Source: (2004) Paper presented at “New Frontiers in Restorative Justice: Advancing Theory and Practice”, Centre for Justice and Peace Development, Massey University at Albany, New Zealand, 2-5 December.
The radicalism of restorative justices resides in good part in its potential to acknowledge the relational dimensions of conflict while also pursuing individually meaningful (‘just’) outcomes for aggrieved parties. This separates restorative justice from mediation, which takes the relational aspects of conflict as its field, and human rights interventions, whose foci are the protection of and pursuit of justice for, the identifiably vulnerable. This paper uses the psychoanalytic notion of intersubjectivity to articulate how restorative justice might bridge these two worlds. First, it demonstrates the value of the concept for analyzing conflict by examining the contemporary conflict in Aotearoa/New Zealand between Maori and the Crown over ownership of the foreshore and seabed, identifying how the identities of those parties mutually constitute one another in the course of being in conflict. The second part of the paper considers the implications of this mutual constitution of identity for the restorative pursuit of justice. Drawing on contemporary debates within psychoanalysis it identifies the complexities that emerge within all attempts to fuse relational understandings of conflict with pursuits of individually meaningful ( just ) outcomes. Abstract courtesy of the Centre for Justice and Peace Development, Massey University, http://justpeace.massey.ac.nz.
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