Integrating Peace, Justice and Development in a Relational Approach to Peacebuilding

Abstract

This paper considers how restorative justice as a theory of justice grounded in feminist relational theory can offer a conceptual framework from which to understand and approach justice, peace and development and their interrelationship in the context of peacebuilding. Feminist relational theory grounds a conception of justice that moves beyond the narrow focus on justice as merely an element or stage of peacebuilding to an understanding of peacebuilding as the work of building sustainable just social relationships.

Keywords:

• Restorative Justice
• Relational Theory
• Peacebuilding
• Development
• Sen

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the helpful comments I received from participants at the IDEA conference at Bryn Mawr. I am particularly indebted to Christine Koggel for her support and encouragement. Thanks are also owed to Dan Van Ness, John Braithwaite and Dan Philpott for the insights and inspiration they have offered.

Notes

¹Alex Boraine (2012), then Chairperson of the International Center for Transitional Justice, addressed a United Nations Panel on ‘the essential nature of both peace and justice in post-conflict countries, and the critical issue of sequencing efforts to these ends, while keeping in mind justice as the goal’. See also Roht-Arriaza and Mariezcurrena (2006).

²Daniel Philpott and I sought to offer such a new framework for peacebuilding as part of a recent project shared at the International Symposium on Restorative Justice, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in New York (2011) and which will be the subject of an upcoming edited collection.

³My account is indebted to Christine Koggel's notion of relational equality (1998) in which she distinguishes a relational account from formal and substantive approaches in the liberal tradition.

⁴This issue has received some attention in the literature (Koggel 2003; Hill 2003; Gore 1997).

⁵Reference to the retributive justice of prosecution and punishment as ‘normal’, ‘full’, ‘ordinary’ or ‘proper’ justice is common within the literature on transitional justice. See, for example, Goldstone (2000, p. ix); Shriver (2001, p. 1); and Allen (1999, p. 315).

⁶Note that the evidence is largely in the context of domestic criminal justice. See, for example, Sherman and Strang (2007). However, experience in post-conflict societies has shown the weakness of criminal justice in that restorative responses have often also been practically better able to ensure accountability in the wake of the inaction or inability of criminal justice to deal with the volume of cases.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer J. Llewellyn

Jennifer Llewellyn is Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. She is also Director of the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Community University Research Alliance (NSRJ-CURA), a collaborative, multi-partner, interdisciplinary research initiative involving university and community partners. She is currently co-directing a project on Restorative Justice, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding with Daniel Philpott at the Kroc Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies