Restorative Justice and the Danger of "Community"

Community is another name for the phenomenally complex strand of populism in American history, in all of whose versions community is selectively invoked and law always appropriated to achieve highly contestable social ends to police boundaries or resolve disputes. At one extreme, we have from the 1960s Saul Alinsky-type left-wing "community organizing," which explicitly seeks to create a new sense of community identity in order to achieve highly specific redistributive goals. But, at the other extreme, we have racist enclave-protecting crime aimed at solidifying a sense of community, and somewhere along the continuum we have Not In My Backyard environmental programs and the subtly exclusionary "Neighborhood Watch" programs.