Dr. Franziska Boehme Newell published a new article in a Global Studies Quarterly special issue on political apologies and historical wrongs in International Relations. In the article entitled “Normative Expectations and the Colonial Past: Apologies and Art Restitution to Former Colonies in France and Germany,” she compares France’s and Germany’s approach to apologies and art restitution to its former colonies in Africa. The analysis shows that both countries’ acknowledgement of colonial crimes was delayed in part because of willful avoidance by museum and culture administrators but also because other violent pasts—Vichy, Algeria, and the Holocaust—were first addressed through public memory. It was ultimately various social pressures from within and outside of each country, in the form of lawsuits by victim groups and official demands for apology and restitution, that led to domestic mobilization toward more open engagement with their respective colonial pasts.
Read the full article here: https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/2/4/ksac053/6753236
