25 Years After 3rd World Conference Against Racism: Peoples’ Victories, Reparative Justice, and the Struggles Ahead

The third World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR), which was held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, represents a watershed moment in the struggles for social justice and reparations. The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) provided an important international framework for confronting racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and for addressing the enduring consequences of chattel slavery and colonialism. 

Black and oppressed peoples across the world have been organising at the levels of the state and among peoples regardless of the artificial boundaries that seek to impede the solidarities required for equity, equality, non-discrimination, and repair. From anti-slavery rebellions and wars to the Pan African Congresses of the early twentieth century, through the anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggles, the United Nations Decades to Combat Racism, and the global movement for reparations, the historical crimes committed against African peoples steadily moved from the margins of international diplomacy toward the centre of the global political and human rights agenda.

The multigenerational struggle has shown that while the ruling class remains important for the achievements since Durban, meaningful reparations always come from below, where Africans and oppressed peoples build networks and solidarity to resist racialized injustices and demand justice for historical atrocities. 

The formal UN process began with General Assembly Resolution 52/111 of 12 December 1997, but its political genealogy extended much further back. Between 1997 and 2001, governments, scholars, activists and organisations of people of African descent engaged in extensive national, regional and international mobilisation. The movement from Durban in 2001 to the General Assembly's declaration in 2026 about slavery being the gravest crime against humanity must therefore be understood as part of a much longer struggle by African peoples and their descendants to place the history of the transatlantic slave trade at the centre of the history of modern humanity.

The process reached a critical stage in Santiago de Chile in December 2000, where the concerns of people of African descent in the Americas were forcefully brought into the international preparatory process. The European Regional Meeting in Strasbourg, France (11-13 October 2000) had preceded the Santiago conference, while the African Regional Conference in Dakar, Senegal (22-24 January 2001), and the Asian Regional Preparatory Meeting in Tehran, Iran (19-21 February 2001) followed the American regional meeting. The Regional Seminar of Experts in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (4-6 October 2000) centred on prevention of racial and ethnic conflicts in Africa. The Expert Seminar for Europe held in Warsaw, Poland (5-7 July 2001) focused on the protection of minorities and vulnerable groups, and how to improve the situation of the Roma, Sinti and Traveller communities. The Seminar for Asia-Pacific, in Bangkok, Thailand (5-7 September 2000) examined xenophobia against migrant workers and human trafficking, while that of the Americas in Santiago, Chile (25-27 October 2000) addressed measures to combat racial discrimination against vulnerable groups. Geneva had two such Seminars (6-8 December 1999 and 16-18 February 2000) which respectively explored racism, refugeeism, multi-ethnic states, and available remedies to victims of acts of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerances. 

NGO forums were held in Warsaw (15-18 November 2000), Quito, Ecuador (13-16 March 2001), Kathmandu, Nepal (27-29 April 2001), Cairo, Egypt (19-22 July 2001), and during the Regional Preparatory Committee (Prepcoms). The NGO forums united grassroots groups, indigenous communities, and human rights defenders from all corners of the world and provided the civil society base that challenged historical injustices from enslavements and colonialism, to discriminations against minorities, untouchables, indigenous peoples, and other despised groups across the world. The regional meetings together with the mobilisation of civil society, helped create the political conditions for Durban.

When the United Nations passed resolution A/RES/80/250 of March 2026, this ground breaking moment exposed the continuing hesitation on the part of countries responsible for crimes against Black and Indigenous peoples to demonstrate accountability for a global economy built on the commodification of African bodies. 

As Charles Brooks’argues in this issue, the language of the recent UN resolution built on Durban’s foundations and added the descriptor “gravest.” Durban had amplified the language from the Santiago Prepcom where participating governments and civil organizations of Afro-decendants declared the institution and practice of enslavement in the Americas a crime against humanity. The Santiago Declaration from the American Preparatory Meeting in Chile (5-7 December, 2000), in the lead up to the Durban Conference, was unequivocal on the genocide against native peoples and the marginalization, structural poverty, discrimination and exclusion suffered by African descendants in the Western Hemisphere. It was at the Chile conference the term “Afro-descendants” was adopted which led to an awakening of the Black peoples in Latin America. Afro-descendants in Brazil then could identify as Afro-Brazilian, those from Uruguay as Afro-Uruguayans, and those from Chile as Afro-Chileans.

Durban has been a tremendous victory for peoples of Global Africa and humanity. Over 200 million people in Latin America now identify as African descendants. Before Durban, Black could not even appear in the census done in many countries in that region. The rising politics of the Black people in Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Venezuela are inextricable from the Durban Conference.

In the United States, the battleground over reparations has made some gains in legislation, such as H.R. 40 and H.Res.414, which mandate an entity to study and develop proposals for reparative justice for Afro-descendants. These laws emphasize the country’s moral and legal obligations to provide reparations for the “crime of enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.” Mahder Serekberhan’s article in this issue covers a recent conference organized to commemorate Durban and highlight not only the struggles and victory for reparations in New York state, but also the delicate questions of lineage.

Past efforts at reparations in various states in the US have been pockets of isolated payments to individuals whose enslavers’ property had been confiscated or that the enslavers fled from accountability. The land question exposes the failure of reparative measures that emphasize repairs in material conditions. Measures such as the Homestead Act and Field Order No 15 in the 19th century did not succeed in providing lands for Black peoples. The compensation component of the reparative programme of the 20th and 21st centuries are based on lineage and the debate about lineage including survivors of atrocities such as the 1923 racial pogrom against Blacks in Rosewood, Florida. Different financial compensations have been secured by sections of the Black community. The intellectual and theoretical positions continue to take the struggle away from the grassroots and collective uplift to focus predominantly on lineage.

The Caribbean represents another important location of the reparative struggle. Tennyson Joseph in this issue unravels the contradictions in this site of the struggle. Whether from the peoples’ or government’s standpoint the cohesion of the Caribbean, the CARICOM reparations movement and its ten point plan, despite the state-centric nature, represents a major political intervention which followed directly from the Durban Conference. Joseph demonstrates the inadequacy of cohesion at the state, whereas Horace Campbell’s article explains why. Campbell’s article reflects a period of reckoning, in which countries such as Ghana are being radicalized, as Jamaica and the wider Caribbean navigate a delicate moment in the broader reparations struggle.

The AU, African governments, intellectuals have responded to reparative claims from the Abuja call to the killing of Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale (M.K.O.) Abiola in 1998, and where we are going now. The AU’s 2025 theme on justice for Africans and peoples of African descent through reparations became a prelude to the declaration of 2026-2036 as the decade of reparations. Ghana’s President Mahama served as the AU champion for reparations in 2025 in this part of a long history of reparative justice. 

The African ruling class retreated amid bullying by their European counterparts during the Durban meeting and even after the UN declaration of the transatlantic enslavement as the gravest crime against humanity to the extent that it does not appear much in their speeches and conversations let alone curriculums. Similar posture was observable when the UN declared apartheid as a crime against humanity. Gregory Elphas’ article further locates these retreats in expulsion of African migrants by African states, which is not only xenophobic but contrary to reparative justice in a context where Africans do not live in national borders of their own making. 

The solidarity and fortitude required for the reparations claims remains at the centre of the conversations around justice against the transatlantic enslavement by European enslavers and the accompanying racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerances on racialized peoples.

The resurgence of neofascist and right-wing forces exposes the reversals in the struggle against racism. Racism and imperial power continue to structure the political, economic and social realities of the planet. Racial profiling is not simply a matter of individual prejudice but is embedded in policing, border regimes, immigration systems, security institutions and representations of African peoples. The criminalisation of African communities is reinforced by surveillance, selective crime statistics and media narratives that transform individual acts into evidence of collective African pathology. Afrophobia and anti-Africanism have also intensified, including within African societies themselves. The stocktaking of Durban reveals contradictions within the South African society and other parts of Africa. Gregory Elphas, Ismail Abukar, Sani Khamees, Tafahri Munjatta examine these contradictions in this issue. Abukar asks Pan Africanists to also look inwards, in societies like Somalia where slave trade hierarchies have been formalized by state institutions yet to be transformed. 

Outside the continent, the resurgence of right-wing nationalism increasingly casts African migrants, refugees and people of African descent as scapegoats for economic and social crises. Tightened borders, deportations, detention, racialised surveillance and the militarisation of migration are presented as measures to defend national sovereignty and cultural identity, while obscuring the continued relationship between Western prosperity and the extraction of African labour and resources. The struggle against racism must therefore be situated within the broader struggle against imperialism, racial capitalism and the political fragmentation of African peoples. Essam Elkorghli in this issue explores the linkages between zionism and racism, and Pan-African solidarity for reparative justice from Libya to Palestine and related spaces. It is time for the African intelligentsia and institutions of learning to stand up. We can draw lessons from Cape Coast, as highlighted by Mario Nisbett in this issue, on the necessity to advance research agendas, pedagogy, and teaching built on the victories of Durban and promoting reparative justice.

The next 25 years demand building African independence, unity, sovereignty, and solidarity by confronting the structures that reproduce dependency, division and structural racism, whether internal or external, as we facilitate repairs across the continent and throughout Global Africa.

Mapambano yanaendelea!!

A luta continua!!

Harakati zinaendelea!!