The Renewed International Struggle for Colonial Reparations

(Photo by the Office of the Vice President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

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From June 17 to 19, 2026, the ‘Next Steps High-Level Consultative Conference’ was held in Accra, Ghana, to discuss translating the Landmark UN Resolution on the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans into a common framework of actionable commitments for a just and equitable world order. The conference was called in response to a historic UN Resolution in March of 2026 that condemned the transatlantic slave trade by majority vote as “the gravest crime against humanity.”  

With Pope Leo issuing a formal apology in May on behalf of the Catholic Church’s role in the slave trade, 2026 has seen renewed momentum behind discussion of reparations. Reparations refers to a broad set of policies urging governments of former empires to compensate countries and people harmed by the empire, whether politically, culturally, or through other means. 

The reparations movement has had several wins within the past several decades. France, Britain, Germany, and other countries have been offering public apologies and returning stolen cultural property. However, as Ghanaian President John Drahami Mahama said at the UN General Assembly, “moral justice cannot rely on piecemeal generosity or isolated acts of goodwill.” The Next Steps conference marks a clear evolution of the reparations movement, shifting the discussion away from isolated symbolic apologies toward tangible planning for material, systemic compensation. 

In the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Canada, reparations remain controversial and poorly understood. Critics of reparations often capitalize on a lack of clarity to argue that compensation for the many crimes of colonization is impractical, too expensive, or even harmful. It is crucial, then, to examine the histories of colonization and contemporary reparation movements to better understand why reparations are important and how they can be implemented. 

Why Reparations? 

Following hundreds of years of colonizers mapping the globe, the full-fledged European project of colonization began in 1492. European colonization intensified significantly after the Industrial Revolution in the 1760s. The most consequential colonizing nations included Spain, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany.

Ghana, the host country of the Next Steps conference, was the first British colony in Africa to achieve independence from European colonizers. From 1821 to 1957, European merchants and locals had isolated encounters. Still, the British formally took control of the territory of the state of Asante by force, calling it ‘the Gold Coast’ for its vast gold deposits. 

Throughout this process of conquest and ensuing subjugation, millions of native populations were killed by European colonizers. The Spanish conquest of what is now South America killed tens of millions of Indigenous Peoples through pillage, disease, and a brutal system of forced labour known as the encomienda system. The foundation of what is now Canada and the United States was facilitated by the genocide of Indigenous populations, whether accomplished through destruction of crucial land and agriculture, land theft, involuntary cultural assimilation, or large-scale massacre of people. 

Beyond securing land or trade in valuable goods for Europe, colonization soon became a trade in human beings. As colonization projects began to require labour, the slave trade became a lucrative business, forcing local populations into lifetimes of servitude for commercial needs. From 1500 to 1820, the transatlantic slave trade saw over twelve million Africans kidnapped from Africa alone. Of these twelve million, an estimated 10% were taken from what is now modern-day Ghana. 

Over two million were killed during transportation to the Americas, either directly at the hands of slavers or indirectly from the abysmal conditions during this ‘middle passage.’

A History of Arguments for Reparations

Taken together, this immeasurable siphoning of wealth via resource extraction, land theft, etc., combined with the millions of lives displaced or lost as a result, makes the total monetary value of colonization incalculable. Britain formally abolished slavery in 1833, followed by France in 1848 and the U.S. in 1865. After outlawing slavery, most former colonies gained independence toward the end of the 1960s. Around this time, reparations movements began around the world. The question of ‘why’ was clear to those who suffered, yet the methods and context for each movement depend on the country.

Discussion of reparations worldwide has spiked in the 21st century. In the U.S., discussion regarding reparations for slavery has followed high-profile instances of racial injustice and police brutality. During the Black Lives Matter protests of the 2010s and the George Floyd protests of 2020, many protesters and activists linked systemic inequalities and state violence disproportionately affecting black people in the U.S. to the long-term effects of slavery. 

Protests in former French colonies have continued for decades, while reparations discussions have regained prominence in former British colonies following Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2023. 

Misguided Anti-Reparation Arguments

Despite the massive historical body of evidence that demonstrates that colonization was systemically harmful, this has not stopped anti-reparations activists. In recent years, apologism for imperialism has been on the rise. 

In the UK alone, politicians like Suella Braverman, Nigel Farage, and pop historians like Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson have focused on constructing an image of the British Empire as a ‘benevolent’ force, with colonization a ‘net positive’ in the world. Furthermore, in the British context, the country’s role in abolishing slavery is often used as a self-congratulatory part of its history, shutting down discussion of the empire’s numerous crimes and ultimately arguing that those who suffered under colonization need to get over it.

Given that the UN Resolution specifically condemned the transatlantic slave trade and not other slave trades like the Arab slave trade, critics of reparations for Western colonialism will also object to the focus on Western slavery, arguing that the trade of human beings as property was normal at that time. Not only is this a case of whataboutism, or deflection of criticism, but the two slave trades are fundamentally different in terms of the length of time, annual scale of export, conditions of slavery, and long-term impacts on creating systems of race-based hierarchies. 

While the Arab slave trade occurred over a far longer period of time, the Atlantic slave trade kidnapped 10 times the people annually on average and bound slaves’ descendants to servitude. Even still, what this cynical argument fails to capture is that reparations are not an either-or pursuit; they are a holistic system of justice for slavery and colonization in all its forms, wherever they occurred. 

Why The Renewed Momentum for Reparations Now?

Another key criticism often levelled against reparations activists is timing: why is something from decades in the past relevant today? Have  Western countries not atoned enough for their past sins by providing loans, investment, and aid to their former colonies? 

This short-sighted argument does not take into consideration that global systems of oppression and harm do not simply vanish with the signing of a document or a public apology. Many patterns of colonial activity have continued under new names. This phenomenon, referred to as ‘neocolonialism’, sees former colonizers exerting outsized influence and control over their former colonies, despite their legal independence. 

In a 2022 study, economists and researchers found that from 1990 to 2015, $242 trillion USD in value from resources and labour was extracted from the Global South to the Global North. Regarding aid provision, the researchers also found that this flow of resources outnumbered aid payments sent from the Global North to the Global South by a factor of 30 to 1. 

The inequality between the Global North and the Global South is not only economic but also environmental. Climate change disproportionately affects Global South communities, and this resource extraction further contributes to uneven development. Furthermore, while formal slavery has disappeared, different systems of forced labour exist around the world, whether it be in Canada, the U.S., Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates, or China.  

Neocolonialism & The Urgency of Reparations

These factors all affect the West African nation of Ghana, making its decision to host this conference particularly symbolic. The nation struggles to assert sovereignty over its own natural resources, particularly its gold, and faces other lingering impacts from the colonial era. 

Furthermore, it has an even closer connection to neocolonialism; Kwame Nkrumah, the nation’s first prime minister, was a key theorist of neocolonialism. He was one of the first to acknowledge that even following independence from European colonizers, local economic and political policy would be strongly influenced from outside.

In order to combat this influence, he advocated for pan-Africanism, a unity among newly independent African states with the aim of creating common Africa-wide systems of finance, development, and overall prosperity. 

Nkrumah’s trailblazing activism against continued Western interference in former African colonies eventually led to his overthrow in a Western-backed coup, demonstrating the unfortunate foresight of his thinking; the coup d’etat that unseated him was not the first, nor would it be the last, across Africa with Western help. 

The Next Steps Conference & The Future of Reparations

Ghana shines as a key historical example of why reparations are necessary. Yet many remain skeptical about how reparations can be implemented. Particularly how funds will be raised, how they will reach those most in need, how this will be assessed in the first place, and how such policies will be enforced. 

The UN vote in March and the subsequent conference in Ghana in June have not only reignited discussions of reparations, but have also put forward serious proposals to answer these questions. The conference ended with a pledge from its 80 attendees to meet once a year to further develop a comprehensive framework for administering reparations through a Global Reparations Fund. Beyond this, the conference also put forward concrete measures, including debt relief and cancellation, mutual investment and cultural exchange programs, and support for decolonization across multiple spheres of society. 

This clear articulation of a roadmap for colonial reparations, backed by an international legal framework, has international implications. While it focused strictly on reparations for “Africans and African descendants,” this could pave the way for other formerly colonized and Indigenous Peoples around the world adversely impacted by colonialism to seek restitution using a similar set of legal strategies. 

While there is cause for optimism about the Next Steps conference, it is nonetheless a first step. It is important to point to other similar events that held promise for reparations. In particular, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) held in 2015 similarly set ambitious targets, outlining 94 Calls to Action providing justice for the genocide and subsequent crimes carried out by the Canadian government against its Indigenous Peoples. 

As of 2025, the TRC has unfortunately realized only 15 of its 94 Calls to Action in the 10 years since the commission. Given the international makeup of the Next Steps conference, though, this may allow it to apply its calls to action more urgently and broadly.

Beyond Understanding, Towards Action

At the UN General Assembly held in September, President John Drahami Mahama of Ghana concisely summarized the case for reparations, stating that, “Ghana does not come to this hall to assign guilt for the past. We come to forge a partnership with the present to repair the future.” 

The overall narrative surrounding reparations, the legacy of slavery, and colonialism is beginning to change. Rather than being something that people need to leave in the past, reparations and colonialism are crucial to discuss as politically consequential topics today. 

The Next Steps conference represents this political will. If it follows through on its aims, it could mark a major shift toward undoing the inequalities created by colonial systems. 

Edited by Gabrielle Andrychuk