After decades of a cloistered colonial memory that was truncated, skewed, and long dominated by sanitised by colonialist narratives, the Belgian state appears to finally be reckoning with the past and present colonial harms in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. What that reckoning involves, and who has the authority to shape it, remains contested.
In Belgium, an evolving field of redress activity includes state institutions, diaspora and civil society organisations (CSOs), legal claimants, archival and memory projects, and heritage and provenance institutions, each articulating a range of objectives for truth-seeking, recognition, restitution, or decolonisation. Each initiative and the actors that make them up draw on evolving process of naming, blaming, and claiming, mobilising complementary and competing frameworks to make claims about what the colonial past was, what harms it continues to cause, and what claims for repair can be made today.
This project examines how these interconnected truth initiatives interact, and how those interactions shape the emergence of a historical truth regime. It treats redress not as a single, linear, transactional process that is limited temporally or otherwise, and regards historical truth as an evolving, contested object produced through the relations of power, visibility, and knowledge, translated and understood differently across state institutions, grassroots organisations, archives, and courtrooms.
Using a qualitative, actor-centred socio-legal approach, this research seeks to explore both visible and invisible claims for colonial redress and to highlight the everyday practices of redress initiatives in articulating their aspirations, strategies and forms of collective visibility within the Belgium decolonial landscape.
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