A growing body of scholarship explores how human rights have been hijacked for various political ends. In contrast, reparations tend to be either lauded as an uncontested good or dismissed as a political impossibility. As demands for reparations have come to occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and transatlantic slavery, a critical reassessment of the concept from a historical and comparative perspective is overdue. The introduction lays out the parameters for this reassessment by investigating reparations from colonial modernity and dispossession to the aftermath of genocide in Germany and nuclear holocaust in Japan to our present moment of atomic fallout and environmental collapse. It considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human. It approaches reparations not as a moral response to, but as a form of, continued state violence.