Theories of justice can readily be elegant and unitary, but this is not the case for theories of enduring injustice. There are many kinds of injustice, many endure, for which there is no single reason or set of reasons. One could lay the blame, as some do, at the doorstep of liberalism. Certainly the ideas of civilization and progress not only led many liberals to justify injustices against indigenous peoples, but also against Black Americans and many peoples in the colonial world. It is too easy, though, to suggest that liberalism is the cause of injustice. Liberals have not cornered the market on injustice. Many of the injustices I have discussed here were inherited by liberal polities, not caused by them. The expulsion of the Tatars, and much of the history of the caste system took place within non-liberal regimes. Indigenous peoples were (and are) victims of both liberal and non-liberal regimes. The cultural destruction of Tibet is caused by a clearly non-liberal regime.

This does not excuse liberalism, but it is wrong to think that there is one single core problem for which there is one solution. My goal in this book is to frame a difficult problem in a particular way, which I hope will alter our way of thinking about how to solve it, even if solutions are not easy to come by. The framework of group or cultural rights or liberal justice will not do much or enough to overcome many enduring injustices. The framework of liberalism cannot tell us why the past matters, but overcoming enduring injustice means taking the past into account. I have argued here, however, that using history and memory to determine responsibility for past injustices is the wrong route to take; rather, we need to use the past to help us see why some injustices exist, why some persist, and determine ways to overcome the enduring injustice. The past of liberal states can also matter as well, and help us to understand why the implementation of liberal justice is as important as its substance.