Past injustices have afforded dominant societal groups the ability to continuously accrue wealth and have prevented other societal groups from breaking a cycle of poverty, indebtedness and social exclusion. The lack of historical perspective on social, political and economic inequalities on a global and local scale has hindered a critical discussion on the root causes of ongoing poverty worldwide faced primarily by women and people from the Global South. Shifting the discourse on reparations and corrective measures for past inequalities would imply to shift the conversation towards the historical and systemic causes of economic injustice, and material and non-material ways to correct this injustice. My research explores the discursive and political developments pertaining to corrective measures and reparations for past injustices, breaches of human rights and crimes against humanity from an intersectional standpoint. I intend to look at the ways in which the concentration of wealth in specific societal and demographic groups negatively impact our collective ability to devise new systems of economic justice.
Dr. Emilia Roig is a bestselling author, political scientist and award-winning social justice leader. She founded the Center for Intersectional Justice (CIJ) in 2017 and has been dedicated to inspiring people to divest from systems of oppression and to shift collective consciousness ever since. She has taught at universities in France, Germany, and the U.S. on intersectionality theory, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, queer feminism, and international and European law, including DePaul University of Chicago and Columbia University. After earning a Master of Public Policy and an MBA in International Law, she completed her PhD in Political Science at Humboldt University in Berlin and Science Po in France. Prior to her PhD, she worked at the UN in Tanzania and Uganda, at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Cambodia, and at Amnesty International in Germany, and decided to leave the field of international development to focus on social justice in Europe. She was a jury member of the German Nonfiction Prize in 2020, was appointed Ashoka Fellow in 2019, and received the Edition F Award in 2021. She was elected “Most Influential Woman of the Year” in the Impact of Diversity Award in 2022. In 2024 she joined the Käthe Hamburger Research Center on Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg.