This article brings together different strands of literature to explore how time operates in international law as a technique of inclusion and exclusion. The question of reparations for enduring colonial and ecological injustices provides a useful entry point to examine, at a more granular level, the temporal foundations of the field and their distributive outcomes. Concepts of restitution, compensation, satisfaction as well as the doctrine of causation in the law of state responsibility, encode a specific understanding of time. This understanding, I argue, is embedded in a modernist worldview characterised by linear, abstract and universal notions of time. Calls for reparatory justice for colonial and climate wrongs attempt to defy and interrupt law’s forward motion by binding together interconnected (though unequal) pasts, presents and futures. In examining how international law reacts to those claims, and manages the conflict between law’s temporal abstractions and the concrete tempos of those seeking redress, this article reinvigorates the conversation on the politics of time in international law.

We design algorithms of “optimal" data complexity for several natural problems about first-order queries on structures of bounded degree. For that purpose, we first introduce a framework to deal with logical or combinatorial problems R ⊂ I x O whose instances x ∈ I may admit of several solutions R(x) = {y ∈ O : (x,y) ∈ R}. One associates to such a problem several specific tasks: compute a random (for the uniform probability distribution) solution y ∈ R(x); enumerate without repetition each solution y j in some specific linear order y0 < y1 < ... < yn-1 where R(x) = {y0,...,yn-1}; compute the solution y j of rankj in the linear order <.Algorithms of “minimal" data complexity are presented for the following problems: given any first-order formula $\varphi(\bar{v})$ and any structure S of bounded degree:(1) compute a random element of $\varphi(S)=\{\bar{a}: (S,\bar{a})\models\varphi(\bar{v})\}$ ;(2) compute the jth element of $\varphi(S)$ for some linear order of $\varphi(S)$ ;(3) enumerate the elements of $\varphi(S)$ in lexicographical order.More precisely, we prove that, for any fixed formula φ, the above problem (1) (resp. (2), (3)) can be computed within average constant time (resp. within constant time, with constant delay) after a linear (O(|S|)) precomputation. Our essential tool for deriving those complexity results is a normalization procedure of first-order formulas on bijective structures.