5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

While in recent years, the unspeakable, genocidal global atrocity of colonialism has become more and more acknowledged, responses to this have often remained extremely tokenistic and reduced to vague land acknowledgements or the like. This session aims to discuss what should be the reparations for the wide range of atrocities of colonialism, including the genocides on native populations, stealing of land by settler colonization, slavery and the various forms of economic exploitation and resource extraction, historical and contemporary ones. The session encourages scholars to formalize various calls for reparations and to connect to activism. It also calls for discussing the role that sociologists should take in bringing about social justice globally, e.g., by calling for reparations.