happen. Since the 1981 version of The Politics of Racism (POR1981) was published, it has undergone two further editions: an HTML version in 2000 (POR2000) with an additional afterward about Redress; and an e-book edition (POR2020) with an additional photo essay by the author. Both are published at japanesecanadianhistory.ca.

An exceptional resource, this comprehensive reader brings together primary and secondary documents related to efforts to redress historical wrongs against African Americans. These varied efforts are often grouped together under the rubric “reparations movement,” and they are united in their goal of “repairing” the injustices that have followed from the long history of slavery and Jim Crow. Yet, as this collection reveals, there is a broad range of opinions as to the form that repair might take. Some advocates of redress call for apologies; others for official acknowledgment of wrongdoing; and still others for more tangible reparations: monetary compensation, government investment in disenfranchised communities, the restitution of lost property and rights, and repatriation. Written by activists and scholars of law, political science, African American studies, philosophy, economics, and history, the twenty-six essays include both previously published articles and pieces written specifically for this volume. Essays theorize the historical and legal bases of claims for redress; examine the history, strengths, and limitations of the reparations movement; and explore its relation to human rights and social justice movements in the United States and abroad. Other essays evaluate the movement’s primary strategies: legislation, litigation, and mobilization. While all of the contributors support the campaign for redress in one way or another, some of them engage with arguments against reparations. Among the fifty-three primary documents included in the volume are federal, state, and municipal acts and resolutions; declarations and statements from organizations including the Black Panther Party and the NAACP; legal briefs and opinions; and findings and directives related to the provision of redress, from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 to the mandate for the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States is a thorough assessment of the past, present, and future of the modern reparations movement. Contributors. Richard F. America, Sam Anderson, Martha Biondi, Boris L. Bittker, James Bolner, Roy L. Brooks, Michael K. Brown, Robert S. Browne, Martin Carnoy, Chiquita Collins, J. Angelo Corlett, Elliott Currie, William A. Darity, Jr., Adrienne Davis, Michael C. Dawson, Troy Duster, Dania Frank, Robert Fullinwider, Charles P. Henry, Gerald C. Horne, Robert Johnson, Jr., Robin D. G. Kelley, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., David Lyons, Michael T. Martin, Douglas S. Massey , Muntu Matsimela , C. J. Munford, Yusuf Nuruddin, Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Melvin L. Oliver, David B. Oppenheimer, Rovana Popoff, Thomas M. Shapiro, Marjorie M. Shultz, Alan Singer, David Wellman, David R. Williams, Eric K. Yamamoto, Marilyn Yaquinto