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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minutePublic attention often focuses on apologies, reparations and the return of cultural objects. Yet formal government-to-government requests for redress are less common: in an analysis published in 2023, Manjari Chatterjee Miller reported that governments had not requested compensation in 78% of the cases she examined. She argues that the gap reflects political disagreements within formerly colonized societies as well as disputes with former colonial powers.
What counts as an official request for redress?
Redress can take several forms: an apology, reparations or compensation, or restitution such as returning cultural objects. Here, an official request means a government formally seeking redress from another government. It is not the same as a public campaign, a community’s claim, or a government’s acknowledgment of historical harm.
Miller’s 78% figure concerns compensation requests in the cases she analyzed, not every kind of redress. Her December 2023 article does not provide the underlying case dataset or enough methodological detail to reproduce the statistic, so it should be read as her reported finding rather than a comprehensive count of all former colonies.
Why can a formal request be politically difficult?
Miller’s explanation is that redress can be contentious on both sides of the former colonial relationship. As she puts it, “The answer lies in the fact that colonial pasts and atoning for injustices are controversial—not just in what were perpetrator countries, but also in their victims.”
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A government may face competing accounts of what happened, which events deserve priority, and how responsibility should be assigned. Without some domestic agreement on the history being invoked, leaders may find it difficult to make a claim that speaks for the country as a whole.
Disagreement over who should benefit
Even when a past injustice is acknowledged, people may disagree about which communities were harmed and who should receive an apology, compensation, or other remedy. That question can turn a diplomatic request into a domestic political dispute.
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The power imbalance with former colonial states
Seeking redress from a much wealthier former colonial power can also be politically difficult. Miller’s analysis treats these obstacles as part of the explanation for the relative rarity of formal requests, not as a single explanation that applies in every country.
India: difficulty building agreement about the past
In Miller’s account, India had not officially asked the United Kingdom for an apology over the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre as of the publication of her article in December 2023. This is a dated claim about an official state request; it does not mean that no one in India had called for an apology.
Miller points to differing interpretations of colonial rule and the massacre as obstacles to consensus. She also describes differences in how federal and state textbooks presented history. For example, the accounts she discusses gave different weight to the 1947 Partition and assigned responsibility differently. These divisions illustrate the challenge of choosing a shared national narrative and deciding which harms a formal request should foreground.
Namibia: an official request and a negotiated response
Namibia offers a contrasting case in Miller’s analysis. The government officially requested redress from Germany in 2015. Miller describes that request as following a longer process in which historical narratives and the experiences of affected communities—including the Herero and Nama—were brought into greater focus.
According to Miller, Germany agreed in May 2021 to recognize the Herero and Nama genocide, apologize, and establish a $1.35 billion fund for reconstruction and development projects in areas dominated by those communities. The figure and account here are reported by Miller in 2023; they do not establish the fund’s current implementation status. Miller’s interpretation is that reconciling narratives and recognizing affected communities helped create conditions for Namibia’s request, not that those factors alone caused the outcome.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the two cases show—and what they do not
India and Namibia are bounded examples, not a representative sample of all formerly colonized countries. Together, they show why a formal request is shaped not only by relations between two governments but also by domestic arguments over responsibility, historical memory, beneficiaries, and the remedy being sought. A government’s silence at the intergovernmental level should not be mistaken for an absence of public claims or disagreement about the past.
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Miller summarizes the challenge succinctly: “Redress between countries is rare. Successful redress even more so.” Her cases make clear that the path to redress can depend on how a society negotiates its own account of history as well as on what a former colonial power is prepared to acknowledge.
Read Manjari Chatterjee Miller’s article at the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR page identifies Miller as a senior fellow, gives the publication date as December 6, 2023, and notes that the article was originally published at The Conversation.
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