ExtractThe social, political, and economic transformations that surfaced in the last decade of the twentieth century contributed to a new wave of public demands for financial and material reparations for the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War, European governments, the Catholic Church, and other institutions gradually acknowledged their collaboration with the Nazi regime, and expressed apologies to its victims and their descendants. As the end of the Cold War favored continuous calls for reparations associated with abuses and human atrocities committed during the Second World War, the dictatorships sustained by the United States and the Soviet Union in Africa and Latin America also witnessed their last days. The fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe helped to intensify and solidify the connections among the populations of African descent around the world, favoring the emergence of requests for reparations...