Superseding historical injustice? New critical assessments

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that debates over historical injustice and Jeremy Waldron’s supersession thesis are helpfully framed by distinguishing between (a) the abstract supersession thesis proper, (b) the temporal orientation of justice, (c) various conceptions of supersession, and (d) arguments against using supersession discourse. This introduction and contributors to this volume advance the debate by discussing Waldron’s later, less examined writings on supersession of sovereignty, group identity, and treaties, as well as public dimensions of supersession and critiques drawn from settler colonial theory and Indigenous perspectives, among others. We discuss the contributions by Gordon Christie, Burke Hendrix, Julio Montero, Esme Murdock, Seunghyun Song, Jeff Spinner-Halev, and Santiago Truccone-Borgogno, and Jeremy Waldron’s reply.

KEYWORDS:

• Supersession
• Jeremy Waldron
• historical injustice
• Indigenous peoples
• sovereignty
• temporal orientation of justice

Acknowledgments

We thank Rahul Kumar, Katie Unger, and Athena Waligore for comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Waldron (1992a, 1992b, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2013); Quist and Veraart (2009). See also the earlier work of Lyons (1977).

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of research undertaken in the project ‘Supersession of Historical Injustice and Changed Circumstances,’ funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under research grant P 30084. Timothy Waligore thanks the Scholarly Research Fund from the Provost’s Office at Pace University for providing funding for release time from teaching.

Notes on contributors

Lukas H. Meyer

Lukas H. Meyer is Professor of Philosophy at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria.

Timothy Waligore

Timothy Waligore is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pace University.