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Season 2 episode 5 of the Resist + Renew podcast, where we talk about some frameworks of justice, and reflect on them in relation to conflict.

'Whose responsibility is the conflict? Is it the responsibility of the people within the conflict…or is it the responsibility of the whole group? Because they are nodes within a network of a group – they are in conflict, so the group is in conflict'

Show notes, links

An explainer for the different approaches to justice that we use to reflect on conflict in this episode:

Note: these words are used in many different ways. Some use restorative justice (RJ) and transformative justice (TJ) interchangeably; some see RJ as between TJ and punitive systems; some see RJ as focusing on individuals and TJ as situating individuals in structures etc. Words are multivalent - don’t get too bogged down on “the right definition”.

A quick summary of the episode:

People choose the tactics they use to respond to conflict in service of a broader aim.

These different approaches all come up when thinking about what tactics to choose to respond to conflict. People may respond because they want to disappear a problem through punishment, or because they want to bring cohesion back to a group.

So it's useful to have some shared language to discuss in your groups the different tactics you use. What are your rituals around conflict in service of?

Deeper responses to conflict should look at the people in your group, the relationships between people, and what need to change in the wider structures.

Conflict can be one of the most visible instances of structural power in a space. Working with conflict in a group can be a path to address how those structural powers impact the group and the relationships within it, in a way that could help shift or transform things.

Some useful links:

Brick By Brick, a new book by Cradle Community on prison abolition and transformative justice.

A collection of resources on transformative justice at Transform Harm

Fumbling Towards Repair, a workbook for community accountability facilitators. A small bit from that book, to give you a flavour:

Perennial resources:

our sister facilitation collective Navigate have a conflict facilitation booklet (from back when they were called Seeds For Change Oxford).

See our "What is facilitation?" podcast episode page for more general facilitation resources.

Transcript

ALI

This is Resist + Renew,

KATHERINE

the UK based podcast about social movements,

SAMI

what we're fighting for, why and how it all happens.

ALI

The hosts of the show are

KATHERINE

Me, Kat.

SAMI

Me, Sami,

ALI

and me, Ali.

SAMI

I'm recording this now, baby!

ALI

Shit, it's a podcast!

Welcome back to the Resist + Renew podcast. This is another Toolbox episode with a focus on conflict. Last episode we looked at some of the common ideas around conflict, which might be floating around in people's heads and groups; which may not be that helpful as to impacting how we approach conflict.

In this episode, we're going to take a look at some ideas around conflict, which are often held up as better, as more appropriate ideas around conflict, particularly in social movement spaces. These might be ideas like restorative justice, and transformative justice. But as they’re used quite a lot, we'd like to take a bit of time to explore what those words mean a bit. So yeah. Gonna get a bit more clear on that. Sami, are you up for giving us a bit of a spiel around these frameworks of justice?

SAMI

[Laughs] Yeah, I can, I can definitely start with a bit of a spiel. So I think so I guess a few things to note so like, yeah, we mentioned terms like ‘transformative justice’ and ‘restorative justice’, I guess, like one thing to note is like, often these things are brought in as ideas that are a lot broader than things that you'll talk about, relating to like conflict and working with conflict and moving through conflict and resolving conflict and all that kind of stuff. It's often, they're often used in far more broad, far more societal ideas of, like, how justice works, rather than like approaches to conflict, necessarily.

But I think there is a lot of commonality between the approaches. And like, so I think that's what we can flesh out a little bit here is like, when we talk about transformative justice, what does that mean, in practice? What does that look like? How's that structured? And therefore, like, how is that relevant to conflict? This may be like, how we can approach it. And to go back to the caveat from episode one. Like, again, often these things that use in the context of like, often more abuse, like dynamics would be more like in terms of like negotiating abuse dynamics, and things like that. And like, that's not what we're talking about here today, there's a lot of chat that you could also find and read and listen to about applying these ideas to different areas. But that's not what we're talking about now.

ALI

Before we get started, it might be just useful to say that, because we're talking about a few different frames and different aspects of those frames, just listening along could get quite confusing. So we have created a visual resource to go with this. It's like a table. And it might be helpful while you're listening along just to have a look at that. If that's something you're able to do. We will mention it again later. But yeah, just just before we get started might be helpful. But yeah, back to you, Sami, to start.

So I guess to start, yeah. So, people have like, there's like a framework that people will use when talking about, like, different ‘models’ of justice is often a phrase people will use where people will put three different approaches to justice out there, and then use them to talk about different ways that different people approach justice. So one of them is transformative justice, one of them is restorative justice, and then there's a third one, which people use a lot of different names for often kind of synonymously, which would be like punitive justice, or like carceral justice. And sometimes there'll be scare quotes there. Sometimes people say like, carceral injustice, or people talk about, like, retributive justice and things like that.

So those are like kind of three, three different models of conflict. And I guess a way to kind of differentiate those different models of conflict is having a think about like, what are the like, what are the different strategies that those different types of those different approaches to justice, employ, to achieve the justice that you're talking about? And I guess, like maybe starting from like the kind of carceral justice/retributive justice/punitive justice one, because that's like, that's the model that's used a lot in the society that we live in. Like, it's what's used in our so called ‘justice system’, which involves like courts, policing, and exclusion from schools, all this kind of stuff. And, like the strategies that are used in those forms of justice are strategies of like, retribution, of punishment of like, ‘someone did a bad thing and so a bad thing should be done to them’ to, like, balance the scales-type thing. So that's like, that's like a, an overarching strategy that kind of comes up a lot in punitive justice. And there's also often something around like, incapacitation, incarceration, things like that: like, isolating people who have done harm in some way from the wider collective as like a method of justice. And that's, like, the logic that underpins prisons, and also the logic that underpins, like school exclusions and a lot of those other forms of like, incapacitation, and remove, like removing stuff: disappearing the problem basically, is one way of thinking about it with.

ALI

With, with, with like prisons especially but probably other areas, people talk about ‘social death’ as like the punishment, like the reason prison is so horrible is because you are ripped from your communities and ripped from your families and loved ones and put away from them and like those connections have been severed. And that's part of, part of the punishment, I guess.

SAMI

Yeah, yeah, I definitely think that's true. And like, I think there's also a frame that I know like Angela Davis has used before and other people, which is like ‘prisons are like a way of society for disappeared to disappear its problems, basically, like. And, and in that frame, often the problems are, like, people. It goes back to that, like, essentialist idea, like: there are bad people that do bad things, because they're bad people. And so the strict like the strategy is that we get rid of those bad people, and we put them somewhere else. And that's like our solution to the problem.

And so that's like, those are the kind of strategies. And then like, there's a lot of different tactics within that you can talk about like prisons, you can talk about like all these different tactics of those approaches to justice. But then then maybe thinking about like some of the ones that often use more positively as terms you've got like restorative justice and transformative justice. And there's often like a bit of a crossover in some some of the strategies between restorative and transformative justice: some people use them synonymously. Some people use them to mean different things depending on like, what kind of background you come from, and like what I guess, like, what tendency you come from and stuff as to how you use the words.

But like, often, in both of those approaches to justice, there is at least an intention, often in the strategy for prevention. So like the aim of restorative justice, transformative justice,