The Power of the Persecuted: Why Governments Create Domestic Reparations Programs

Why would a state voluntarily pay reparations to citizens against whom it has committed human rights abuses when those citizens were recently so reviled, so powerless, that the state was able to abuse them without restraint? The very fact that domestic reparations programs exist is a puzzle. Despite the fact that it takes a great deal of political will to draft, pass, and implement a reparations program, dozens of them are currently being administered all around the world. The aim of The Power of the Persecuted is to solve that puzzle by answering a fundamental question: After governments commit severe human rights abuses against their own citizens, what motivates these governments (or their successors) to promise and pay reparations for their crimes? This book theorizes that, in keeping with the political process model developed by the social movement literature, domestic reparations programs are the result of victim group mobilization.

The Power of the Persecuted offers the first cross-national, systematic test of this theory's applicability to reparations by applying it to three case studies: The West German government's reparations decisions regarding Jewish Germans affected by the Holocaust, the West German government's reparations decisions regarding reparations for Romani Germans persecuted by the Nazis, and the Peruvian government's reparations decisions regarding Peruvians harmed by the country's 1980-2000 Armed Internal Conflict. Using the political process model, original interview data from five countries, and archival sources, these detailed case studies show that when victims' groups mobilize and pressure a formerly abusive state for reparations, those reparations will be forthcoming in most non-autocracies. Conversely, when victims do not organize and demand reparations, reparations will almost certainly not be paid. The Power of the Persecuted demonstrates that the absence, creation, and timing of the case studies' domestic reparations programs are best explained not by economic considerations or international pressure, but rather by the lobbying efforts of organized victims' groups.