Hiro Katano - Building Peace through Restoration

Building Peace through Restoration

Hiro Katano, facilitator,
Northeast Asia Regional Peacebuilding Institute (NARPI)

This essay aims to provide a brief introduction to restorative justice (RJ) for those who are taking RJ course at NARPI training.

My assumptions are 
1) that the participants are highly interested in peace issues in Northeast Asia, and 
2) that they are not yet well informed of the field of RJ. 

In this essay I will describe the connections between peace issues and RJ ideas so as to help the participants locate RJ field into a larger picture of peacebuilding in general.

As described in NARPI website (http://narpi.net/?page_id=7#program-01), 
RJ is a new paradigm on how to make things right when wrongdoings have happened. It sees justice as not merely punishing wrongdoers, but ensuring that the voice of victims, offenders, and communities are heard and their needs are met. The concept and practice of RJ are growing in schools, the justice system, and communities throughout the world.

The course will help you understand the framework and implementations of RJ, and explore the possibilities of applying RJ to various settings such as education, criminal justice, community conflict and historical conflict.

Focus on Harm
While peace is variously defined, we can agree that we need to work on violence in order to build peace. Peace work has a lot to do with addressing, confronting and reducing violence in various forms, such as physical, systemic, and cultural. War, for example, involves all these aspects. Soldiers kill each other, towns are bombed, and the environment is damaged (physical violence).  Military is maintained as the default policy for national security and the defence industry has become an essential part of national and global economy (systemic violence). Nationalism is widespread through the media and education, and defending country is promoted as a virtue we should even die for (cultural violence). Thus our work for peace involves various efforts to challenge these violent aspects in our society through disarmament, sustainable development and peace education.

In the field of RJ, we focus on the harm in various forms, just as we focus on violence in peace work. The harm done by wrongdoing can be physical (such as wounds, trauma and property damages), systemic (lack of enough support, secondary damage by police, school and other social institutions) and socio-cultural (loss of trust, shame, stigmas and broken relationships). A primary
focus of RJ, then, is addressing the harm done to victims, to communities and to offenders themselves. According to RJ framework, justice is achieved when harms are mended and relationships (in terms of identity, community and history) are restored.

Restoring Identity
Conflict affects and transforms our identity. It can be harmful when conflict is
destructive. A crime, for example, creates new identities among ordinary people such as victim, offender and witness. You may simply try imagining what would happen in your society when someone is identified as victim, offender, witness or even all of the three! (For your reference, note that more than half of the murder cases in Japan take place among family members. Thus when you see your brother kill your mother, you become offender’s family, victim’s family and a witness at the same time.) These identity shifts can victimize, stigmatize, and traumatize the stakeholders.
Moreover, some violence in society is highly related to particular identity such as race, gender, age and social status. After all, identity can cause conflict, and conflict shapes identity. As we explore more during the course, RJ involves various methods of storytelling, accountability, and empowerment to support people to take care of their distorted identities. The RJ paradigm aims to provide a framework in which one’s given (or taught) identity can be disassembled and rebuilt into a new identity.

Restoring Community
Conflict affects and transforms our community as well. Think about school bullying, for example. Experts often say that bullying is not only a fight between a bully and a bullied, but rather a more complex and dynamic conflict involving offenders, victims, bystanders, teachers, parents and neighbourhood. The harm can often be communal, cause broader damage to the surrounding community and thus affect relationships negatively. Conflict can easily escalate in a dysfunctional community where neighbours do not know each other and thus live with the sense of fear and suspicion.
RJ is a community-oriented approach to justice-making. As we explore more during the course, RJ involves variety of skills of conferencing, circle process and facilitated dialogue to provide a safe space where people can work on restoring community and strengthening the sense of belonging and mutual support.

Restoring History
The harm can be not only communal but also historical; it is transmitted through generations. Northeast Asia is no exception; we can figure out the harm done in the past causing the legacy (stories, beliefs, myths, biases etc.) and aftermath (in politics, economy, laws, education etc.) perpetuating various conflicts in the region. History has layers of personal and communal memories involving both facts and emotions. The legacy of colonialism can be a good example.
Although colonizing other nations is no longer justified, we still suffer from various aftereffects of colonial history. The Tokyo Tribunal accused Japan of war crimes but not of colonial rule, thus injustice remains as unsettled disputes.
RJ focuses on unaddressed and unmet needs of not only victims but also as many stakeholders as possible. As we explore the historical issues from RJ perspective, we will realize various needs for truth, acknowledgement, healing and restitution. The restorative approach to historical conflict goes beyond looking back the past wrongdoing for blame and punishment. It seeks to transform the historical harms to envision the future with renewed understanding of our common history.