New Books Network Joshua Castellino, "Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations and The Crime of Unjust Enrichment" (Policy Press, 2025)
Nov 4, 2025
In this enlightening discussion, Joshua Castellino, a prominent Professor of international and comparative law at Brunel University London, shares his insights on the ongoing impacts of colonial legacies. He elaborates on the legal barriers to addressing historical injustices and proposes a framework to reclaim wealth from corporations for reparations. Castellino draws connections between colonial extraction and the climate crisis, advocating for the inclusion of indigenous knowledge in climate solutions. His work aims to reshape the conversation around decolonization and equitable justice.
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Law Hardwired Post-Colonial Inequality
- International law's failures created deep structural impediments in post-colonial states.
- These legal blind spots perpetuate injustice across roughly 60 countries Joshua Castellino has studied.
Technical Hurdles Block Redress
- Colonial-era legal rules like statutes of limitation and evidentiary gaps block accountability for historical harms.
- Tracing facts and valuing compensation across time remain major legal and practical hurdles.
Three Legacies That Shape Modern States
- Three hardwired colonial legacies: sovereign-state centrism, imposed territoriality, and extractive economics shape today's problems.
- These legacies constrain governance choices and normalize resource extraction as development.
