Over the last two decades, the idea of reconciliation has become central to Canadian political and social life. But what does reconciliation mean? Is reconciliation good or bad? What is reconciliation doing? For whom is reconciliation available? While Catherine Lu is not exclusively concerned with this topic—her book takes up a wide array of issues, from the genocide of the Herero and Nama during Imperial German rule to the Japanese military comfort system, alongside debates in global, historical and transitional justice—the clarity she offers on the Canadian situation is a testament to the framework of responsibility and justice advanced, and the normative reconstruction of reconciliation as nonalienation.

The central problem of existing theories of justice and reconciliation are the limits of accountability and reparations. Building on the work of Iris Young, Lu argues that accountability cannot address the enabling conditions for interactional injustice. In harms done by individual/group A to B, there are often structural processes—institutions, norms, practices and material conditions—that have caused or conditioned the vulnerability of B and/or the power of A that lie outside the A-B interaction, and where responsibility subsequently exceeds that relation too (34–36). These structural processes also cut across and through A and B on the basis of race, gender, sexuality and class, thus drawing out limits to, yet not dispensing with (as responsibility is not zero-sum [75]), a victim-perpetrator responsibility model. These limits include the responsibility of victims for the “suffering they inflict on others” (76, 138), the responsibility of all to address structural conditions of differentially distributed vulnerability (77, 138) and the way in which the collectivization of victims can obscure the needs of individual sufferers (77–78, 140).

The difficulty of reparations involves its temporal character and the determination of the connection between past and contemporary actors, corrective measures, and the role of historical events in producing structurally unjust processes that persist in the present. Two major difficulties with an interactional approach are the unequal distribution of benefits and harm between contemporary agents and the introduction of “contemporary new agents” (163–64). Whereas an interactional and backward-looking approach grounds reparation duties on continuous benefit, a structural approach affirms the responsibility for structural reform of all those who participate in the continuation and evolution of structural injustice that are formed in part through historical injustices. While the distinction between structural injustice and historical injustice is less clear in our situation, this approach is better positioned to avoid disavowals of responsibility based on one's own experiences of oppression or lack of direct connection to historical actors. But here we perhaps reach the limit of a moral approach to political responsibility. When actors question the extent of responsibility, is it always and only a disavowal or might it draw out other enabling conditions? How might solidarity be a necessary supplement to this emphasis on responsibility—a missing term that might address the “amorphous collective” concern with such an expansive notion of responsibility (172)?

Lu further argues that it is not clear on the interactional account how reparations would overcome alienation and lead to reconciliation. The redistribution of benefits may not only be insufficient but it also may fail to address, and could perhaps further, structural injustice, especially when alienation arises from a mode of distribution and production presumed in redistribution. While I suspect that there is an alternative history of reparation claims beyond Anglo-American philosophical discussions of global justice that challenges a distinction between reparations and structural transformation, this point remains one of the most important insights of Lu's study for the reconciliation project in Canada. This is so especially as analysis of the Trudeau Liberals’ approach to reconciliation suggests redistribution without structural justice and reconciliation. What's more, in insisting on connecting backward-looking to forward-looking and structurally transformative forms of reparation, Lu gestures to how the politics of reconciliation might contest its conditions of possibility in what David Scott describes as the stalled present and foreclosed future that followed liberalism's ascendency after the defeat of socialism.

To get at this problem of alienation and reconciliation, Lu turns to Rahel Jaeggi's reconstruction of alienation. To avoid essentialism, Jaeggi conceptualizes alienation functionally as “the denial, distortion, or disruption of an agent's appropriative powers” of self and world (36–37). This idea of alienation helps avoid conceptions of reconciliation that presume restoration of a prior state, aspire to a final end-state or overlook the structural conditions of possibility, while providing enough content to evaluate existing approaches to reconciliation. For Lu, the telos of reconciliation is nonalienation: “agents’ mutual and nonalienated affirmation of the social/political order” alongside those agents nonalienated flourishing (37, 182–83). Because alienation has both objective and subjective components (38), reconciliation, too, operates at different levels: interactional reconciliation (37), existential reconciliation (38), and the “more normatively fundamental” (183) structural reconciliation (37).

This attention to the objective conditions necessary for reconciliation echoes Indigenous critiques of reconciliation that offer alternative conceptions while also offering a refreshing challenge to agonistic conceptions in which critical criteria are limited to the problem of closure. Still, one question that arises here relates to critiques of reconciliation that do not seek to recuperate it as a normative or regulative ideal. This raises a question of the relationship between reconciliation as an ideal and political action. Unlike other approaches that ignore this distinction, Lu's text rightly holds on to it, emphasizing reconciliation as an ideal rather than a vehicle for political transformation—suggesting decolonization (269), decentering (274–75), and disalienation (277) as strategies for transformative redress. The extent to which this distinction of reconciliation as a regulative ideal remains convincing may map onto evaluations of the utility of ideal theory for contemporary political situations. For this reader, the analytical distinctions are clarifying and politically relevant. Nevertheless, I still find myself wondering whether reconstructions participate in the closure of alternative horizons.