ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the challenges facing various contemporary reparative justice policies. Such policies provide rules and guidelines for reckoning with and repairing past injustice. It discusses how ethics identifies and frames some of the difficulties for states in overseeing a reckoning with the past. It considers the difficulties for states in fashioning some policies that reduces controversy while satisfying widely shared moral concerns for repair and reconciliation. The chapter outlines some of the key concepts at work in discussions of moral repair and policies for reparation. It discusses some of the central difficulties confronting any efforts at moral repair for historic injustice. The chapter briefly sketches aspects of the developing movement for 'restorative justice' and how it offers an alternative or supplement to traditional criminal justice. It highlights some of the difficulties in emphasizing material compensation for historic injustice. The chapter offers some closing thoughts about the potential for policy to promote some moral repair.
