ABSTRACT
To help us to evaluate the potential of informal justice as a political project, we then turn to Habermas’ work on communicative rationality, the public sphere and discourse ethics, which allows us to begin an examination of the role that informal justice might play in reconstructed democratic processes designed to maximise deliberative engagement. Habermas’ perspective also suffers from limitations in that, by envisioning the possibility of undistorted communication, it holds to an overly idealistic notion of interaction that does not fully account for the existence, in communicative settings, of the more subtle and less overt forms of power described by Foucault. In the end, we argue that insights from both Foucaultian and Habermasian perspectives will be necessary if we are to engage the political potential of informal justice.
