The Centre for Rights, Reparations, and Anti-Colonial Justice is a new initiative formed of two long-standing Centres and areas of intellectual concern, scholarship, and doctoral supervision at the University of Sussex. It brings together the Sussex Rights and Justice Research Centre and the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

Centre members pursue wide-ranging research agendas in the areas of the ethics and politics of (human) rights and justice. We examine, for example, the late 20th century ascendance of 'rights talk' and its transformation of the nature and practices of social movements, the political rhetoric of states, and its impact on formations of selfhood (through new categories such as ‘rights holder’, 'minority', 'indigenous person'). At the same time, we also probe the challenges to rights arising from populist socio-political formations and the capitalist economy. The understanding of such phenomena and our intellectual scholarly and activist responses to them as pursuits of a more encompassing justice are always already embedded in the revenant histories and cultures of colonial modernity more broadly. The Centre explores the politics of knowledge production inherent in our undertakings as well as historical and ongoing colonial and imperial endeavours, allowing such critical self-reflection to drive our study of racial, anti-colonial and gender justice, environmental racism and resistance to it, contemporary disposability, as well as the dynamics of armed conflict and political economy.