The Great Circle of Justice: North American Indigenous Justice and Contemporary Restoration Programs

Discursive representations of restorative justice in international policies

“…As Pavlich and Thorlakson (2017) highlight, restorative justice’s early aspirations were to work through different lenses, paradigms and approaches when addressing conflict and harm, resisting the bureaucratic, alienating and adversarial focus of criminalizing institutions (see also Pavlich, 2018; Strang and Braithwaite, 2001; Zehr, 2015; Zehr and Toews, 2004). However, as Pavlich (2018: 464) writes, instead of grappling with the complexities posed by plural and often competing visions of justice, so-called maximalist versions of restorative justice were translated into programmes, generating compromises and accommodations that ended up homogenizing restorative justice within the language and forms of criminal justice system (see also Christie, 2013, 2015; Gray and Lauderdale, 2007; Suzuki and Wood, 2017; Wood and Suzuki, 2016). In other words, ‘the aspirations to promote a distinct moral and practical alternative to criminal justice [were] undermined by the manner in which restorative justice position[ed] itself as supplementary and ultimately subordinate to state justice empires’ (Pavlich, 2005: 21).…”

A Research Agenda for Geographies of Slow Violence

“…It may also be, that these methods are flexible enough to incorporate other methods to help strengthen the overall goals of care and compassion. For, in reality, restorative justice is only a portion of justice in Indigenous communities (Gray and Lauderdale 2007).…”