Strategic Silence and Performative Demands: A Typology of Claimants in Postcolonial Reparations Politics

This paper develops a typology of claimants seeking reparations for colonial injustices. Despite growing international attention to historical injustices and the diffusion of global reparations discourse, there exists remarkably little knowledge about who claims reparations and why, and which actors remain silent. This study systematically investigates this variation, distinguishing between the motivations that drive actors to claim or refrain from claiming reparations, and the goals and strategies they employ when advancing such demands. Four distinct categories of reparations claimants emerge from this analysis. First, private victim organisations, including Kenyan independence fighters, Indonesian villagers, and Namibian genocide victim descendants, pursue redress through legal and advocacy channels. Second, interstate reparatory claims, both bilateral (Namibia, Armenia, Libya, Algeria) and multilateral (CARICOM, African Union), represent demands that are endorsed and sometimes appropriated by state governments, transforming what were initially grassroots justice movements into instruments of state diplomacy. Third, performative domestic claims by states such as Burundi, Niger, Senegal, Mexico, and Venezuela appear to deploy reparations discourse primarily for domestic political purposes and international positioning, engaging in bandwagoning behaviour with potentially high domestic returns despite limited prospects for actual redress. Finally, the study examines the "dogs that don't bark": large countries like Brazil, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria that could plausibly advance reparations claims but choose to remain silent. This restraint appears driven by their own human rights records and a focus on non-interference and sovereignty, internal ethnic politics, and calculations regarding economic interdependence. Drawing on a dataset covering 29 countries, this paper investigates the reasons behind these patterns through a broad array of coded primary sources, secondary literature, and quantitative indicators. The analysis draws on norms literature but confronts it with alternative theoretical frameworks, including neorealist thought, liberal scholarship, narrative theory, and postcolonial critique. This multi-theoretical approach allows for a nuanced understanding of whether reparations claims represent genuine normative change or strategic behaviour cloaked in moral language. The investigation distinguishes between cases that genuinely aim for redress and reconciliation, thereby strengthening emergent global justice norms, and those that strategically capitalise on reparations discourse to pursue alternative political or economic objectives. This typology contributes to understanding how historical justice claims function in contemporary international relations and what they reveal about evolving norms of global solidarity, accountability, and the instrumentalisation of moral discourse in the postcolonial era.