Dignity Restorations: In General[edit]

Dignity restoration are to be distinguished from remedies. Remedies include such practices as restoration, reparations, and restitution. Compensatory remedies are intended to provide the injured party with a sum of money to make up for the injury suffered.^[1] In contrast, remedies in restitution are intended to deprive a wrongdoer of ill-gotten gains obtained at the victim’s expense. Finally, equitable remedies require the wrongdoer to act in a way to right his or her wrong or to prevent further injuries from occurring. (See also Reparations (transitional justice) for a discussion of dignity restoration in the context of reparations.)

During war or violent conflict, property rights are frequently disheveled and dignity takings routinely occur. Once the dust settles and the fighting stops, dignity restoration is necessary. Dignity restoration is “providing material compensation to dispossessed populations through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency” and is the appropriate remedy for dignity taking.^[2] Dignity restoration is necessary because it is more of a compensation for the inflicted harm than mere reparations.^[2][3] Because the process of dignity restoration is prescribed on autonomy, it needs to account for dispossessed people who want both integration and separation.^[2]

Dignity Restorations Precipitated by Hostilities: Scholarly Research[edit]

Scholars Kedar, Guzman, Albert, Brophy, Hulscebosch, and Veraart, among others, write about dignity takings and dignity restoration that are precipitated by hostilities.

Alexandre Kedar: Ikrit Villagers[edit]

Kedar discusses the dispossession of the Ikrit Villagers, who are Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel.^[4] Under the guise of security concerns, the Israeli military evacuated the village and when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled the military must facilitate their return, the military roundly ignored the court and proceeded to demolish the village while the court proceedings were still pending.^[4] In his cursory review, Kedar does not find evidence that the Israeli army intended to dehumanize or infantilize the Ikrit Villages.^[4] He instead leaves it to other scholars to more closely examine evidence of intentional or unintentional dehumanization and infantilization.

Daniel Hulsebosch: American British Loyalists[edit]

Daniel Hulsebosch is a legal historian at NYU School of Law who argues that, during the American Revolutionary War, the state subjected Loyalists to a civil death by expropriating their properties, revoking their professional licenses, annulling their civil and political rights, and detaining and banishing them.^[5] Hulsebosch argues that Loyalists were neither dehumanized or infantilized because their identity was a choice.^[5][6] In contrast, Atuahene (see below) argues that the American revolutionary government dehumanized Loyalists by taking their lives—the most severe form of dehumanization.^[2] The state also infantilized Loyalists by stripping them of their most essential rights, and thus impairing their basic autonomy.^[5][7] That is, America’s nascent state subjected Loyalists to dignity takings by depriving them of their property alongside acts of dehumanization and infantilization. Through this debate, we learn that there are different types of dignity takings. For some people, the source of their oppression is an identity that they chose and can disavow at any time, while others are subjugated due to an identity that they cannot escape.^[2] Scholars and policymakers must not equivocate these two qualitatively different types of dignity takings.

Moreover, the case of the Loyalists offers important lessons for students of dignity restoration. Hulsebosch writes that—so long as the Loyalists solemnly renounced their allegiances to the British Empire—the fledgling American nation permitted their brothers to once again rejoin the fold as equal citizens.^[5] But, even after renouncing their allegiances, most Loyalists either did not receive their property, had to repurchase it, or had to pay fines.^[5] We learn that sometimes there is only a partial dignity restoration: a restoration of dignity without a restoration of property.

Wouter Veraart: World War II[edit]

Wouter Veraart argues that the extermination and dispossession of Jews during World War II was an emblematic dignity taking.^[8] Veraart is a Dutch legal scholar who elaborates the contours of dignity restoration by examining the multiple rounds of compensation offered to Jews in France and the Netherlands. He argues that the first round focused on restoring legal equality to people who had just been thoroughly dehumanized.^[8] The second round shifted the focus from solely monetary remedies for individual harms to monetary and moral remedies for group harms.^[8] Veraart concludes that multiple rounds of dignity restoration is often times necessary because extant circumstances may not allow an immediate and comprehensive remedy.

Alfred Brophy: Tulsa Race Riot[edit]

The iterative nature of dignity restoration is also exhibited in the case of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, which involved the looting, burning, and destruction of African-American property after they had the audacity to resist an extra judicial lynching.^[9] Alfred Brophy—a legal historian at the University of Alabama School of Law—argues that the first round of dignity restoration occurred throughout the course of the twentieth century with America’s gradual establishment of African-Americans as rights-bearing citizens with a full array of substantive rights that they could finally defend judicially and politically.^[9] The second round began 75 years after the Riot when the Oklahoma legislature passed the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act, which created a memorial, provided college scholarships for Greenwood descendants, and allocated funds for Greenwood’s economic development.^[9] In the case of the Tulsa Race Riot, dignity restoration began with the restoration of dignity, and the victims and their descendants finally achieved property restoration three quarters of a century later.

Craig Douglas Albert: Iraqi Kurds[edit]

Craig Douglas Albert argues that Iraqi Kurds have been subjected to multiple rounds of dignity takings under both Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime and ISIS who tried to deny Kurdish self-rule through massive property deprivation accompanied by infantilization and dehumanization in the form of state-led violence.^[10]

Albert—a political scientist—enumerates the circumstances under which the denial of self-rule constitutes infantilization. He argues that, when three conditions are present, failure to grant self-determination establishes infantilization:

1) the will to self-govern;

2) the capacity to self-govern; and

3) when no greater conflict will result from granting sovereignty.

"If any of these three conditions are not present, infantilization has not occurred.”^[10] This is a valuable contribution to the dignity takings/dignity restoration framework.

Diana Esther Guzman-Rodriguez: Colombia[edit]

Colombia’s ongoing civil war has displaced millions of its citizens.^[11] Diana Esther Guzman-Rodriguez, a Colombian legal scholar, argues that sometimes the associated depravation of land, housing, and other property entailed dehumanization or infantilization, but other times it did not.^[12] But, even when there was no dignity taking, Guzman asserts that dignity restoration is still required because it is not only an adequate remedy for dignity takings but also a suitable remedy for other types of massive human rights abuses. In addition, Guzman compares the conception of transformative reparations—embedded in Colombia’s land restitution law—with the idea of dignity restoration. Relying upon a sample of judicial opinions from Colombia’s land restitution court to understand transformative restitution, she claims the main difference is that “while transformative restitution aims to transform social injustices, dignity restoration focuses on reaffirming victims’ humanity and reestablishing their agency.”^[12]

Bernadette Atuahene: Apartheid[edit]

Professor Bernadette Atuahene writes about South Africa’s recent efforts to restore land to those who were dispossessed under colonial and apartheid regimes in her book We Want What’s Ours^[13] (see also Sifuna Okwethu)This empirical study is based on 150 interviews conducted with South Africans who were forcibly dispossessed of their properties and who received compensation through the Land Restitution Commission.^[2][13] South African dignity takings and dignity restoration is a critical case study in this topic because during its transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994, 87 percent of the land was owned by whites even though the only comprised 10% of the population at the time.^[2] This process occurred through a large process that included disappearance, torture, educational disruption, political exclusion, incarceration, sexual violence, and death.^[2] This was because of the widespread land theft which Europeans rationalized by perpetuating the myth that Africans were inferior, uncivilized savages.^[2] In addition, South Africa is also a prime case for this theory because the government has made efforts to implement dignity restoration, and not just reparations.^[2] Although an appropriate remedy, dignity restoration is not easy to implement. Standing in the way are questions concerning which groups and individuals have been affected by dignity taking as well as how much they were affected.^[2]

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