Book Review: Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, by Alasia Nuti

• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211048005
• Author: Timothy Waligore
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 539

context in which discussions often tend to be simplistic and/or polemical in

character.

Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, by

Alasia Nuti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 229 pp.

Reviewed by: Timothy Waligore, Department of Political Science, Pace University,

New York, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211048005

The normative political theory literature on reparations and redress for his-

torical injustice has until recently been dominated by backward-looking and

forward-looking approaches. In the last decade, the “structural injustice”

approach, exemplified by the works of Iris Marion Young and Catherine Lu,

has advanced these debates by focusing on unjust social-structural processes

reproduced over time.1 Alasia Nuti’s book, Injustice and the Reproduction of

History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, makes three important

contributions: it provides a sophisticated and masterful development of the

structural injustice approach; it focuses on redress for women, a group not

usually analyzed in the historical injustice literature; and it incorporates

backward-looking elements into the structural injustice approach.

The first part of the book develops Nuti’s framework on the normative

significance of the past. In chapter 2, Nuti critically analyzes the two main

approaches. Backward-looking approaches place independent normative

significance on rectifying past events now. They face the “impracticability

objection”: redressing all past injustice is an impossible task. No criterion

exists to distinguish what to redress or not (15). Forward-looking approaches

say reparations are justified if they help “tackle an unjust or problematic

present condition” (16). For example, reparations may be pragmatically jus-

tified if they appeal to non-egalitarians or instrumentally justified to reduce

relations of distrust (16). They face the “redundancy objection”: consider-

ations of historical injustice would lose significance in a world with a just

distribution of resources and opportunities (17). Nuti claims that both

approaches suffer from an “under-theorization of history, specifically of

how persistence and change are interrelated” (19, emphasis in the original).

1. Catherine Lu, Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2017); Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for

Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 7.