About the Masterclass

This Masterclass will explore reparations as a question of making different ecological worlds.

The 2025 International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion on Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change has been celebrated as marking the start of a “new ear of climate reparations”. Yet their remain many legal, political and moral questions about the conceptualisation of climate reparations and how they could be actualised. 

At heart of the current “climate transition” is the question of who will be entitled to what reparations for which harms: will international law grant reparations to those least responsible for and most vulnerable to the impact of the climate crisis, or will it instead grant reparations to those companies who have profited from contributing to the crisis?

This Masterclass will critically examine how the ongoing colonial and structural bias in international law, and its temporal underpinning, erect barriers for reparations for historical injustices and ecological harms and explore how it might be possible to decolonise international law to enable reparative climate justice.

To Apply & Requirements

As part of preparation for the Masterclass, participants are encouraged to engage with the following texts:

• Dehm, Julia. “The Evasion of Historical Responsibility? Colonialism, Temporality and Reparative Justice in the ICJ’s Climate Advisory Opinion” Verfassungsblog, 4 September 2025
• Dehm, Julia. “Who Receives Reparations in the Context of Climate Change: Conflicting International Claims” (2025) 119 AJIL Unbound 128-133.  
• Mason-Case, Sarah and Dehm, Julia. “Redressing Historical Responsibility for the Unjust Precarities of Climate Change in the Present” in Benoit Mayer and Alexander Zahar (eds) Debating Climate Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) pp. 183-189.

Participants will receive the texts after registering. 

Registration required via the form here; for all other enquiries please send an email to Dr. Kanad Bagchi (Scholar in Residence host) at k.bagchi@uva.nl. Deadline for applications is 27 of April. 

About the Speaker

Julia Dehm is an Associate Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Law, La Trobe University Australia. Her research addresses urgent issues of international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her books include Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law (edited with Usha Natarajan), Power, Participation and Private Regulatory Initiatives: Human Rights under Supply Chain Capitalism (edited with Daniel Brinks, Karen Engle and Kate Taylor) and Becoming a Climate Conscious Lawyer: Climate Change and the Australian Legal System (edited with Nicole Graham and Zoe Nay). In April-May 2026 she is a RPA Decolonial Futures Scholar in Residence at the University of Amsterdam.