While colonialism is often viewed as a historical chapter, its legacies – intertwined with structural racism and discrimination – continue to shape societies both within and beyond Europe. In response, a dynamic field of redress initiatives is emerging across Europe with a wide range of societal actors including grassroots and civil society organisations, communities, and local institutions persistently calling for concrete measures to confront the enduring impacts of colonialism. Demands for redress range from legal and policy reform to symbolic and material reparations, formal apologies, truth-seeking processes, restitution, education, and memorialisation. This has resulted in a dense and dynamic landscape of initiatives, reflecting diverse understandings of what redress means and how it should be pursued.
This plurality of actions and voices is a strength in itself, showcasing the bottom-up and multifaceted nature of efforts and struggles for redress. Yet, this decentralisation also comes with challenges: initiatives often operate in isolation, with limited opportunities for cross-sector exchange, visibility, or mutual learning. This fragmentation can reduce the collective impact of redress efforts and obscure the broader significance of the movement.
RedressHub seeks to bridge this gap by building an innovative online platform to map and connect efforts addressing colonial harms and their ongoing legacies – first in Belgium, and later across other European contexts. By bringing people and data together, RedressHub wants to provide a dynamic platform for cross-sector collaboration on justice initiatives, and aspires to become an indispensable resource for grassroots organizations, community leaders, policymakers, educators, human rights practitioners, and others. It will support learning about, designing, and implementing redress initiatives in Belgium and beyond.
The platform’s development follows two interrelated tracks that are in continuous dialogue:
The co-creation track actively involves key stakeholders in shaping RedressHub through a collaborative process. This ensures they play a central role in defining both the conceptual and practical dimensions of the platform. For example, by contributing to the development of a comprehensive typology for analysing harm and repair, as well as informing the platform’s overarching goals, concrete functionalities and visual outlook. This approach grounds the platform’s development in the needs, experiences, and insights of diverse user communities. Read more about the Co-Creation Track.
The technical track focuses on the technological development and implementation of RedressHub. The mapping will not only rely on ‘manual’ searches and conventional data collection, but combine this with automated information retrieval, assisted by large language models (LLMs). The technical track encompasses tasks such as designing the information retrieval pipeline, modeling the database structure, building the website interface, the iterative collection and processing of data to populate the database, conducting performance testing, and ensuring data security. Activities in this track are informed by the priorities and insights gathered through the (bilateral) meetings and focus group sessions with stakeholders. Read more about the Technical Track.
