Decolonising Restoration and Justice: Restoration in Transitional Cultures

Publication Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

1-2000

Abstract

Employing perspectives and techniques of comparative contextual analysis, Findlay maintains that restorative justice may be construed as a new form of colonialism, particularly in transitional cultural contexts. Restorative justice initiatives, in this view, tend to locate models of conflict resolution in the contextual customs of indigenous cultures, expropriate them from those indigenous contexts, and subsume them in the state-centered systems of the 'outside' dominant culture. In some instances then, proponents of restorative justice processes have failed to respect the limitations of the models they promote, and they have failed to address the tensions with the systems they seek to replace. Findlay highlights the application of banishment in Western Samoa as an example of such dynamics. In view of all of this, Findlay proposes a reinterpretation of restorative justice as collaborative justice - restoring culturally sensitive custom-based resolutions within and beyond their original contexts.

Discipline

Criminal Procedure | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance

Publication

Restorative Justice: Philosophy to Practice

Editor

H. Strang & J. Braithwaite

First Page

185

Last Page

202

ISBN

9780754621478

Publisher

Ashgate

City or Country

Aldershot

Additional URL

http://worldcat.org/isbn/9780754621478

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