ABSTRACT
Christa Pelikan: 0000–0002–5526–8878
Ivo Aertsen: 0000–0002–6929–6757
The chapter analyses through the action research that took place in the ALTERNATIVE project the role of restorative justice in becoming a counter-security discourse, and what is most important in being counter in the sense of doing both justice and security. The chapter proposes ‘participatory justice’ as a counter-justice, as well as ‘participatory security/safety’ as a counter-security. The radicalisation of the participatory element towards community ownership, on the one hand, and the extension of the reparative element towards transformation, on the other, have oriented the interventions of the action researchers. Grounded in the lifeworld, this implies resorting to concrete experiences of wrongdoing, harm, conflict or injustice in order to counteract the tendencies of reacting to conflicts repressively, and to provide an antidote to ideology-driven images, politics feeding on these images, and the fears evoked. The societal ecology of the research sites has laid open the dynamics of those fears as produced by social and political upheavals that vary at the four sites. Restorative justice and restorative practices offer ways to tackle these fears – to find a new societal balance and a new togetherness based no longer on people being in the same ‘secure’ situation, the same secure place with neatly separated compartments or social strata, but together within their being different. However, the restorative approach, which espouses active participation and dialogue, is highly demanding, and the authors argue that if ‘participatory justice’ and ‘participatory security/safety’ appear as hallmarks of an alternative governmentality, its intricacies and its ramifications have to be traced carefully.
