Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics is a study in normative and critical theory of how to conceptualize practices of justice and reconciliation that aim to respond to colonial injustices in international and transnational contexts. Examining cases of colonial war, genocide, forced sexual labour, forcible incorporation, and dispossession, this book highlights the structural injustices involved in colonialism, based on race, class, and gender, and shows that interactional practices of justice and reconciliation have been inadequate in redressing these structural injustices. The book argues that contemporary moral/political projects of justice and reconciliation in response to the persistent structural injustices of a colonial international order entail strategies of decolonization, decentering, and disalienation that go beyond interactional practices of accountability and reparation, beyond victims and perpetrators, and beyond a statist world order.
Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, and Coordinator of the Research Group on Global Justice of the Yan P. Lin Centre. She received her PhD in 2000 from the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests intersect political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative studies of humanitarianism and intervention in world politics; theories and practices of justice and reconciliation; colonialism and structural injustice; and cosmopolitanism, global justice, and the world state. She is the author of Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). In 2018, she was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She has received research fellowships from the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University (2013), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2010-11), and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (2004-5). Lu serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Journal of International Political Theory, and Politics, Groups, and Identities.