Time, law and deflection after empire: Temporal strategies of Germany’s disavowal of colonial atrocities

Abstract

The relationship between time and (in)justice has stirred debates in political theory, international relations and international law. This project addresses the relationship between international law and redress for colonial atrocities. More specifically, it argues that the politicization of international law’s temporal secondary rules of non-retroactivity and inter-temporality provides a vehicle to foreclose demands for reparations for colonial atrocities. At stake is the contested, yet understudied case of Germany’s consistent rejection of reparations claims raised by descendants of survivors of the German colonial genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama. In conflating political demands for reparations with international legal principles that vitiate them, Germany pursues two temporalized strategies that characterize its politics of deflection. First, the insistence on the non-retroactivity of international treaties posits the Genocide Convention as a radical normative rupture in historical time that forecloses the possibility of reparations. Second, in arguing that the (il-)legality of colonial violence must be examined considering then-valid laws (inter-temporality), Germany confines the current question of reparations to an odious legal-historical context. Both temporal strategies feed a ‘chronopolitics’ that seeks to excise a violent past from an arguably peaceful present. The paper argues that, upon closer examination, neither the non-retroactivity of the crime of genocide, nor the principle of inter-temporal law are valid grounds on which to refute calls for reparations for colonial atrocities.