Racial Justice in Land Restitution

This review proposes discussing racial justice in land restitution as a sociolegal problem of entanglement rather than one of linear repair. Drawing on research in law, anthropology, sociology, political theory, and critical race studies, race is conceptualized as a modality of belonging, a form of territorialized governance as well as ordered through property relations. In dealing with racial injustice, restitution is shown to operate as an ambivalent legal technology that both enables redress and risks reproducing inequality. Engaging Indigenous land claims in settler states, reparations for slavery, postapartheid restitution, Israel/Palestine, and Latin American plurinationalism as a set of paradigmatic cases, the review highlights how specific racial injustices are addressed in differential and unequal ways, unevenly redistributing recognition, authority, and futurity. The analysis shows how claims of exclusive victimhood run the risk of eclipsing coexisting as well as new injustices—a process captured through the notion of hegemonic subalternity. Moreover, terrestrial, anthropocentric, and planetary biases further complicate restitutionary imaginaries. The review's central contribution lies in arguing that, under conditions of intersectionality, entanglement, and varying dimensions and scales of injustice, legal–political institutions may bring backward-looking reparative justice and present- and future-oriented (re)distributive justice into closer alignment through processes of mutual approximation. Such a convergence may be framed as opening a cautiously post-racial horizon—one that neither erases the history of race nor falsely relies on formal equality but seeks to render race increasingly nondeterminative for structuring future inequalities.