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Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)
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Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
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Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6. Each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Joshua Castellino about his book titled Calibrating Colonial Reparations and the Crime of Unjust Enrichment, published by Bristol University Press in 2024, examining what has been done, what should be done, what can be done about the fact that while countries were decolonized, it became independent. There were a whole bunch of aspects of the time during which they were colonies that was not addressed, has not yet been addressed, and probably, I'm sure, for reasons we'll discuss, should be addressed going forward. And so as much as we might be able to point to a particular country and say, oh, you became independent in year X and that was however many decades ago, that doesn't mean that this is just a question of history. So we clearly have a lot to discuss. Joshua, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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B
Thank you so much for inviting me, Melinda. I'm looking forward to it.
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C
I am as well. But before we get too far into the discussion of the details of the book, can you please introduce yourself and tell us why you decided to write a book about colonial crimes and the lens of international law?
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B
Brilliant. Yes, thank you very much. So my name is Joshua Castellino. I'm professor of International and Comparative Law, and I'm the Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Law and Social Sciences at Brunel University of London, which is in the United Kingdom. I started my career as a journalist around 30 years ago, Miranda, which probably dates me too much. I specialize in international law. I did my PhD in international law, and I've spent the 30 years since then effectively researching and teaching law while also working with vulnerable groups on how law can be used to win rights. So what this has done is it's given me insight into around 60 countries. Most of them are postcolonial, and it really builds the clear realization that there are actually deep structural impediments that have to be challenged before the average post colonial society can actually become viable in the sense of having a sustainable future and a shot at peace and economic stability. Now, all of these impediments from my lens take place as a consequence of the failure of international law to adequately protect peoples. And so of course, the lens of international law becomes the most appropriate one from which I tried to review this issue.
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C
Okay, that's very helpful to have as a basis for kind of what we're looking at and how we're looking at it. What then are some of the specific problems? If we're looking at reasons why we haven't addressed this so far, there are surely reasons that these colonial crimes have not yet been addressed. You discussed that some of these barriers have been sort of hard, hardwired into the international law and legal systems that we currently have. What are some of those challenges?
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B
Yeah, I mean, in a sense, the book talks about what I call 10 hurdles. And some of these are of a technical nature. So some of them are statute of limitations, for instance, or the intertemporal rule of law, which those among your audience who are. Who are legal, who follow the law, will understand what those mean. But basically, there are also some softer elements and more difficult elements to it, like how do you tell the histories? If the only history you have is written from the view of a male Westerner, then how do you tell that history? And how do you discover where the facts might lie? How do you trace the evidence so many years, decades, maybe a century later? So there are some of these elements that are quite difficult to overcome. Even if you did decide you were to pay compensation, would you pay market rate? Would you pay the rate at the time of the violation? Where would the money come from? So there are these kinds of difficult questions that exist. But I would say in terms of hardwiring, there's basically probably three elements to it. First of all, the fact is that essentially the sovereign state has become the only legitimate form of government governance that can emerge from decolonization. Now, that creates, I guess, elements to it that make it particularly hardwired. First of all, there's an imposed territoriality that ultimately this particular territory is now the territory of the state of X, and therefore we can only talk about it in those terms. Secondly, the fact that there is now a notion of governance that is based on the sovereign state. We have to ask ourselves, I mean, was that the only form of governance we had? And especially when we see it failing so dramatically across the world, both in the developed and the developing world, like, is that the only. Is that the only form of political governance we've had? Actually, you find it's a notion that's come out of Western Europe, it's come out of the Western European political philosophy, and then it's been imposed everywhere else in this creation of a. Like a hierarchical, centralized form of governance? And then I guess the third is the idea that the only way in which you can build growth is by digging stuff up and selling it, the extractive economic model. And then that effectively is the only tool. So these are hardwired elements to it, and they all stem from, first, the sovereign state, second, the idea that there's a fixed territory in which the sovereign state would occur. And I guess third, the idea that the sovereign state, to build wealth, has to participate in an extractive economy.
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C
Okay, so there's clearly a lot of things then being intertwined here. And one way forward, at least, to identify what we're talking about is doing what you've just been doing, which is creating lists, right? Helping us categorize and untangle some of these pieces so that we can see and talk about them more clearly. So how far can we take that? To what extent, for example, might we be able to create a typography of colonial crime?
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B
And that's really what the book is trying to address. And this came out of discussions I had with NAMA and Herero communities in Namibia when they were seeking to gain accountability from Germany for genocide that was perpetrated against the community in the early 1900s, where essentially Kurnem von Trotta sent his Schutzgruppe, the German forces, into Namibia and into the. Into the desert and shot down these communities even while they were fleeing from this violent assault. And that particular conversation was eye opening because it's a particular episode that occurred, but actually it's an episode that recurs. It created a system. So I guess I started off by looking at how we can. How we can put some degree of coherence to demands that are taking place. Because colonial crime demands are very localized. You know, a particular community is looking for a particular type of reparation from a particular colonial master in country A, in one continent, while as a different community is looking for a different type of, I guess, compensation from a different colonial master and another continent. So trying to find this all together and build a solidarity. Excuse me, trying to build a solidarity that links this together is incredibly difficult, especially because these communities are quite disparate from each other. And the first task that it felt needed to be done was to start trying to show patterns that occurred. And there are patterns. And you have to look at the globe, look at global histories. You have to pay attention to untold histories. But when you start delving into these, especially through the lens of local communities, indigenous peoples, minorities, various different groups who have been written out of history, especially the stories that women often tell, because women have been particularly excluded and erased from many of these narratives, which tend to be male, what you find is there are commonalities. And what this book tries to do is to explain what those commonalities might be. I mean, it starts off by looking at what are what you'd call systemic, what you'd call episodic crimes. Now, international criminal law has developed, and international criminal law is focused on episodic crimes. So you look at what happened in Germany during World War II, and that's the episode. And then you look at accountability for those episodes. But then you look. You extend that to thinking about genocide and crimes against humanity. These are usually things that occur as episodes. They're particular events. But then there are also other elements that are hardwired in which are systemic, which establish processes, or which basically treat ancestral domain of indigenous peoples as terra nullius, as blank territory. Where did that come from? Where did that notion arise? Since when was it okay for you to look at your neighbor's garden, decide that it's actually vacant, and decide that it's. Therefore you can claim it? So it looks at some of these elements, and that's what started the typography. And effectively I'm offering seven. And it's partly also a play on words because the book is written for a wider audience. So it talks about the seven deadly sins of colonial crime and tries to give examples of each of those crimes to effectively paint what is a structure within which those particular crimes occur.
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C
Would you mind giving us a sense of those categorizations? Obviously, we can't go into every example you include in the book, but maybe what the categories are and one example from each.
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B
Sure. So, for instance, I would look. I'm looking at the book now. Subjecthood and objecthood. So there is this notion that effectively, at least, we all believe we are all human beings. But then if we are all human beings, then human beings need to have the right to consent. So if I hold in my hand a pen and decide I want to break the pen, well, it's probably not a very good thing to be doing. But what I certainly don't need to check is how the pen feels about it, because the pen is an object. A human being, on the other hand, is a subject. And so what you often find, the colonial enterprise, was that effectively, when these adventurers went out, they came across people who they decided were less than them. There was a superior, superiorist attitude towards them. But it went even further. They decided that they were a bit like flora and fauna. You know, if you went to a forest and you saw wildlife there, you might be afraid, you might decide to attack it, Whatever, whatever you might choose to do. The one thing you won't do is try and ask that particular flora or that wild animal what it wants, because you don't attribute to that wild animal the possibility of reason, and you don't particularly care. And actually, that's the way in which colonial peoples were treated. They were treated as objects and not subjects. And in the book, I talk about how subjects can resemble objects in the dark. And this was one of the crimes that of course sets us off. But then you've got the acquisition of title to territory. And this is a classic example that occurs worldwide, starts off the colonial process, but continues in the guise of a neocolonial form with indigenous peoples, where you decide that you have a notion of land registry that effectively has little plots of land with a picket fence and the title to that particular land is deposited in some central place. So you go to a place and you say, so where's your central place where you deposit your picket fence, your picket fenced lands? And those people say, what do you mean land is not individually owned, it's collectively used. And you say, oh, that's not good enough, therefore your land is blank, your land is empty, and therefore I'm going to claim this land in the name of discovery. So it looks at that as a particular type of crime as well. It looks also at episodic crime of the kinds I mentioned, the genocide of the Nama and the Herero. In the book I talk about the Jallianwag, the Jallianbag Wala incident. This is a, this is an incident that took place in the north of Punjab in what is now the state of Punjab in India, where British forces effectively, to disperse a crowd, gave the order to disperse and when they didn't, they brought in tanks and simply shot people down. And even worse than that, it's not just that, it wasn't just that that happened. The actual individual who did that when he faced court martial was exonerated mostly and was then celebrated in various different sources. So it looks at, so that's three examples of, of them. I can give you a few more. But effectively that's the type of material that I've looked at in trying to come up with the classification of these, what I call seven deadly sins.
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C
Yeah, no, that definitely gives us a sense. And I want to ask you about some of those in more detail. So especially the subject objecthood one that you mentioned at first, that's a very clear example of what that meant in the colonial context. One would think, however, that today, as you said, we do think that all humans are being equal. We have all sorts of UN documents and international law that says that. So is this gap between thinking everyone is human and yet having issues with subjecthood and the law, do we still see that today?
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B
Absolutely we do. We absolutely do. And I mean, I would put this in the context that we have dura, equality, we have equality in Law, it's written into every constitution in every country in the world. But we have de facto inequality. And it's not just a gap. It's not just that we say one thing in the law and we have a different reality. It's in fact a chasm. We simply haven't been able to address inequality and all of the indications in the post Covid world. And if you haven't read some of Oxfam's work, it's worth looking at. All of this points to the fact that we have growing inequality, that wealth is becoming concentrated in a very few hands, and then that effectively is becoming the source from which much of the political system is being driven. You have a very good example in the United States of America, but you have examples all over the world where you're seeing this and what this is. Basically, when you look at this through the lens of different countries in the world, and one of the scholarly features in my work, for instance, is to look at minorities and indigenous peoples, you see this very clearly that poverty has a very clear identity. It's often ethnic, linguistically and religiously distinct people, women among them, being worst impacted. But now with the growing centralization and the growing concentration of wealth in private hands, what you're also seeing is vast masses of people from the majority community who are also being affected. And so you have this. You think about them as Rust Belt workers, or you think about them as working class in various places. They are not seeing the benefits of this notional equality. They know it's in their law. They understand they should be entitled to it, but they're not seeing it happen. Their pay packets are going down, they're losing jobs. They are finding it harder and harder to keep their families afloat. So in fact, the notional equality of human beings written into law was a laudable and worthy project. But in fact, in the translation of that to a real system, we have failed quite dramatically. Even when you look at one of the oldest fights on gender, for instance, the patriarchy has, in a sense, won. There's a very clear gender gap, pay gap that you can see in the most developed countries, and I'm talking about countries where the culture has already shifted towards greater gender parity. Even in those places, you see significant gender gap. Violence against women is a constant feature of life in every single country. Unequal property laws are clear manifestations of this. So you're seeing this really clearly with regards to something like gender. You're seeing it very clearly with regards to indigenous people, where still corporations are out there. Treating indigenous lands as terra nullius. They're doing a deal with the government to extract, to mine, to effectively exploit whatever resources they believe the land has. The indigenous peoples who live on those territories largely in harmony with nature, well, they're just told, listen, you're in the way of development. And corporations are muscling into what are pristine territories. In the past it was for fossil fuels, but that already has been that. That's been done, it continues to be done. Now the new quest is for rare earth minerals. So you're seeing that these are struggles that continue. And while the notional equality is something that we can have on our books, actually realizing it in practice, that's a much bigger task.
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C
Yeah, that's a very big task indeed. I do, however, want to move to another colonial crime that you discuss in the book. We briefly mentioned it earlier, the process of decolonising of these states becoming independent. You mentioned the issues of kind of assuming that a nation state was the only option. So I want to get into that in a bit more detail. There was, of course, decolonisation processes that happened in all sorts of different ways, but many of them were sort of UN led in the middle of the 20th century and there was an entire special UN committee that did this. And that is often where we think of, when we think of the decolonisation process. Why and how might we think of that as being a colonial crime?
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B
Yeah, so I mean, that's where I really. That's where the book tries to, I guess, make its hardest hitting points because it basically argues that we didn't have decolonization. Now, let me just interrogate that a bit. And to be able to answer your question on UN decolonization, we'd need to go about 70, 80, maybe 90 years before that process to the actual colonization part. And in the actual colonization part, you had a race, and that was a race between a variety of European powers who were seeking land to exploit and build their own wealth at home. You know, so, for instance, even the Americas were described as the new territories. They were unoccupied territories, apparently where Europeans had, or not just a dude, not just the right, but the duty to go and find land that was unoccupied. Land was considered factor of production. Leaving it unoccupied and leaving it uncultivated was seen almost as a wastage of resources. And there's lots of writing among some of the most celebrated economists that talk about land as a factor of production. Now, what they fail to emphasize is that there were indigenous peoples on those lands. Who didn't believe in a sedentary way of life. And that was somehow seen as making them lesser. So we had these processes of colonization. They resulted in what I guess the best way to capture it is A quote from 1890 from Lord Salisbury, who stands up in the House of Lords here in London, where I sit in the British Parliament. And he says something to the effect of we have been drawing lines upon maps where no white foot has ever trod. We have been giving away mountains, rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment, small indeed, of not knowing where these were right now, effectively, when those lines were drawn on the map, they were drawn to reflect one hegemon's interest from another. So if you look at, and West Africa is a really good example of this, you know, what divides Niger from Nigeria were British interests from French interests. These were lines drawn on a map. The Sykes Picot Agreement in the so called Middle East. Middle of what and east of whom? All of these were lines drawn on maps to please colonial masters. Now you might say, well, that's colonization. Why are you bringing this up in the context of decolonization? Well, why I bring it up in decolonization is because UN decolonization, which started in 1945 and gave us the change from the 51 states that founded the UN charter in San Francisco to the 193 we have now, mostly that came out of decolonization and the hardwired rule was that the only way you could emerge was if you respected the colonial boundaries. So all of a sudden previous histories, over 3, 4, 5,000 years matter not. What mattered was the 70 or 80 years of colonial rule from around the 1880s until around the 1940s, 1950s, and that became the sovereign state. So I would describe and decolonization is such a big word that is used for so many things and it's usually used in the name of progress. It's usually used by people who want some progress. But the actual decolonization, I'd argue that never happened. That was just basically a transfer of wealth from one patriarchal power to another. Patriarchy handpicked by the departing colonial ruler along the parameters that were already drawn. And then what those incoming rulers had was the job of trying to create development and trying to pick up the pieces. You know, as Prime Minister Barbados, Mia Mottley often says, the first post colonial governments, they just inherited entrenched poverty and under development and then they had to find a way out of it. And the way in which they did that was to use the same extractive system that had been set up, which involved a steady departure of wealth and resources from the formerly colonial state, now the independent state, to the formerly colonial state, now the so called northern global power. So this wealth has continued and if anything, it has escalated the transfer of resources from the decolonized, from the global south to the global North. With the only difference being that there are now a creamy layer, a kind of rich 1% in each of these former colonial countries too, who have become part of those elite. So this is the analogy that the book draws in terms of UN decolonization.
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C
So wealth, I think is such a key part of what you've just described there that we want to go into it, I think in some more detail, especially in terms of what could be done about this. So one option you suggest in the book is the idea of an international crime of unjust enrichment. Do we have this already? If not, what could this look like and why might it help?
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B
So I guess before I get to unjust enrichment, one thing that I think I want to just get your audience to engage with is this idea immediately after decolonization that somehow the states that were newly formed, independent states now could control their own destinies. And the way in which they would do it is they would focus on economic growth. That growth would create wealth, and then through fair distribution, everything would basically all boats would rise, so to speak. So they paint this trickle down economics was something that was often talked about and was assumed that wealth was somehow fluid. And you imagine a cup sitting in a pot, for instance, and a tap being turned on and the cup gradually gets full. And that's of course the elite who are investing and all of that. But then the analogy goes well, the cup flows over and then the entire pot starts getting full. And that makes some assumptions. It makes the assumptions that wealth is in fact fluid. Actually, wealth seems to be incredibly viscous. And rather than a mug in a pot, what it's more like is a wine glass and the stuff that's coming out of the tap is viscous and won't flow. It solidifies. So what we have instead of is wealth getting concentrated into the hands of very, very few, and then that glass effectively cracking because the stem can no longer handle the head. And that's what we see. So effectively, whatever measure we try to do right now, we have to tackle the fact that wealth has become concentrated in specific hands and that they have solidified there in an intergenerational sense. So the people who gained through this particular process have always become and will always be the so called winners from whatever society we build. And it's painted as, oh well, we have a meritocracy now. But you've seen that in the context of Ivy League applications, you see that in whatever measure you want to. And then you wonder why is it that other people don't make it? And then the argument is put out that this is a meritocratic system. If you work hard, you can make it. But there is a head start. You know, not even Usain Bolt would win a 100 meter race if he was starting from outside the stadium. You effectively have an unequal starting point. So unjust enrichment is an attempt to think through how it is that you can regain access to the wealth that has been taken that first of all gave its, I guess its handlers, its wielders, its beneficiaries, gave them the first advantage, but then continues to build that advantage into something that's systematized. The actual term has been used widely in law. It's very, very common in so called civil law countries. It's less common in so called common law countries, but you find it has been used in common law countries mainly in the realm of private law. So usually this is a remedy that occurs when you can't get other types of remedies to be able to recoup money that you're owed. And that's usually in the context of some kind of a failure to fulfill a contract. Now, it has been used in public international law. In fact, public international law scholars would often say that the among the first reparations cases that we study in an international law textbook is the Chorzow factory case. But you will find already in the Lena Goldfields case before that that there's an attempt to try to understand. And that occurred in the context of Russia and some concessions, land concessions, interestingly, in the context of the colonial crime work, and in that context unjust enrichment was used. You're also seeing this now coming into discussions at present, because if you look at what to do with climate violations, there is a very, very strong argument that we need to go the route of loss and damage. Now that's fine. And loss and damage needs to be supported as a way in which you can gain accountability. And of course, in terms of looking in the future, we talk about the crime of ecocide. And that's good because that's about the future. But what about the past? What about the aspects where wealth has effectively been taken out of societies and moved into tax havens and moved into creating immense privilege and somehow this can't be touched anymore because of statute of limitations. So unjust enrichment is really trying to get and cajole people into thinking through exactly to what extent can we rethink the systems we build now everybody talks about a climate transition. Everybody talks about a transition away from fossil fuels. Well, not everybody. There are some people who still think that climate change is a myth and good luck to them. But effectively, when we think about that, the biggest problem in making any change happen is finance. And actually the book argues this finance does exist. It's just protected. It's first of all it's ill gotten and then it's protected by statute in various different places. We need to unleash that. It makes far more sense to unleash that kind of wealth and put it to the climate mitigation than anything else. Really. It's much more effective than asking people to consume less. I mean, people should consume less, there's no question of that. But if you want the kind of systemic change we need, this needs to be done through something that as big as trying to get at the ill gotten wealth that sits behind all of these tax havens, that effectively is doing nothing other than worsening the climate crisis.
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A
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C
So I'm glad you've mentioned the climate crisis. Because as you correctly pointed out, looking ahead at how the law can help with it doesn't help with the past. But that doesn't mean that these issues aren't intertwined. So how would going back and looking at the past of colonial crimes help with also going forward to deal with climate change mitigation and adaptation?
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B
Yeah, I mean essentially, you know, even the UNFCC panel has now said very clearly that effectively climate, the climate crisis is a direct, directly traces to, to colonial activity. And we look at this, it wasn't so much the industrial age that did it, it's literally the mass, the mass extraction that took place. You know, when King Leopold went to the Congo, assuming he even bothered to go, or his Africanist society went, they weren't marveling at nature of the Congo basin. They probably thought, wow, all of this wood, think of what wealth we can build. But then they had to. It wasn't just enough to cut those trees down, it wasn't enough to just transport it to Belgium or to Europe. You had to actually stimulate demand. So, and this is the economy that's been created that we're living in this deeply, deeply colonial economic system which is worsening on a daily basis the climate crisis. And it's not just fossil fuels that are doing that, even though they might be the biggest player. So I think the evidence is now incontrovertible that the climate crisis is directly linked to colonial enterprise. But this is not necessarily just to say, oh well, you know, this is it. Africa got colonized by Europeans, Europeans are responsible for climate change. Europeans should pay. It's not as simple as that. Because in fact the post colonial state often escalated the extraction because they were trying to play catch up on the development front. So what we do need to do is to think much more about how to finance that particular transition. That's required a way weaning off fossil fuels, weaning off a consumption based model, weaning of an extractive based economic system, to thinking more about circular economies, to thinking about local enterprise, and to finding ways in which you build an economy based on something other than the sheer exploitation of nature. And in this you find that suddenly if you work with indigenous peoples, as I had the privilege to do for six years when I was the executive director of minority rights group International, what you often find is that in indigenous communities there is the traditional knowledge on climate mitigation. These are people who are deeply, deeply ensconced in their environment, in their local environment. They understand what's happening to it and they understand the threats to it far better than anybody else can. So finding a way to get those indigenous voices into the mainstream of the climate conversation is fundamental, because ultimately the opposite is that we have the very people who created the climate crisis now saying to the rest of the world, don't worry, guys, we'll fix it. We've got our Western science that can do it. There's no moral ground for it. But even in a scientific sense, we have to look at all alternatives that exist in finding out which might be the best strategy that we need to follow for climate mitigation.
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C
If we're thinking then about strategies that will actually help when it looks for the future with climate change, change, mitigation, adaptation as well. There's, of course, many options on the table if, for example, as you said, we had the finances unlocked to do it. But there's also some questions that are not just about the finances or also about some of these ideological aspects that you've mentioned of kind of how land is viewed and who's making these sorts of decisions. So, for instance, how would we avoid kind of replicating some settler colonialist policies around this? Land should be used for this, and you're not allowed to use it in these ways. You know, if we're making, I don't know, nature reserves or things like that, there are probably ways to do that without replicating the sorts of things that settler colonialist policies did with indigenous peoples and reservations. But there's also some overlaps that are probably worth discussing.
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B
Absolutely, there are. And I mean, in a sense, I think the way I'd put it is this. We now have a greater awareness of the climate crisis. And the reason we have a greater awareness for the climate crisis is because the climate crisis is now hitting the temperate parts of the world where the wealthy live in parts of the world that have seen increased desertification for decades. For half a century, when they have talked about climate crisis, they have been dismissed. So there are many parts of the world where there's a persistent state of starvation, persistent state of famine. Lake Chad has evaporated to 80% of its size. So you've seen these for a long time. And people were talking about climate crises long before, but somehow they were irrelevant. But when the climate crisis started to hit the temperate regions, and actually you and me and we had to start dealing with excess flooding and excess heat and all kinds of stuff, then we thought, oh, maybe there's a scientific reason for this. Now, of course, we know already that even, even oil companies already knew about the impact of this Damage because they had scientists who were telling them that, they were just denying it. So effectively. The fact is that even on the mitigation side now, we are still deeply emboldened to those kinds of power structures. And you see this very much in your own context in the United States of America, where climate change is defined as an ideology and that somehow there is no evidence for any of this. And this is, then this lie is effectively perpetrated and repeated in various different sources to cast aspersions on it. In places where there is slightly greater acceptance that climate change is in fact a reality, we often have again, system modification attempts. One of the ones that I talk about in the book is the so called 30 by 30, this notion that by 2030, 30% of the globe should be reserved for wilderness. Now, on the face of it, it sounds good. On the face of it, the argument is nature is powerful enough to heal itself. So you find the places where biodiversity is most intact and you throw a protective ring around them, you effectively allow those places to regenerate. And then hopefully these places, you know, talking about places like the Amazon, the Congo basin, various forests around the world, they will then act as the carbon sinks and they will somehow mitigate climate change. Now, there is good science behind that, there's no question about that. But actually there are a number of other questions you have to ask. One, those places where biodiversity is most intact, they are places where indigenous peoples have their custodianship of the land. It's where indigenous peoples have effectively prevented the settled state from making inroads, literally in roads and literally building infrastructure. So actually, if you take those indigenous peoples out of those areas, as 30 by 30 envisages, what you'll in fact do is leave those 30% of the areas also at the behest of the settled state. And there's no guarantee they will protect the rights. So that's one element to it. There's another element. You know, if you were, if you or I had a crisis, a budgetary crisis, God forbid, and we were thinking about, you know, how do we make ends meet? You start looking at the big ticket items on, that you're spending on. You don't look at the small marginal items. You know, you think about, well, do I need such a big house? Do I need such a car? You don't think, well, maybe I'll put the light off. You know, maybe I'll read in the dark. So if we are to tackle climate change and if we are serious about tackle that are tackling climate change, my question is what happens in the 70%? Why should we not tackle the 70%? Why should we start bullying indigenous peoples out of the 30%? And we already have evidence of this, right? We lived through Covid, we lived through an effective shutdown. And in that effective shutdown we already saw good signs in nature regenerating itself because we didn't pump out as much fossil fuel as we did in so called normal times. But now that Covid is finished, instead of tackling where the 70% perpetrators of the climate crisis are, we go after the marginal because we think, well, we can bully you out of the land, you're not going to be powerful enough to fight back. So in a sense, even the plans we have right now are deeply colonial and that has to change. And we keep talking about green climate plans and these green climate plans are all attempts to stave off, well, not all of them, let's be fair, I guess many elements of them are attempts to stave off the hardcore call from especially the youth, like the Pacific island case in the International Court of Justice for real meaningful change. Not just tinkering at the edges and hoping things will get better, but real meaningful change. And that real meaningful change really will only come if we as a globe accept the fact that we need some pretty radical solutions if we are going to get back on track and somehow find ways to mitigate against the climate crisis.
- [38:53]
C
So not easy things then?
- [38:55]
B
Not easy things at all? No, if they were easy, they would have been done.
- [38:58]
C
Exactly. Well, one of the things that has not been done because it is not easy, in fact, you say it might be one of the most challenging steps needed would be an idea that seems kind of simple, that colonial crime is a legal wrong. That sounds really simple to say. Why is that so hard to actually enact?
- [39:19]
B
Yeah, it's really hard because I think where we are right now, societies are incredibly polarized. I would say it's a sponsored polarization. It's a sponsored polarization by effectively a 1% who are very, very keen to maintain the system as it is, and a 90% of people who are actually largely angry at the fact that they're not getting better off and they're quite happy to blame the 10% who they are told is a scapegoat. So it's extremely difficult in this environment to talk about colonial crime because that's seen as an attack. And look, it's not even anybody who reads history will tell you Europeans weren't the only people who colonized. There were many, many colonial regimes across the world. There were many more brutal colonial regimes that happened. The difference between those and the European version of them is the European version hardwired a system, and that system simply isn't good for us. It's almost like we as a body are now being exposed to arsenic on a regular basis as a consequence of this, and ultimately it will just lead to death. And we seem to have no mechanism by which we can ask these questions, because the moment you start asking the question, you're told, oh, you're trying to blame people, and, oh, why should we pay for the crimes of the past? So it needs a very sophisticated and strategically adept discussion to even start that process. And it has to be done gently, and it has to be done. I mean, finger pointing is inevitable, but it has to be. It can't be finger pointing against an entire population. So you can't just say, well, all persons of European descent are therefore responsible for colonial crime, and therefore all persons of European descent should pay for it. What we need to do is we need to identify the specific individuals who may have been of European descent, who may have perpetrated this, and guess what? Who have overwhelmingly benefited from this. The rest of persons of European descent haven't benefited as much as these individuals have. So it's a very very. Has to be very carefully framed in terms of going past some attempt at a, you know, at a. I guess I'm almost reluctant to use the word witch hunt because I don't like that terminology at all. And witches particularly gendered as well. But if you don't want it to be a process by which you have people with stakes going after people they don't like. But at the same time, we do need a targeted process by which the wealth that these individuals still hold can actually be unleashed, not just for the benefit of African or Asian or Latin American or victims of colonization, but even in their own societies, where I would argue that many people are living in a colonial present in many of the OECD countries, and they are being misled into believing that they have some enemy scapegoat, some bogeyman that is taking away their rights, when in fact what is happening is a steady, steady, steady concentration of wealth in the hands of the few who are. Who are then mobilizing every single trick in the book, they have to prevent system change.
- [42:24]
C
So if we're trying to avoid then the two problems here that you've outlined, right, One, painting everyone with way too broad a brush, or going after people motivated less by sort of historical evidence than kind of current political Beefs with people, I suppose. What could accepting wrongful action or compensation, what could that look like if it was done properly? I mean, to some extent those conversations tend to go along the lines of find a person whose great great great great grandfather was harmed in this way by this other person's great great great great grandfather and then calculate how much money it would have been then and pay it. Like that's potentially one route. But if we're talking about compensation, what are some other options we might want to consider?
- [43:11]
B
Yeah, so this is where the book tries to, tries to put out a number of different avenues. But I guess in terms of unjust enric to emphasize on that is that the wealth that was taken from many of these, many of these countries did not get distributed fairly. Even in the colonial country in which they were, which effectively benefited. Even in the colonial country, the wealth got concentrated in very specific hands. And actually we can trace that because these hands were usually private. These were private corporations. And those private corporations had to fill tax returns and those private corporations had to explain to the state where its money was. And now, of course, they managed to evade reporting on some of it, but the vast amount of it is in the public archives. So we need a very targeted approach. So when you hear of a company that's blue chip and has existed for 100 or 200 years, well, check what they did, check what the origins are. Let's try to find that out. Because actually the active state, the actual public coffers of almost every state in the world, there's a few exceptions, of course, Norway comes to mind, Saudi Arabia, Qatar come to mind. But the public coffers of most states are pretty empty and many are in deficit. So even if you were to win your argument on colonial crime, the state can't pay out. I mean, the estimation is that Britain owes India 43 trillion. That's just an impossible number to even conceptualize. But actually the wealth that was taken went into private hands. It had, it owns property. A lot of it is sitting behind tax havens, A lot of it is protected and a lot of it is giving intergenerational benefits. So we need to ask ourselves if we do have solutions on hand, unpalatable as they might be, should we not try to train our eyes and train our minds on seeking to bring those resources back to address what is an existential crisis? And that's the level at which we have to do it. It's not an individual going after somebody else's great grandfather to try and find out what they did it's actually looking at this at a systemic level and looking at it in a place where the acquisition costs of that wealth are actually worth it. Because if you went broke it down to the individual, even going after a specific individual and building the kind of evidential trail that you might need, assuming it was even possible to do that, the chances are that it would take so many resources, it would be impossible. Now, it has to be said that in the context of Britain and Barbados and sugar plantations, some of that is happening actually from the side of the former plantation owners who have come forward and said, mea culpa. They've accepted a form of reparations. They themselves are pushing it because they themselves don't want to continue in their ancestral line, the fact that they are effectively the descendants of people who stole and pillaged and effectively made do for centuries after. So there's a little bit of a psychological element here in working with people, but there's also a strategic element in trying to understand what is the best route forward in gaining accountability for these colonial crimes. And the argument the book makes is that looking at corporations in particular is important, not just because these corporations unfairly gained, but because these corporations continue to perpetrate a system that's giving us the current climate crisis.
- [46:36]
C
That's definitely a interesting way forward that avoids some of these problems of potential witch hunts, as you said. Is there anything else from the book that we haven't mentioned yet that you want to make sure we discuss?
- [46:48]
B
I mean, in a sense, one of the things that your listeners might find interesting, I hope they find it interesting, is to provide alternatives to the sovereign state. Now, the book isn't saying smash the sovereign state. I mean, there's no power to do that, even if that was desirable. Not sure it would really work out. But what the book is doing is basically it's making the argument that there are three big challenges that we face. We face a big question on what to do about climate change. That's the biggest crisis we face a big question on how do you construct an economy that's not based on extraction, which is effectively leading to scarcity? And we face a big crisis on migration, which is, of course, shaking the foundations of many formerly democratic states and pushing them into autocracies. Now the book is saying that none of these three problems can really be addressed by the sovereign state as a unit. They simply can't. They have to be addressed in a bigger format. You know, Covid didn't stop at the border between India and Pakistan to pay attention to customs Rules, it just simply transcended it. Migration trails don't stop at the border, climate. So these are elements that are happening. And the book argues that if you look beyond European colonization at a wider history, because people did exist before Europe came to those parts of the world. And if you look at those wider histories, what you see are that there were regional systems that existed. They were not quite systems of governance, but they were interactions. And so the book actually labels and it's a work in progress. In fact, I have a later book that came out this year, this book came out last year. I have a book that came out in 2025 which develops this idea further. But it argues that it's more useful to look at the world as 17 sub regions. Now, in the context of the typography described, the polar regions are considered one. So that leaves 16 inhabited regions of the world. And it basically argues that if you can build those collaborations, irrespective of whether the sovereign state is at the heart of this or civil society is the heart of it, or dare I say even corporations are at the heart of it, if you can look at building those kinds of collaborations, we will have the wherewithal to address these at a more systemic level. And the 16 sub regions. So for instance, Africa has broken into five sub regions. This is not my classification, this is what the African Union uses. But it distinguishes North Africa of, you know, Morocco, Libya, Mauritania, Tunisia, from West Africa, of Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone, Cote d'. Ivoire. It distinguishes that from Southern Africa, Mozambique, Angola, where I know you've also worked, South Africa. Botswana distinguishes that from East Africa or from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and then from Central Africa of the drc. So there are distinct regions, sub regions in the world, and they have specific problems which require detailed attention to be able to address it. Something like 30 by 30, a one size fits all. I mean, what is that? Just neatness? Like that's not going to give us a solution that works. Similarly, when you look at Asia, you know, the book makes the point that the only thing common between Japan and Jordan is that they start with a J. And that's in the English language. There's nothing else that suggests that Japan and Jordan are part of one continent. And by the way, even the continent, so called continent of Asia, what's the geographic dimension? Apparently it's everything east of the Urals, but the Urals don't go from north to south. And by the way, the largest country in Asia still today is European and that's Russia, the country with the largest landmass. So it's asking people to think through these easy solutions we have of thinking of the world as sovereign state. So, for instance, Asia distinguishes East Asia of China, Japan, Korea, Korea and Mongolia from Southeast Asia, of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Indonesia, which are distinct from South Asia, which are distinct from Central Asia. So I would say that that's one of the elements that people perhaps ought to look at just in terms of thinking through what do we need to do to achieve the system change we keep talking about.
- [51:05]
C
Well, and this is clearly something you're continuing to work on with, as you said, your more recent book, is there anything you're working on at the moment that might be upcoming you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [51:16]
B
I mean, I'd draw your attention of your listeners to this book on international law and the reconceptualization of territorial boundaries. I mean, what it basically does is it looks at a few men who, many of whom all trained together as international lawyers at Cambridge University, who then went out and literally drew lines on maps and named stuff after them. You know, they were not bashful. Cecil Rhodes decided he would take part of that territory called, he called it after himself, Rhodesia. You have, of course, Sykes, Mark Sykes. You've got Ratcliffe. You've got a whole bunch of these people who went out and drew lines on maps, and those lines then became breathed into the hard world, hardwired system we have of sovereign states. So I draw attention to your readers to that. There's a little bit of it that is biographical in terms of some of these people and what their motivations were, a little bit as historical in terms of what justifications they gave. It tries to answer the question of how come the biggest state in Asia is European. It talks about the process by which Russia took over vast territories north of China and Japan. So it might be of interest to your international law readers who are we are so conditioned to think about the state and international law as being a state element. You know, it fails to realize its own origins of international law in itself and the difficulties that exist in how this lens is now meant to be relevant and resonant to a world where Western power is waning.
- [52:45]
C
Well, that certainly is an area of a lot of interest, I think, to many listeners. So thank you for highlighting that. And, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Calibrating Colonial Reparations and the Crime of Unjust Enrichment, published by Bristol University Press in 2024. Joshua, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [53:04]
B
It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much and keep up. The great Sam.