BiblioVault - Books about Restorative justice

Born of War in Colombia

Reproductive Violence and Memories of Absence

Tatiana Sanchez Parra

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Born of War in Colombia addresses why people born of conflict-related sexual violence remain unseen within transitional justice agendas. In Colombia, there are generations of children born of conflict-related sexual violence across the country. Whispers of their presence have traveled outside their communities. They also exist within the country’s domestic reparations program, which entitles them to reparations. Drawing on an immersive feminist ethnography with a community that endured a paramilitary confinement, the book reveals how a past-oriented and harm-centered model of transitional justice has converged with a restricted notion of gendered victimhood and the patriarchal politics of reproduction to render the bodies and experiences of people born of conflict-related sexual violence unintelligible to those seeking to understand and address the consequences of war in Colombia.

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Burying the Past

Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict, Expanded and Updated Edition

Nigel Biggar, Editor

Georgetown University Press, 2003

No one can deny how September 11, 2001, has altered our understandings of "Peace" and "Justice" and "Civil Conflict." Those have become words with startling new life in our vocabularies. Yet "making" peace and "doing" justice must remain challenges that are among the highest callings of humanity—especially in a terror-heightened world. Nigel Biggar, Christian ethicist and editor of this now more than ever "must read" (Choice) volume, newly expanded and updated, addresses head-on the concept of a redemptive burying of the past, urging that the events of that infamous date be approached as a transnational model of conflict-and suggesting, wisely and calmly, that justice can be even the better understood if we should undertake the very important task of locating the sources of hostility, valid or not, toward the West.

Burying the Past asks these important questions: How do newly democratic nations put to rest the conflicts of the past? Is granting forgiveness a politically viable choice for those in power? Should justice be restorative or retributive? Beginning with a conceptual approach to justice and forgiveness and moving to an examination of reconciliation on the political and on the psychological level, the collection examines the quality of peace as it has been forged in the civil conflicts in Rwanda, South Africa, Chile, Guatemala and Northern Ireland.

There are times in history when "making peace" and "doing justice" seem almost impossible in the face of horrendous events. Those responses are understandably human. But it is in times just like these when humanity can—and must—rise to its possibilities and to its higher purposes in order to continue considering itself just and humane.

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A Guilted Age

Apologies for the Past

Ashraf A. H. Rushdy

Temple University Press, 2015

Public apologies have become increasingly common scenes and representative moments in what appears to be a global process of forgiveness. The apology-forgiveness dynamic is familiar to all of us, but what do these rituals of atonement mean when they are applied to political and historical events?

In his timely, topical, and incisive book A Guilted Age, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the proliferation of apologies by politicians, nations, and churches for past events—such as American slavery or the Holocaust—can be understood as a historical phenomenon. In our post–World War II world, Rushdy claims that we live in a “guilted age.”

A Guilted Age identifies the two major forms of apologies—political and historical—and Rushdy defines the dynamics and strategies of each, showing how the evolution of one led to the other. In doing so, he reveals what apology and forgiveness do to the past events they respectively apologize for and forgive—and what happens when they fail.

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Implicating the System

Judicial Discourses in Sentencing of Indigenous Women

Elspeth Kaiser-Derrick

University of Manitoba Press, 2019

Legacies of War

Violence, Ecologies, and Kin

Kimberly Theidon

Duke University Press, 2022

In Legacies of War Kimberly Theidon examines the lives of children born of wartime rape and the experiences of their mothers and communities to offer a gendered theory of harm and repair. Drawing on ethnographic research in postconflict Peru and Colombia, Theidon considers the multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold. She reimagines harm by taking into account the impact of violence on individual people as well as on more-than-human lives, bodies, and ecologies, showing how wartime violence reveals the interdependency of all life. She also critiques policy makers, governments, and humanitarian organizations for their efforts at postconflict justice, which frequently take an anthropocentric rights-based approach that is steeped in liberal legalism. Rethinking the intergenerational reach of war while questioning what counts as sexual and reproductive violence, Theidon calls for an explicitly feminist peace-building and postconflict agenda that includes a full range of sexual and reproductive rights, including access to safe and affordable abortions.

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Oil and Water

A Novel

Mei Mei Evans

University of Alaska Press, 2013

What happens when the American dream collides head-on with a nation’s dependence on fossil fuels? Oil and Water, a novel by Mei Mei Evans, focuses on precisely this question. Starting with a star-crossed supertanker, a wayward fishing boat, and a well-known hazard in the Gulf of Alaska, the story presents a region plunged into an oil-slicked crisis. As thousands of miles of shoreline and sea are obliterated, the spill threatens the lives and livelihoods of the coastal community of Selby.

At the center of the disaster are Gregg, a down-on-his-luck skipper, and Lee, his lone deckhand. As they cross paths with the tanker and later the residents of Selby, they are faced with decisions that will have a lasting impact on the entire community. And when the residents are presented with a controversial deal—accept handouts in the form of work from the very company responsible for the disaster—they must learn just how important it is to find strength in the connections that bind humans to each other and the natural world.

Evans’s compelling story, influenced by her own experiences during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, is a provocative look at the choice that must be made between environmental safety and economic survival. A PEN/Bellwether Prize finalist, it will have readers reconsidering where they draw their own lines.

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Shattered Justice

Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations

Kimberly J. Cook

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Shattered Justice presents original crime victims' experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Using in-depth interviews with 21 crime victims across the United States, Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations. Important lessons and analyses are shared related to grief and loss, and healing and repair. Using restorative justice practices to develop and deliver healing retreats for survivors also expands the practice of restorative justice. Finally, policy reforms aimed at preventing, mitigating, and repairing the harms of wrongful convictions is covered.

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Mary Ingouville Burton

Ohio University Press, 2017

In 1995, South Africa’s new government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a lynchpin of the country’s journey forward from apartheid. In contrast to the Nuremberg Trials and other retributive responses to atrocities, the TRC’s emphasis on reconciliation marked a restorative approach to addressing human rights violations and their legacies. The hearings, headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, began in spring of 1996.

The commission was set up with three purposes: to investigate abuses, to assist victims with rehabilitation, and to consider perpetrators’ requests for amnesty. More than two decades after the first hearings, the TRC’s legacy remains mixed. Many families still do not know what became of their loved ones, and the commission came under legal challenges both from ex-president F. W. de Klerk and the African National Congress. Yet, the TRC fulfilled a vital role in the transition from apartheid to democracy, and has become a model for other countries.

This latest addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series is a trenchant look at the TRC’s entire, stunningly ambitious project. And as a longtime activist for justice in South Africa and a former commissioner of the TRC, Mary Ingouville Burton is uniquely positioned to write this complex story.

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