De Greiff, P. (2006). Justice and reparations. In P. De Greiff (Ed.), The handbook of reparations (pp. 451-477). Oxford University Press.

In this article, Pablo De Greiff (2006) recognizes material and symbolic reparations as fundamental and complementary categories. This article provides an extensive list of typical symbolic-material forms of reparations. However, De Greiff argues that social investments and development projects are not reparations.

Forrest, Caili. 2018. “What’s in a Name? A Feminist Reflection on Street Name Changes in Durban.” Agenda 32(2): 53–61.

Discusses symbolic reparations by looking at the changes of Durban street names through a feminist lens.
Bureaucracies of renaming did not allow for socio-political tensions to be addressed
“The formal procedures tended towards ‘rationality’ and ‘objectivity’ in the face of the social discord surrounding renaming. This raises the very real question of the role of technical and judicial tools in relation to reparation and addressing apartheid’s colonial legacy in South African cities. From a feminist perspective, these masculinist technocratic approaches have been contested in numerous ways, such as Hames’ (2006) unpacking of the limits of mainstreaming women’s issues” (Forrest 2018: 58).

Howard-Hassmann, Rhoda E. 2003. “Moral Integrity and Reparations to Africa.” Human Rights in Development, Volume 7: 341–67.

This paper presents some very preliminary thoughts on reparations due to Sub-Saharan Africa, including acknowledgment, apology, and financial compensation. Acknowledgment of the moral integrity of an individual requires acknowledgment of how that individual can be damaged or hurt by past wrongs. It also requires acknowledgment of the value to the individual of the community in which he or she lives, and how destruction of that community can also constitute an individual wrong. Acknowledgment of moral integrity, then, requires that outsiders listen carefully to insiders= accounts of the wrongs they have suffered. In the case of Africa, this requires careful attention to accounts of wrongs suffered because of the slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and various forms of Western incursion into Africa in the present.

McElhinny, B. (2016). Reparations and racism, discourse and diversity: Neoliberal multiculturalism and the Canadian age of apologies. Language & Communication, 51, 50-68. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.01.006

This article provides a non-dichtomous conception of material and symbolic reparations. Moreover, they demonstrate how symbolic reparations plan a role in Canada’s neoliberal ‘diversity’ project which play a critical role upholding the Canadian states’ discourse around reconciliation and the neoliberal market. McElhinny (2016) uses the example of how the initial apology for the Japanese Canadian internment camps made by Pierre Trudeau in 1976 was not made in Canada but rather in Japan.

Moon, C. (2012). Who’ll pay reparations on my soul? Compensation, social control and social suffering. Social & Legal Studies, 21(2), 187-199. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663911435829

This article provides a list of material and symbolic reparations to highlight how their distinctions are rooted in Enlightenment thought and that one does not proceed the other but rather both are necessary in order to attain holistic reparation.

Segovia, A. (2006). Financing reparations programs. In P. De Greiff (Ed.), The handbook of reparations (pp. 650-675). Oxford University Press.

This article sees the provisioning of reparations as dependent on political incentives or lack thereof. They see reparations as a political-electoral instrument and do not see social/development projects as a form of reparations.