The Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to usher in both environmental sustainability and a development that “leaves no one behind.” To accomplish this, the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes the need for international cooperation and an ethic of global citizenship. Still, does the 2030 Agenda itself (and the UN system behind it) sufficiently promote international equity, inclusion and democracy that is fundamental to its success? This talk makes a case that the 2030 Agenda and the UN System behind it, insufficiently recognizes environmental, social and economic divides between developed and developing countries and their roots in centuries of European imperialism. Here, the current call by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and its 15 Member States for reparatory justice for histories and legacies of enslavement, native genocide and systemic racial discrimination—may offer a model for the sort of recognition and address needed to make an international shift towards sustainable development.

Michael McEachrane is a Visiting Researcher at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights. He has a PhD in Philosophy (with distinction, 2006) from Åbo Akademi University in Finland and has held positions at universities in the US, Canada, Trinidad & Tobago, Sweden, Germany and the UK. His current research focus is on postcolonial/decolonial perspectives on human rights, structural racial discrimination and reparatory justice. Among his publications are the books Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe (Routledge, 2014) and Sverige och de Andra: Postkoloniala perspektiv (Natur & Kultur, 2001). Michael McEachrane is a regular commentator on issues of race for international as well as Swedish media. He is also a seasoned universal human rights advocate who, among other things, has helped found several CSOs and served as an expert advisor to the UN around the International Decade for People of African Descent 2015-2024.

"(Re)conceptualizing the African Diaspora in Europe,” a workshop with McEachrane, the following day.

This talk is part of the Transcultural Approaches to Europe speaker series, spearheaded by the departments of Germanics, French and Italian Studies, and Scandinavian Studies, interrogates issues of race, identity, colonialism, and migration within a broad European context. In order to advance ongoing campus-wide conversations on world language and literature study, speakers will present research that focuses on migrant and minoritized cultures, as an extension of these departments’ current initiatives in promoting diversity and equity and in recognition of the transcultural and transnational scale of these scholarly issues.