Research Article – An African Union-Caribbean Community alliance in the global reparations movement: promises, perils, and pitfalls

[These are two excerpts from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.] Introduction Hilary Beckles (Citation2019) argues that the reparations movement is the most significant political tide of the 21st century in creating a just world. The Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) Reparations Campaign is part of a larger conversation in the new worldmaking process. CARICOM’s campaign is a movement that aims to address the damage caused by transatlantic slavery and its long-lasting adverse effects on Indigenous Peoples and Africans who were enslaved. The campaign, which regional governments spearhead, has made a strong case for the importance of transnationalism in advocating for redress. In a significant development, the African Union (AU) and CARICOM held their Inaugural Annual Summit on 7 September 2021, focusing on establishing trade and investment between the two regional blocs. The two transregional regimes formalised a reparative justice alliance to address crimes against humanity. To bolster this effort, representatives from the AU, CARICOM, and the University of the West Indies (UWI) convened in Bridgetown, Barbados, in July 2023 to form a coalition demanding reparations for historical crimes. A follow-up reparations conference was held in November 2023 in Accra, Ghana, where political leaders from Latin...