Reorienting Restorative Justice: Initiating a New Dialogue of Rights Consciousness, Community Empowerment and Politicization

For the last three decades scholars have explored the practice of restorative justice as a crime control mechanism in a multitude of settings. Much of the discourse has focused on restorative justice as an alternative to traditional punitive and retributive criminal justice processes. Whether restorative or punitive, criminal justice processes that seek to address harm are not apart, above, or outside social, cultural and political relations. This Article seeks to initiate a new dialogue of justice and argues that the ontology of restorative justice should to be viewed to include a liberatory moment of politicization focused on promoting equality and human relationality.

Such a reorientation presents a new way of understanding restorative justice as political demands, specifically demands for emancipation, for an end to domination and oppression, and the right to have a meaningful, rather than tokenized, voice. This ideological approach to restorative justice is more inclusive, multifaceted, and as such, more responsive to the needs of increasingly complex social, legal, and political structures. Fur-. ther, this approach challenges a reconsideration of how to envision the taxonomies of relational accountability and political empowerment. A more political account of restorative justice also shows why an agreement on practice or experience is unnecessary, as the purpose is not to show the validity or legitimacy of restorative justice, but instead to challenge dominant ideologies.