ABSTRACT
Throughout history, humans have migrated, often violently invading and subsequently supplanting or integrating with earlier settlements. Empires have been built and dismantled, civilisations have emerged, lived and died. Across the millennia, the human record is replete with episodes of genocide, slavery, torture, forced conversions, and the mass expulsions of overrun peoples. The existence, boundaries and multi-ethnic populations of modern states are largely the result of acts and omissions that would be unlawful if done today – and some of which were unlawful at the time. Indigenous peoples have lost their traditional lands, and members of many communities have been killed, excluded and subject to discrimination by invaders who enriched themselves through privilege and the suppression of preexisting societies. Such events, even from centuries ago, remain alive in memory and the consequences of past injustices continue into the present, manifest in on-going inequality, discrimination and racism.
