About the Book
The intercultural contexts and new configurations in Europe offer fertile ground for social conflict, tensions and threat. This book challenges predominant and fear inducing approaches of justice and security as they appear in intercultural contexts, and develops alternative understandings by exploring both theoretically and empirically the potential of dialogic and restorative justice oriented actions in sensitive areas of living together. The book offers unique opportunities for rethinking frames of (in)justice, (in)security, and their intersections, and for reshaping European practices and policies in a more sustainable way.
This book is based on an innovative and exploratory action research project in four European countries, which challenges the obsessive focus on security concerns, the merging of the security discourse with intercultural contexts, and the emphasis on technology and surveillance as a way to conceive the doing of security. Both the project and the book offer another vision on what security means and how it can be done, by multiplying participatory encounters between different groups in society, promoting opportunities for deliberations and dialogue about alternative forms of conviviality.
The book is one of two volumes resulting from the work by a group of researchers in six European countries having cooperated intensively during four years in ALTERNATIVE, an action research project funded under the EU Seventh Framework Programme.
Table of Contents:
Introduction : Doing restorative justice in intercultural contexts, Ivo Aertsen, 1. Difference as culture: Roots and implications of a mode of framing, Ida Hydle and Marie Louise Seeberg, 2. Mapping the cultural turn in (in)security discourses: Highlighting the path for restorative justice, Brunilda Pali, 3. In the name of security: Justice under threat or restored? Tim Chapman, 4. Restorative justice: Doing justice and security? Christa Pelikan and Ivo Aertsen, 5. Restorative justice and urban citizenship: A comparative dialogue between Vienna and Brussels, Erik Claes and Katrin Kremmel, 6. Counteracting social exclusion through restorative approaches, Gabor Hera, 7. Re-imagining security and justice in post-conflict societies through restorative lenses, Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic, Sanja Copic, Nikola Petrovic and Bejan Šaciri, 8. Security and justice in transition: Restorative justice and the politics of hope in Northern Ireland, Derick Wilson and Hugh Campbell, 9. Community in conflict in intercultural contexts and how restorative justice can respond, Tim Chapman and Katrin Kremmel, 10. Critical reflections on active participation under new governance models, Christa Pelikan and Mario Ragazzi, 11. Restorative justice in the societies of control: The ambivalence of decentralised state control in participative justice processes, Espen Marius Foss and Brunilda Pali, 12. Looking at the European policy level: the place of restorative justice in intercultural environments, Edit Torzs, Katrien Lauwaert and Ivo Aertsen, Conclusion: Restorative justice - A tool for conviviality, Brunilda Pali
About the Author :
Brunilda Pali is a postdoctoral researcher at the KU Leuven Institute of Criminology. She has worked as a researcher on several EU-funded projects, besides the FP7 project ALTERNATIVE. She publishes on multiple themes, including restorative justice, critical criminology, security, social movements, gender, and arts. She is co-editor of the book ‘Critical Restorative Justice’.
Ivo Aertsen
is Full Professor of Criminology at the University of Leuven and leads the Leuven Institute of Criminology Research Line on ‘Restorative Justice and Victimology’. His main fields of research and teaching are victimology, penology and restorative justice. He is Editor-in-Chief of 'Restorative Justice: An International Journal'. He was the academic coordinator of the European FP7 project ALTERNATIVE.
Review :
"This is a collection by a lovely group of Europeans who choose to wear flowers rather than armour, as Nils Christie expresses it. The book takes us to Vienna’s Womens Café where Muslim and non-Muslim women sit in the restorative circle, to action research on the politics of Roma exclusion in Hungary, to intercultural borderlands of Serbia, Northern Ireland and Belgium. It shows that justice and security can be transformed in the face of intercultural challenges. This is accomplished by rethinking restorative justice in terms of a politics of participation, hope and conviviality. Restorative justice must meet the challenges of redistribution (the ‘what’ of justice), recognition (the ‘who’ of justice), and (political) representation, as Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young put it. The result of this reframing is a fresh, challenging contribution to the restorative justice literature. A vital book for reflective scholars of restorative thought."
- John Braithwaite, Distinguished Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University, Australia
"Intercultural and superdiverse urban environments have created the need for scholars to explore new tools and vocabularies in which attention shifts from the classic themes of ‘power and order’ to a more comprehensive approach of security. By focussing on the possibilities created by restorative approaches to justice and security, this book serves the generally interested reader as well as the scientific reader and provides an important source of discussion to draw inspiration and motivation from."
- Marc Schuilenburg, Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands
