Coercive sterilization clearly is an infringement of human rights. Although systematic sterilization programs exist¬ed in many Western countries in the 20th century, victims'' struggles for redress are rarely covered by the historic justice literature. This paper argues that sterilization programs belong to a type of historic injustice that challenges some established paradigms and perspectives in this field, namely infringements that grow out of a modernist biopolitical rationality characterized by practices, tech¬nologies and ideas of improving society through managing the composition, health and pro¬ductivity of the population. It will explicate sterilization programs as manifes¬tation of modernist biopolitical rationality and discuss the conceptual challenges this poses for historic justice research. It will argue that the wide-spread view that Nazi eugenics forms the paradigmatic case of sterilization policies is misleading. It obscures the fact that a) in most cases, democratic institutions, civil society or¬ganizations, social science and medicine were actively in¬volved and b) that they were motivated largely by ideas of social progress, solving social prob¬lems, and improving the health and productivity of the population. Systematic human rights violations occurred, when this rationality lead to the view of certain people being the problem, rather than having problems. Second, drawing from a comparative empirical study, the paper will examine reparation struggles by sterilization victims in the Federal Republic of Germany, Norway and the Czech Re¬public with respect to the question of whether and how the existing institutional and ideational reparatory frameworks allowed for coming to terms with the injustice they suffered—or not.
