All About Intimacy: Returning Restorative Justice to its Roots

• In Event: Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations of Restorative Justice

Abstract

Restorative justice helps victims, offenders, schools, communities and societies to transform thinking and responses to harm and conflict. Yet the potential of restorative justice remains unrealised, especially in large scale applications. Assessing how the restorative justice movement can step beyond the claims made by its proponents to reconsider its spiritual and ideological underpinnings, this paper first argues that restorative justice can also be understood as, 1) a spiritual healing practice that may in fact, 2) valorise neoliberal ideology alongside, 3) conservative values ensconced within settler-colonial legacies of Eurocentric justice models.
Further, reflecting both on bell hooks’ imperative about the need for love to cultivate justice (2000), and Cornell West’s claim that “justice is what love looks like in public (2011),” we contend that the potential of restorative justice is most significantly and best realised when people are deeply and intimately connected through direct, meaningful and respectful dialogue. Evidence continues to show that expanding restorative justice into civic or societal-level projects, or expediting it through distal relational practices, compromises its most fundamental importance and values. Building on Umbreit’s (1999) concept of the McDonaldization of restorative justice, and Tauri’s (2023) more recent reference to ‘plastic shamanism,’ we conclude that the future of the restorative justice movement is best served by deepening its understanding of the transformative intimacy and authenticity of the archetypal ‘person-on-person’ restorative encounter.

Authors

• Mara Schiff, Florida Atlantic University

• Simon Green, University of Hull