Catherine Lu’s book Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics offers a theoretically rich, original, and comprehensive normative account of redress for colonial wrongs that constitutes a major contribution to political theory. Her analysis moves beyond existing literature by articulating an account of repair that is explicitly transnational in orientation with an emphasis on structural wrongs. Lu’s argument is illustrated throughout by extremely detailed discussion of historical cases, from the Versailles peace process following the end of World War I to the cultural destruction of indigenous peoples in North America. Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics is essential reading for anyone interested in the morality of responding to political wrongdoing, both past and present.

The wrongdoing of colonialism and the harm it wrought, Lu argues, cannot be adequately captured by what she terms an interactional conception of wrongdoing. In this conception, you can identify specific perpetrators (either individuals or groups) who wrong specific victims (either individuals or groups) in a particular interaction. Justice in remedying interactional wrongdoing is captured by standard accounts of corrective justice and retributive justice. You settle accounts generated by wrongdoing through measures of reparations from perpetrator to victim and other mechanisms of accountability for perpetrators. This conception of wrongdoing is not apt for colonial wrongdoing, Lu claims, because it overlooks precisely what must be the focus: the structural terms of colonial interaction themselves. Such terms and the background conditions structuring interaction go unchanged and unchallenged in the interactive picture.

To illustrate the idea of structural wrongdoing, Lu discusses at length the ideology of civilization as providing a rationalization for colonial endeavors. The ideology of civilization was predicated on a racialized hierarchical conception of who qualified as civilized and who was in need of civilization. By linking “civilized” with white and European, the ideology of civilization rationalized the wrongful imposition of colonial rule, which was intentionally imposed, and the wrongful marginalization of indigenous sources of knowledge, which, despite the repudiation of colonial rule, continues to be reproduced unintentionally. In the case of such structural injustice, victims are defined by membership in a targeted category or group (e.g., racially, ethnically, on the basis of gender). Such membership renders individuals vulnerable to the harms wrought by structural orders (e.g., the wrongful deprivation of self-determination on the part of a group or community) and also more vulnerable to interactional wrongdoing (e.g., in the form of murder or physical assault).

In what does redress for colonial wrongdoing consist? It consists in the search for both justice and reconciliation, Lu argues. The justice of redress does not look like redress for interactional wrongs in the form of corrective or retributive justice. Legal liability or reparations aimed at correcting specific flawed transactions do not alter or change the terms of interaction themselves. Yet structural change is precisely what redress requires. The site of structural change for Lu is the global order itself. Justice demands redressing structural harm that is transnational in its source and effect. This has backward- and forward-looking dimensions. The backward-looking dimension consists in repudiating wrongdoing facilitated or produced by structural injustice. The forward-looking dimension consists in “eliminat[ing] any continuing unjust effects that structural injustices may produce or reproduce” (p. 19), as well as eliminating the injustice itself.

Remedying structural injustice by settling accounts does not fully redress the harms of colonialism. Redress, in Lu’s view, also requires tending to the demands of reconciliation. Lu’s primary concern is not with reconciliation understood as the repairing of relationships between groups whose relations are damaged as a result of colonialism. Rather, it is the repair of the relationship between victims of colonialism and the institutional order from which they became alienated through colonialism and its legacy. One of the harmful impacts of colonialism, Lu argues, is that colonial subjects were not at home in their social world. Alienation occurred through the absence of recognition of colonial or indigenous subjects as peoples and the absence of recognition of their experiences. Alienation also occurred by preventing colonial subjects from being able to live authentic lives. Overcoming such alienation is an important objective of processes of reconciliation.What does a reformed world order look like? Lu does not offer a substantive account. Instead, she focuses on some of the characteristics of strategies that the pursuit of such an order will exhibit. They will aim to decolonize, decenter, and disalienate. Tools to pursue this change will include those used to redress interactional wrongdoing, such as reparations. The difference, then, lies in the purpose that reparations serves.

Lu’s analysis leaves unanswered two key questions. The first is, how radical are the implications of her account of structural injustice? On the one hand, the introduction sets the stage for Lu’s discussion of structural injustice in bold terms, suggesting that existing accounts are unable to properly conceptualize wrongs like colonialism. Her detailed critique of the International Criminal Court implies that an interactional account of wrongdoing and accountability is not just incomplete, but also fundamentally flawed when used to deal with cases of structural injustice. On the other hand, throughout most of the book Lu’s claims with regard to the interactional model are much more modest. Her accounts of structural injustice, as well as of both structural and existential reconciliation, are frequently characterized as supplementing, but not replacing, the interactional model. Thus, no clear picture emerges as to whether it is possible for the interactional model of justice and Lu’s model of structural justice to coexist and what that would look like. To call for “greater humility” (p. 112) about what institutions like the International Criminal Court can achieve in their expressive function is one thing. To argue that “different accounts of moral and political responsibility need to be developed that go beyond the individual liability model of responsibility associated with theories of retributive justice and the work of international criminal courts” (p. 108) is quite another.

The second key question Lu’s account raises is how to understand the relationship among structural injustice of different kinds. She is rightly critical of models of structural injustice that are implicitly or explicitly limited to state boundaries, because of their inability to fully capture the transnational wrongs, like colonialism, on which she focuses. But not all wrongs that entail structural injustice are fundamentally transnational, even if they have transnational dimensions. Contemporary cases of conflict like that between the Colombian government and the revolutionary FARC characteristically have transnational dimensions, including third-party actors, such as multinational corporations, playing an important role. But the structural injustice and structural redress on which the Colombian peace process rightly focuses are in the first instance domestic and national. Thus, there is a need to think through how Lu’s transnational model of structural injustice and reconciliation can and should sit alongside not only interactional conceptions of wrongdoing and injustice, but also statist or in other respects more localized models of structural injustice and repair.

As these questions suggest, Lu’s important book opens important avenues for conversation in the search to identify and pursue justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of political catastrophe. As we continue to live with the legacies of previous political catastrophes, and as new ones unfold, the critical need for the kind of normative guidance Lu provides shows no signs of abating.