2.1 A constellation of practices

Restorative justice is a global social movement, the current form of which began in the mid-1970s. The movement encompasses a wide and diverse array of practices and utilizes the languages of restorative practices, Indigenous peacemaking, justpeace, and more. Major contributors to contemporary understandings of restorative justice include Native American peacemaking practices; Mennonite engagements in criminal justice reform in North America; peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms across Africa and elsewhere; traditional conflict resolution practices of the Māori and other Indigenous peoples of the Pacific; and the research of criminologists. Thus, we follow Carl Stauffer and Sonya Shah’s claim that rather than thinking of restorative justice primarily as a set of criminal justice interventions,

we have to blow open any western conception of the [phrase] and adapt restorative justice to live into the biggest inclusive dream that includes practice iterations from New Zealand to the Yukon Territory, from the United Kingdom to South Africa. (Shah and Stauffer 2021: 5)

In other words, restorative justice is not one idea or practice but a global and mutually informing constellation of praxes linked by a shared orientation to transforming injustice toward justice, peace, and healing. Christian social ethicist Amy Levad calls this orientation ‘the moral imagination of restorative justice’ (Levad 2012).

This moral imagination is often described by practitioners and advocates as radically different from dominant frameworks and systems of justice that inform Western jurisprudence, theology, philosophy, and penal systems. These systems are rooted in retributive frameworks that centre the administration of punishment as central to the practice of justice. Other concerns such as community safety, rehabilitation, and deterrence are variously considered in these systems as well – but the driving concern in the popular imagination of justice and the creation of our justice systems is that of retribution.

2.2 Theological legacies

Several scholars have demonstrated that this idea of justice as retribution emerges directly out of Christian theologies. Theologies of the lex talionis (the law of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, Exod 21:24), eternal damnation and conscious suffering in hell, and the wrathful justice of God requiring the crucifixion of Jesus the Christ in order that it might be possible for humans to receive God’s grace have had an immeasurable impact on Western culture and justice systems (Soltis 2025; Soltis and Grimes 2021; Robert 2017; Gorringe 1996). These approaches have within them logics that theoretically limit vengeance and retribution. The lex talionis can be interpreted as requiring no more punishment than the original injury caused and therefore curb excessive punishment (only one eye taken for one eye injured). And the kind of ‘satisfaction theology’ that understands Christ’s crucifixion as satisfying God’s just wrath so that we might receive God’s grace can be understood to limit God’s retributive punishment to the person of Christ who bears the sins of the world. However, as Kathryn Getek Soltis (2011) has argued, these theologies have been ‘exploited’ to justify inhumane policies of mass punishment. At the heart of these theologies of retribution is a logic of debt, with punishment as the payment for moral debts (Sutherland 2026). This logic is what has often been exploited and has infused our language and captured our imaginations. When we say someone who has caused harm must ‘pay their debt to society’ by being executed or isolated from their community by being warehoused in a cage for years, we betray how thoroughly we are immersed in a Christian-infused culture of retributive punishment.

These are not the only understandings of justice found in the Christian scriptures or tradition, however, and the restorative justice movement is an expression of some of these other beliefs. These beliefs centre covenant, repentance, nonviolence, and reconciliation, and have informed and been informed by social, political, and legal restorative practices around the world. These practices have often emerged from communities who have borne the brunt of so much of the historic oppression theological narratives of debt and punishment have justified: colonized peoples, those surviving incarceration, and minority Christian traditions who have been persecuted by dominant ones. The bulk of this article will narrate this aspect of the global restorative justice movement, describe the theological implications of these practices, and conclude with lingering questions emerging from the movement about the nature and practice of justice in a Christian key.

3.1 The Anabaptist wellspring

In 1974 two teenage boys in Elmira, Ontario, Canada, went on a vandalism spree. They caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage across twenty-two different properties. Tires on cars were slashed, windows were broken, and two churches were vandalized. The teenagers were intoxicated; the town was a small, tight-knit community, and the case became notorious in Elmira because of its broad impact on the community.

At the same time, the Mennonite Church was wrestling with ways to make their calling to peace more socially impactful. Challenging versions of Anabaptist Christian pacifism which resulted in withdrawal from the messy affairs of society, Mennonites in Ontario and elsewhere sought ways to engage in public life that built peace by doing justice while remaining faithful to their Christian call to nonviolence (General Conference Mennonite Church, ‘The Way of Peace’, 1971; Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, Mennonite Church U.S.A [n.d.]). ‘The Elmira Case’, as it came to be known, was their opportunity to make practical their growing social commitments. The Mennonite Church of Canada, with the leadership of Mark Yantzi and Dave Worth, in collaboration with Judge G. H. McConnell who was frustrated with ‘the revolving door of justice’ he saw in his courtroom, birthed the Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program (Shuttleworth 2024). Following their arrest, the two young offenders were sent to go door-to-door to listen to the impacts of their actions from those directly affected, apologize, and learn what might contribute to material repair of the harms they caused. The act of repair identified by the process was paying the costs of damages not covered by insurance (Noakes-Duncan 2016).

Centred on face-to-face meetings between people who committed a crime and the victims of that crime, the Victim-Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP; now often called Victim-Offender Mediation/Conferencing or Restorative Conferencing) sought to make possible experiences of reconciliation between people who had been harmed and those who had directly caused those harms. While in the Elmira Case the young men went door-to-door, once VORP became formalized and the practice spread, these meetings occurred in more public settings such as churches, community organizations, and government offices. In 1978 the first United States-based VORP was implemented in Elkhart, Indiana, by Mennonites. Howard Zehr, who became the first widely recognized modern theorist of restorative justice, was a key figure in this programme and led a partnership between a community-based organization in Elkhart called Prisoners and Community Together (PACT) and the local justice system. Alongside the Elmira Case, PACT became a model that was regarded as a foundational example of what restorative justice, understood as the restoration of right relationships, could look like in practice.

Emerging out of Mennonite Christian theologies of God’s all-encompassing peace, drawn from their interpretation of shalom and covenant in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian call to the ministry of reconciliation (Zehr 1990: 126–157), VORP became the first formal restorative justice practice utilized by dominant North American criminal justice systems in cases involving non-Indigenous peoples. Inspired by a relational and comprehensive vision of God’s justice in the world, Mennonite theologians and practitioners have become leading advocates for the work of justice as the work of creating ‘right relationships’. Right relationships, in this worldview, are grounded in interconnectedness, the repair and healing of harm, and living together with others, including one’s enemies, in ways that contribute to mutual flourishing. In other words, ‘right relationships’ require that people be in relationship with others in ways that reflect the character of God. This character is covenantal and, therefore, committed to rights, responsibilities, and actions of accountability and repair when such covenant is violated (Marshall 2005; Pfeil 2016).

New Zealander Christopher Marshall has articulated a biblical theology of justice that has influenced Christian restorative justice thinkers and practitioners around the world. Drawing on Anabaptist biblical theologies of shalom, Christian pacifism rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus, and the justifying and saving character and action of God, Marshall says,

the justice of God is a dynamic, active power that breaks into situations of oppression and evil in order to bring liberation and restore freedom. Its basic concern is not to treat each person as each deserves but to do all that is necessary to make things right, even though it is totally undeserved and immensely costly. It is a restorative justice more than a retributive or distributive justice. It is God acting to end oppression and secure harmony and well-being, especially by meeting the needs of the disadvantaged and downtrodden. (Marshall 2001: 67)

Therefore, inasmuch as restorative justice centres ‘the healing of hurts, the renewal of relationships, and the re-creation of community’ it is consistent with the Christian theological vision of justice that

looks beyond retribution to a vision of justice that is finally satisfied only by the defeat of evil and the healing of its victims, by the repentance of sinners and the forgiveness of their sins, by the restoration of peace and the renewal of hope – a justice that manifests God’s redemptive work of making all things new. (Marshall 2001: 284)

This restorative vision of divine and biblical justice has inspired and informed, and been inspired and informed by, moments of God’s inbreaking justice as experienced in moments such as the Elmira Case and many other stories, programmes, and experiences in which accountability, healing, and, often, restoration have occurred.

At the centre of this restorative vision is the life and teachings of Jesus. During his ministry Jesus offered invitations both to a life of repentance that leads to salvation and to an experience of the reconciling grace of God. Jesus invited those who benefitted from religious and political systems of exploitation to repent of their oppressive practices and reminded those oppressed and marginalized in society of God’s overflowing love and grace for them. Put differently, those called to repent were invited to confession and repair, and those who were oppressed were invited to communities of mutual love and dignity. Importantly, in the life, death, resurrection, and ongoing ministry of Christ, such reparative salvation extends to all of creation in what Paul called ‘the ministry of reconciliation’ (2 Cor 5:16–20). This ministry reconciles humans, all other creatures, and the Earth and the universe to each other and God in an eschatological future of mutual flourishing. Christians are commissioned to participate in this ministry in their own contexts. The earliest Mennonite-led restorative justice programmes understood their practice of ‘restoring right relationships’ as a political reflection of that ministry of reconciliation and called churches to be faithful by joining in such work.

Often the universal experience of salvation that extends to all of creation is believed by Christians to be reserved for some existence beyond time. However, restorative justice practitioners interpret the salvific experience in an immanent eschatological key. Thus, they understand that God’s salvific work is always already occurring and that creatures can partner with God to make it felt in our individual, relational, communal, social, and political lives. In other words, God’s redemptive covenantal justice made manifest in the ministry of reconciliation is most clearly seen in the lived example of Jesus who is the centre of God’s salvific work.

Whereas retributive theologies centre images of balance, debt, and punishment as central to the ‘doing’ of justice, restorative theologies centre repair, personal and social healing, and community life. Many of the biblical stories about Jesus’ earthly ministry of conversion, healing, and justice incorporate relational repair and communal integration. For example, when Jesus heals the sick (whether lepers, the demon-possessed, or the bleeding woman) or raises the dead, what follows personal healing is the end of social isolation and the reintegration of those harmed by that isolation into communal life (Luke 8: 26–56). Similarly, in the story of Zacchaeus, Jesus links salvation to acts of repentance in which Zacchaeus repairs, as much as he is able, the harms he has caused members of the community and commits to living differently in the community going forward (Luke 19:1–10). In these stories, those who have been harmed experience healing, those who have caused harm are called to repair those harms, and the community is called to live differently so that formerly outcast members are reintegrated. In other words, Jesus’ ministry can be interpreted as a ministry of restorative justice.

Restorative justice, Christian or otherwise, has at its centre a critique of dominant criminal and political theories of justice that centre retribution, punishment, or procedure. In particular, the United States’ practices of mass incarceration and colonial governmental institutions receive damning critique. In restorative justice, justice is not equivalent to retribution or mere punishment, and crime is not understood primarily as a violation of the state. Rather, crime is a form of injustice because it is a violation of right relationship in which particular harms have been caused in particular relationships with particular people. Justice in response to such injustice, then, is not simply punishment that imposes pain, a balancing of the cosmic or legal scales, or even public condemnation. Justice is movement toward the restoration of right relationship.

The restoration of right relationship is a process that occurs as persons who caused harms practice accountability by repairing those harms, and those who have experienced harm experience the healing of the wounds those harms caused. This healing often looks like receiving acknowledgement that one has been harmed, an apology from those who caused their harm, reparation for material losses or costs associated with their harm, promises of and plans for safety from such harms in the future, and agreeing to new ways of living together going forward. In these ways, restorative justice is understood to be a victim- or survivor-centred experience of justice. In many programmes, such healing is consistent with the needs of trauma survivors, such as acknowledgement and apology, opportunities for meaning-making, invitation into relationship, and material repair (Yoder 2005; Captari 2023; for a related discussion, see Trauma Theology).

Persons who have caused harms also have opportunities to experience a justice that is restorative. They have the opportunity to practice accountability via providing acknowledgement, apology, and repair, which is necessary to remain in a covenantal relationship with those they have harmed. They also get to ‘make right’, to the extent possible, what they ‘made wrong’ and, therein, exercise moral agency that contributes to their own wellbeing and moral development. They also have the possibility of being reintegrated into and participating in communal life without their identity and reputation being tied to the most harmful things they have ever done to others. Finally, through the restorative justice process, those who caused harm often find forms of healing from those life experiences, including experiences of themselves being harmed, which were the background for their participation in antisocial, harmful behaviour. This might mean being welcomed into a new community, receiving support in their own trauma healing, and working to prevent such harms happening by and to others in the future.

Such opportunities for accountability and healing via acts of repair is made possible in experiences of encounter (Van Ness et al. 2022). Nearly every restorative justice practice has a component of face-to-face meetings and/or other forms of storytelling in which individual acts of harm are placed in broader life and social contexts. Such opportunities to share the impacts of acts of harm, the sources and contexts of such acts, and the meaning-making that can be a part of such encounters, are often experiences of humanization in which people who experienced harm, people who caused harm, and communities impacted by such harms are able to understand such actions within broader narrative frames that humanize all involved rather than dehumanize.

Experiences of humanization in such encounters empower victims/survivors to be able to exercise agency by having their voices heard in ways that acknowledge and vindicate their experiences and feelings. These experiences of humanization can also enable those responsible for causing harm to acknowledge the impacts of their actions as well as to be seen as more than the worst acts they have ever done. Entire communities can come to understand their corporate responsibility to work toward justice for all members of the community. These humanizing experiences are often the foundation and impetus for the acts of repair and experiences of healing that are the central elements of restorative justice.

The Christian vision of a God who restores relationship after covenant is broken – and who inspires a holistic vision of peace, justice, and wellbeing that is shalom – grounds this relational and restorative vision of justice for Christians. The story of God and God’s people as found in the Christian scriptures is one of participants who make covenants, break them, and reconstitute them through practices of creative restoration that include acts of accountability (confession and repentance, for example) and healing (forgiveness, conversion, and resurrection, for example). In addition, the example of Jesus’ life and ministry inspires restorative justice practitioners in their everyday practice and implementation of this theological vision. These theological commitments both seeded early Anabaptist experiments with restorative justice and have deepened, amended, and developed through theological reflection on practices like VORP.

3.2 The Indigenous wellspring

Many Indigenous and First Nations communities and nations around the world have understood and practiced justice in ways that are not primarily about retribution, legalism, or proceduralism. Rather, they have emphasized relationality, community care, healing, and mutuality with other humans and the rest of the natural and spiritual worlds. Not long after the Elmira Case, First Nations communities in North America reclaimed ancient practices of peacemaking circles in contexts of criminal justice and social welfare failures. Justice systems imposed upon them from the colonial powers that now dominate their traditional lands had proven incapable of stemming crises of violence, depression, addiction, and sexual harm in many of these communities. These crises were the result of the multidimensional harms done to Indigenous communities throughout the experience of colonization (of which criminal justice and social welfare systems are a part). And so, in the 1980s, communities such as the Tagish and Tlingit in the Yukon Territory, the Anishinaabe community of Hollow Water, and the Navajo Nation court system began experimenting with and implementing new justice practices grounded in the traditional practice of peacemaking circles.

Peacemaking circles are used by many Indigenous communities in North America and are grounded in the sacred teaching of the Medicine Wheel, which teaches a holistic theological anthropology that emphasizes personal and social balance. This holistic theological anthropology resists forms of Platonic Christian body-soul dualism (Goetz 2023) as well as modern and neoliberal capitalist practices of hyper-individualism and economic rationalism (Sung 2024) by emphasizing ontological relationality. All things are created by the Creator and are therefore related. In addition, the medicine wheel teaches that all aspects of existence (embodied, spiritual, intellectual, emotional) and the life cycle (infancy, childhood. adulthood, and elderhood) are equal parts of creaturely life. This is not dissimilar to the four directions (north, south, east, west), the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter), and the four elements (fire, water, earth, wind). All creation, then, exists in nonlinear cycles of birth and rebirth in the context of interdependent relationships.

Peacemaking circles are a practice that makes practical this holistic theological anthropology. In them people gather in a circle to be in conversation. They often establish shared values and guidelines for their discussion, utilize a talking piece (an object passed from person to person to signal whose turn it is to speak), have a focus on storytelling, and can be used to make group decisions via consensus. These circles are often ritualized and include elements such as a centrepiece made up of meaningful items, opening and closing meditations, and some spiritual or religious elements relevant to the people meeting. Like in Victim-Offender Mediation, circles often include people who have caused harm and those they have harmed in a shared experience of storytelling and decision-making about accountability and healing. However, circles also often include members of the broader community, recognizing that interpersonal harms have communal components and everyone directly involved in an experience of harm needs communal support to practice accountability and/or healing.

In the 1980s, the people of Hollow Water came together to address the legacies of colonization in their community by relearning peacemaking circles. Hollow Water is an Anishinaabeg First Nation in Canada. They were experiencing a decades-long epidemic of sexual abuse. Approximately two-thirds of Hollow Water’s residents were victims of domestic and sexual abuse and incest. Colonial violence against the community, the erasure of traditional culture, and ongoing discrimination against Indigenous peoples in Canada left legacies of poverty, mistrust, severed relationships, addiction, and shame that manifested in these horrific ways.

Bureaucratic interventions had little impact. Incarcerating those who committed acts of abuse did not stop more abuse from happening, social workers were unable to halt these behaviours within families, and Western medical and therapeutic responses like drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes did not provide the healing the community needed. In response, several leaders in Hollow Water advocated a different way to address the crisis. Reclaiming their traditional knowledge and practices (Sivell-Ferri 1997), they emphasized the need for healing (individual, familial, and communal) alongside accountability. Rather than mere punishment, the community designed a process of repair and transformation. What was identified by the community as their primary need was healing: spiritual, emotional, physical, and relational. Therefore, the people of Hollow Water implemented a multi-pronged approach rooted in their traditional values and practices including a series of peacemaking circles. They called this effort the Community Holistic Circle Healing Program (CHCHP).

Burma Bushie was one of the first ‘circle keepers’ in the programme and became one of their earliest and greatest advocates (Bushie 1997). Bushie was a recognized member of Hollow Water, a community leader, and a social worker; she was a co-founder of CHCH and would regularly travel to conferences and events to share the story of Hollow Water and teach people about the CHCH model. In these peacemaking circles people who had caused harm, the person or persons they had harmed, and members of the wider community gathered in a series of circles to share stories about what had happened and how they could repair the harms and heal the wounds that resulted from a specific incident of abuse. Kathy Louis, a member of Samson Cree Nation and Canadian Parole Board member, called these circles a form of ‘traditional healing based in spirituality’ (Dickie 2000).

Prior to a large community circle in which victims, offenders, and the broader Hollow Water community came together, there were healing circles made up entirely of specific demographic subgroups. For example, there were accountability circles designed for those who had committed sexual abuse. Similarly, those who had survived sexual abuse from another person were in healing circles with one another to share their stories. Through this storytelling they came to know that they were not alone in their experience.

Additionally, there were communal cultural circles. These circles examined the experience of colonization for the people of Hollow Water and provided a historical context for the community troubles they faced. They also reintroduced traditional rituals and practices that had been forgotten or abandoned, often by inviting other Indigenous communities to reintroduce them in Hollow Water.

Finally, for each case that successfully made it through these circles with consent from both those harmed and those who caused harm, an agreement for accountability and healing would be made in a community-wide circle. These circles focused on the best way to keep children who had been sexually abused in the community as safe as possible while providing avenues for accountability and eventual reintegration into the community for offenders. Soon after the introduction of the CHCHP it quickly became clear that the majority of those who had committed sexual abuse were also the victims of sexual abuse when they were younger. Clear lines between ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ were not easily drawn in Hollow Water.

The community trained more people to keep these circles and their use spread. In addition, other traditional practices – dance ceremonies, sweat lodges, drum dances, and wilderness journeys (in which young people spent time reconnecting with their traditional lands and listening to the wisdom of elders) – were reintroduced to the community as means to relearn their old ways. There was an intentional revival of traditional ways of knowing and being that had been suppressed by colonization and the generational traumas it caused. The community found that this approach better achieved what the community needed: a justice that heals. It also stemmed the tide of sexual abuse in the community more effectively than efforts led by the Canadian state. Of the first 107 offenders who participated in CHCH in its first nine years, only two were rearrested (Couture et al. 2001: 26). This way of addressing harms in the community worked – and it did so by deepening relational bonds, reinvigorating traditional ways of knowing and being, and embracing a vision of justice as accountability, repair, and healing (Dickie 2000; Sawatsky 2009b).

In Canada’s Yukon Territory, another experiment with circles took place. Harold Gatensby, a Tlingit man who survived residential school and incarceration, heard about circles used among Indigenous peoples elsewhere and suggested to Judge Barry Stuart that they should be tried in Yukon to reduce recidivism among First Nations people. Later, Judge Stuart heard Burma Bushie present on Hollow Water and became even more interested in utilizing circles in the Yukon (Dickie 2000). He began working with Gatensby to create a circle in which elders and community members sat with young men accused or convicted of crimes. Both Gatensby and Stuart have testified that circles were successful in reducing recidivism and empowering communities to repair broken relationships. While research on these early experiments is lacking, evidence from other Tlingit communities has found evidence consistent with these claims (Nesheim 2010; Stuart 1998; Canadian Press Newswire 1997). For example, dominant-system recidivism rates in Alaska have been measured as high as 66%, but in the Tlingit village of Kake that rate is 48% and in the village of Hoonah it is 42% (Nesheim 2010: 41–45).

Harold and his brother Phil Gatensby, Judge Stuart, Judge Mark Wedge of Tagish descent, and Burma Bushie became some of the most important early advocates of peacemaking circles as a means to relearn traditional ways of healing and peacemaking. In addition to becoming circle keepers among their own communities, they began taking the message of what they were learning and taught others across North America and the world about the power of peacemaking circles as a means of healing, community building, and reforming criminal justice systems. Stuart and Wedge then worked with Kay Pranis who authored the go-to books on the subject (Pranis, Stuart and Wedge 2003; Pranis 2005).

In the Southwestern United States, in Navajo country, another Indigenous peacemaking revolution was under way in tribal courts. Chief Justice Robert Yazzie noticed the same ineffectiveness recognized by the people of Hollow Water and in Tagish/Tlingit territory: mainstream criminal legal systems were ineffective at preventing harm, doing justice, or providing healing in Indigenous communities. So, Judge Yazzie introduced alternative forms of justice in Navajo courts grounded in his people’s traditional teachings about being a good relation. Navajo peacemaking also uses a circle process, though it is distinct from those practiced by Hollow Water or in the Yukon. It is, as Yazzie has said, a form of ‘horizontal justice’ as opposed to the ‘vertical justice’ imposed by western legal systems. As he explains,

[t]he horizontal justice model uses a horizontal line to portray equality: no person is above another. A better description of the horizontal model, and one often used by Indians to portray their thought, is a circle. In a circle, there is no right or left, nor is there a beginning or an end; every point (or person) on the line of a circle looks to the same center as the focus. The circle is the symbol of Navajo justice because it is perfect, unbroken, and a simile of unity and oneness. It conveys the image of people gathering together for discussion. (Yazzie 1994: 180)

Yazzie also described Navajo peacemaking justice as ‘healing’ (like the people of Hollow Water) and ‘solidarity’:

The term ‘solidarity’ is essential to an understanding of both Navajo healing and justice […]. The Navajo understanding of ‘solidarity’ is difficult to translate into English, but it carries connotations which help the individual to reconcile self with family, community, nature, and the cosmos […]. The sense of oneness with one’s surroundings, and the reconciliation of the individual with everyone and everything, makes an alternative to vertical justice work. Navajo justice rejects simply convicting a person and putting them in prison; instead it favors methods which use solidarity to restore good relations among people. Most importantly, it restores good relations with self. (Yazzie 1994: 181)

Judge Yazzie’s reflections point to two core beliefs of many restorative justice practitioners. First, justice is relational. In Navajo and many other Indigenous worldviews, relationality is not limited to the interpersonal. Rather, one is in relationship with other individuals, families, communities, other living beings, the ancestors, nonhuman creatures, and Creator. When harms occur in one or two of these relationships, a person gets out of balance. The work of justice, then, is the work of coming back into balance with all other living things. Those out of balance are invited to become a good relation again. Crucially, punishment is not the primary tool to achieve this state of being. Someone who refuses to be a good relation may, indeed, receive some punishment but that is not understood to be the administration of justice in its fullness. Rather, coming into restored or new relations is the way to fulfil the demands of justice. This emphasis on relationality among Indigenous thinkers has deeply influenced Christian restorative justice practitioners to adopt the language of interconnectedness and interdependence in describing their own theological anthropologies.

The second core belief of restorative justice evident in these stories of Indigenous healing justice is that dominant Western criminal justice systems regularly fail to achieve their stated aims: public safety, deterrence, and achieving justice. This is especially true for Indigenous communities but also more broadly. In the United States, the country with one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world (Widra 2024), violent crime is high (Grinshteyn and Hemenway 2019), recidivism occurs more often than it does not (Council on Criminal Justice [n.d.]), and both those convicted of crimes and many who have been victimized by crime report dissatisfaction with their participation in the system and the degree to which they experience justice (Prison Policy Initiative [n.d.]; Kunst, Popelier and Varekamp 2015; Nascimento, Andrade and Rodrigues 2023).

Other Indigenous communities beyond North America report similar experiences. Most famously, the Māori of Aotearoa (New Zealand), and other Pasifika peoples in the Pacific Islands, have experimented with restorative justice models that are rooted in their own traditional understandings and practices of justice. These communities have implemented Family Group Conferencing as a form of traditional justice that centres family decision-making rooted in traditional values. In New Zealand, Family Group Conferences have been the primary form of youth justice since the passage of the Oranga Tamariki Act of 1989.

These practices are unique from but not dissimilar to the peacemaking circles used by many Indigenous communities in North America (MacRae and Zehr 2004). In fact, in the 1980s, leaders of both movements met and learned from one another at international conferences, where they shared the stories of how they developed and implemented these practices in their own contexts. For example, New Zealand Judge Fred McElrea, Matt Hukahiya (Māori spiritual leader, social worker, and early restorative justice practitioner and theorist), and Judge Barry Stuart attended a talk delivered by Burma Bushie in Winnipeg at a conference in the early 1990s. Hukahiya drew from the Hollow Water example to advocate for the role of cultural revitalization as part of any restorative justice programme for Māori and other Pasifika peoples (Dickie 2000).

For many Indigenous peoples, then, restorative justice’s broad themes of relationality, accountability, healing, dialogue, and societal reintegration have resonated with their own traditional understandings of justice that are, in Judge Yazzie’s words, more ‘horizontal’ than ‘vertical’. When paired with broader cultural revitalization efforts, these understandings can be a method of decolonization and resurgence in their own nations and communities (Simpson 2017: 92). Indigenous practices are unique in the details – peacemaking circles are not family group conferences which are not Hawaiian Hoʻoponopono (Hosmanek 2005) – but there are resonances across and between these practices around the world.

Indigenous experiments in restorative justice push the theological frameworks of the movement in directions the Anabaptist experiments did not. While all restorative justice theorists and practitioners emphasize relationality, Indigenous theorists and practitioners push past ‘mere’ relationality toward a theological anthropology of human and/or creaturely interconnectedness and even interdependence. If Western visions of justice have emphasized the individual rational actor as the moral agent in cases of crime or harm-doing, Indigenous peoples point to the individual in community – the communal individual – as the moral agent. In this understanding, when harm occurs, it is not only because an individual makes a bad decision. It is also because society and the community have failed as well and, therefore, have a responsibility to practice repair and healing alongside the individuals directly impacted by a crime or instance of harm. Instances of harm in a community result, in part, from relational fissures caused by social structures or communal norms that fail to empower people to be just members of the community.

This theological anthropology, rooted in spiritual teachings that emphasize ‘being a good relation’, has birthed restorative justice practices that are more community-focused than early Anabaptist experiments. Rather than victim–offender mediations, Indigenous and Aboriginal communities offer practices in which communities and families sit in circles in the presence of elders. In doing so, the community creates the structure for the generational passing on of traditional knowledge. This work attends to interpersonal harms but also to the harms of centuries of colonization and contemporary structural harms that are racist, classist, and more. This, too, distinguishes Indigenous peacemaking from Anabaptist justice practices. Peacemaking circles and other Indigenous and Aboriginal restorative justice efforts often pair justice work that heals the harms of colonization with restorative justice processes responsive to interpersonal harms. Both are necessary to achieve a justice that heals (McCaslin 2005; Valandra 2020).

If Anabaptist approaches to restorative justice emphasize the covenantal God who works toward repair, healing, and reconciliation, Indigenous approaches to restorative justice emphasize a Creator of all things and in whom all things are interrelated. While not panentheistic in the ways often construed by Western theologians, Indigenous restorative justice theorists do see the divine or spirituality in the relations between all peoples and other creatures. This doctrine of God/Creator influences a theological anthropology that emphasizes the relational self, and community, as relevant moral agents in instances of injustice. It is for this reason that the circle, rather than the dialogue or conference, is the primary restorative justice practice in these communities.

Anabaptist and Indigenous approaches to restorative justice also share beliefs in common. Both emphasize that justice practices which do not make accountability, repair, and healing central concerns are not actually just. Those that prioritize the agency of the state disempower communities. Those that emphasize punishment do not achieve accountability or healing. In contrast, both Anabaptist and Indigenous restorative justice emphasize that justice is necessarily relational and, therefore, require encounters of humanization that make possible the repair, restoration, or creation of right relationships. And they both insist that such practices must include and empower those most directly impacted by crime or harm if they are to achieve these goals.

3.3 The South African wellspring

Christian and Indigenous theologies of restorative justice came together in a unique way under Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s leadership of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the mid-1990s. Nelson Mandela had recently become the first democratically elected president of South Africa after years of white minority rule. The country was on the verge of devolving into civil war before the negotiations that made his election possible. Many other African nations were able to achieve freedom and establish democracy only after revolutionary wars. South Africa avoided this fate. However, this left it in an almost unprecedented situation: how to do justice when there was no military victory, but many had been killed, tortured, and disappeared in course of the ‘peaceful’ revolution.

In this context, South Africa chose a new and innovative way of pursuing justice: they created a truth and reconciliation commission, the first of its kind. The typical way a new ruling power takes over a country and its government is through a military victory and imposition of ‘victor’s justice’ upon the conquered. In other words, winner takes all. Because South Africa’s transition was negotiated rather than won on the battlefield, and because the national leadership of the revolutionary force desired peace and the reconstruction of society, this was not what happened in South Africa.

South Africa’s TRC did not appear out of nothing, however. After the Second World War a new form of justice after war, sometimes referred to as transitional justice, emerged. Out of the experience of the attempted genocide of European Jewry by Germany’s Nazi government, a flurry of innovations of international law developed. Genocide was named, defined, and codified as a crime against humanity. Also, the idea of universal human rights was inscribed into international law and has become the centrepiece of contemporary international governance and activism.

Connected to the creation and rise of human rights were the first international criminal trials in which individuals who were not political or military commanders were tried for their participation in war crimes. Various ‘middle managers’, if you will, were tried in international court and found guilty for ‘making the Nazi trains run’. The Nuremberg Trials and the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem are the most famous of these proceedings. This individualization of wartime guilt was a new phenomenon in the world and transformed international jurisprudence and politics.

In this new legal-political context, colonized peoples around the world fought revolutions and established new democracies – and sometimes new dictatorships. In these countries, there were sometimes counter revolutions against the new governments as well. All of this meant that there were many governments that engaged in horrific human rights violations who found themselves at risk of punishment during times of political transition. This insecurity made such transitions feel especially fragile and capable of devolving into mass violence. In Latin America, especially, the ways that these societies came to navigate transitions from one government to another was via projects of amnesty. Either there were blanket amnesties, in which violations of human rights in the midst of violent political conflicts were never reckoned with, or there were truth commissions which documented broad social truths about the oppression and violence of previous governments but did not provide avenues of legal redress for these crimes. Rather than victor’s justice or individualizing guilt, it had become common practice to forego accountability in the name of maintaining fragile peace.

It was in this international and historical context that South Africa emerged from almost half a century of legalized apartheid. Apartheid was a regime of gross racial inequality and extreme segregation in which Black people were not granted citizenship rights, white people ruled with impunity, and Coloured and Asian residents were treated as second-class citizens. Countless political activists and leaders had been imprisoned, kidnapped, exiled, and killed by the ruling government. Draconian laws were put in place to control the movement, education, employment, economics, and family life of Black and other non-white South Africans. The apartheid government became infamous for the level of brutality in its form of racism and stands today as a metaphor for injustice in many countries around the world.

However, victor’s justice was not imposed upon the architects and administrators of apartheid when the country transitioned to a democracy. While there were many who benefitted from and oversaw apartheid who would have preferred a blanket amnesty, the newly elected leaders did not accept mass forgetting as an option for the new nation yet to be born. Neither of these two dominant options, mass prosecutions and blanket amnesties, was the path South Africa chose. Instead, drawing on the basic idea of truth commissions – that full, accurate historical truth-telling and memory are essential to preventing future oppression – and pairing it with the insights of restorative justice, the first democratically elected government in South Africa’s history chose to create what they called a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

South Africa’s TRC was grounded in three core beliefs. The first was ubuntu, the southern African philosophical idea that says all humans are interconnected and interdependent, and that individual human wellbeing is tied to communal human wellbeing. In the famous words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, ubuntu means ‘I am because we are’. Said differently, it can be translated as ‘a human being is a human being because of other human beings’ (Makgoro 1998: 15–16). Against the agonistic individualism of modern capitalist visions of the human, and the hierarchical and segregationist racialism of apartheid, ubuntu stood as an African ideal for this African country.

The second core belief was that truth-telling was necessary for establishing justice and peace in the country. Whereas some worried that the search for truth could undermine any negotiated peace, South Africa’s first democratically elected leaders insisted that in a country with its history – which included myth-making that denied the humanity of Black and other non-white people, and government violence cloaked in secrecy and denial – there could be no just peace without widespread acknowledgement of the truth.

The third core belief was that if the country was going to have a future, if the multiracial national project was to be successful, then national reconciliation should be pursued. Inspired by the idea of ubuntu, the Christian tradition with which so many South Africans identify, and the global movement for a justice that heals, South Africa created a commission that sought to do restorative justice at the national level. While social, and not merely interpersonal, forms of restorative justice had been tried at local levels among Indigenous communities, a national-level restorative justice process of this scale had never been attempted before South Africa.

These values were embedded in the postscript to the interim Constitution on which the TRC was based. This post-amble reads, in part:

This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterized by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex.

The pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all South African citizens and peace require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction of society.

The adoption of this Constitution lays the secure foundation for the people of South Africa to transcend the divisions and strife of the past, which generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge.

These can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization […].

With this Constitution and these commitments we, the people of South Africa, open a new chapter in the history of our country. (South Africa Interim Constitution 1993)

It was in response to this call and charge to ubuntu, reconciliation, unity, and reconstruction, that the TRC was created. The Commission had four core components with the broad goal of promoting national reconciliation. The core components were a series of public testimonies in separate committees and a set of special hearings. The Human Rights Violations Committee heard testimonies from individuals who had either experienced violations of their human rights or were family members of people who had. The purpose of these hearings was to gather information for the final report of the Commission that would tell the true story of the apartheid years, to provide space for healing for those who experienced human rights violations by providing a platform to be heard and vindicated, and to contribute to the possibility of reparations for them or their families. Many of these testimonies were broadcast on live television and radio across the country and became foundational to the country’s self-understanding and its political transition.

Second, the Amnesty Committee provided opportunities for people who had committed human rights violations to tell the truth about what they had done in a public forum and, potentially, be granted amnesty from future prosecutions. To be granted amnesty they needed to be judged to have told the whole truth about what they had done and could demonstrate that they committed such acts in the name of a political goal of the state or a revolutionary party. Whereas the Human Rights Violations Committee sometimes felt more like talk therapy sessions, the Amnesty Committee meetings were closer to a criminal courtroom as those who testified faced questions and something akin to cross-examination. Many of these testimonies were also broadcast on national television and some particularly infamous participants’ testimonies have had a large impact on how the nation remembers the era of apartheid and its resistance.

Third, the Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee was designed to determine levels of material reparations to be granted to those who had shared about the harms they had endured in the Human Rights Violations Committee. Whereas perpetrators of human rights violations had the potential of amnesty to incentivize their participation in the process, the victims of human rights violations had the hope of reparation.

Finally, in addition to these core committees, there were special hearings devoted to the experiences of political organizations as organizations and not only individuals. Members of the National Party, who administered the apartheid government, and leaders in major revolutionary organizations like the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress were the headliners of these hearings, but other parties participated as well.

The Commission was chaired by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a leader of the anti-apartheid movement and internationally recognized advocate for peace and justice. The seventeen commissioners were a multiracial group of recognized leaders, nine men and eight women, who oversaw the commission and its functioning as a kind of executive board. It collected over 21,000 victim testimonies of which 2,000 appeared in the public hearings. Over 7,000 amnesty applications were received of which 849 cases were approved. The Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee recommended a series of different types of reparation: urgent interim monetary reparation for those who were facing dire needs; individual reparation grants for those who had experienced human rights violations, to be paid out over six years; community rehabilitation programmes; and symbolic reparations like public memorials and the exhumation and proper burial of family members killed during the era of apartheid. This committee also recommended political and institutional reforms to address the legacies of ongoing apartheid inequality in land, money, and status. Of the work of all the committees, the Reparations and Rehabilitation Committee was the one that prompted the least amount of action from the government and many of its recommendations were not implemented. In the years that followed, Tutu, among others, was regularly critical of the government’s relative failure to follow through on reparations and the institutional reforms needed to remedy the racialized inequality in the country (Biles and Tutu 2006; Tutu 2011). Reconciliation is not possible, Tutu argued, if reparation is not made (Tutu 1999: 61–66).

At the end of its chartered time, the Commission produced a report that states clearly that the apartheid government regularly and brutally violated the human rights of many non-white persons as a matter of policy. In addition, it includes the voices and stories of many individuals who experienced these human rights violations and whose testimonies are now part of the permanent national record. The Commission’s report also memorializes many who were killed for their resistance to apartheid and puts forth recommendations for reparations and reforms.

By many measures, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was successful. Thousands participated, the political transition was completed relatively peacefully, a new national history was written and identity cast. The stories of the oppressed were heard and memorialized, and there were some who received material reparation and repair. In addition, many forms of justice were experienced by participants that went beyond retribution or material reparation. Justice as acknowledgement, recognition, participation, and more were experienced by formerly disenfranchised people for the first time (Du Toit 2000). Many individuals self-reported instances of individual healing after finally getting to tell their story or learning about what happened to loved ones who had long gone missing. Some even experienced interpersonal reconciliation as they encountered either those who had done them or their families harm or faced those they had harmed. Some of the most famous moments of the TRC include moments of apology and offers of forgiveness between people harmed and those who harmed them.

However, the Commission was imperfect, and it has had its critics. One of the most damning criticisms regards the failure of the government to follow through on its recommendations for reparations and reforms, as noted above. This failure is often interpreted as the TRC exploiting the traumatic experiences and stories of people without meeting their material needs. Another is that the nature of the Commission’s goals and public testimonies, which emphasized acts done for explicitly political reasons, meant that women were often rhetorically excluded as victims of apartheid in the formal political-revolutionary narrative the TRC created. When women were included, they were often only able to be so by sharing stories of sexual violation or of losing a child, which reinforced many gender stereotypes and forms of oppression (Ross 2002). Others were critical of Tutu and his explicitly Christian leadership; of the Commission’s treatment of revolutionaries as possible violators of human rights even if their cause was just; and of being too lenient to the leaders of the apartheid government. Even with all this criticism, however, it is often viewed as one of the most successful such commissions in the world. Indeed, South Africa remains a democratic country that has avoided counterrevolutions by agents of apartheid even as it continues to struggle to overcome its legacies.

South Africa has inspired dozens of TRCs around the world since it completed its work. Many of these have taken place in countries experiencing political transitions, others have been launched in response to localized violence, while yet others address long histories and legacies of oppression, violence, and trauma. Each TRC is slightly different, adapted to the particular needs of each country and context.

For example, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the first to include the testimonies of people living in diaspora in their report. Sierra Leone paired their TRC with simultaneous international trials of those who were the leaders of the organizations which committed gross violations of human rights. The TRC in Greensboro, North Carolina, was the first not to have formal government sponsorship and was inspired by the failure of criminal and civil courts to do justice after an instance of racialized violence in the city. And the variations continue. Importantly, one feature that has become quite common is the pairing of formal TRC testimonies, which often resemble a courtroom experience, with localized reconciliation and restorative justice mechanisms grounded in the culture of a place. For example, TRCs in West Africa have often implemented complementary traditional tribal conflict resolution practices, like palaver ceremonies, to help facilitate the reintegration of those who caused harm back into a local community. Sierra Leone’s use of fambul tok ceremonies is perhaps the most famous such example (Graybill 2017).

Another important innovation among TRCs is the growing number of Indigenous communities who have participated in national TRCs to address the legacies of colonial oppression or are presently calling for such commissions today. Canada’s TRC to address the legacies of colonization, including especially the residential school experience, is perhaps the best known of these but there have been several others around the world and more are underway. Each of these commissions has its critics – and oftentimes rightfully so. However, historically oppressed peoples and transitional societies continue to choose this method as a tool to facilitate healing through truth-telling, repair, justice, and even reconciliation. For instance, there are now those in the United States working at the intersections of racial justice and restorative justice who are calling for a TRC regarding the country’s history of racist policing (Davis 2019).

Desmond Tutu, when discussing South Africa’s TRC, regularly described it as an exercise in restorative justice, and others who cite South Africa as an example follow suit. He said:

One might […] say that perhaps justice fails to be done only if the concept we entertain of justice is retributive justice, whose chief goal is to be punitive, so that the wronged party is really the state, something impersonal, which has little consideration for the real victims and almost none for the perpetrator.

We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice, which was characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence. Here the central concern is not retribution or punishment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense.

This is a far more personal approach, regarding the offense as something that has happened to persons and whose consequence is a rupture in relationships. Thus we would claim that justice, restorative justice, is being served when efforts are being made to work for healing, for forgiving, for reconciliation. (Tutu 1999: 54–55)

In this summary of the vision of justice that informed South Africa’s TRC, there is much resonance with the Anabaptist and Indigenous visions of restorative justice already discussed. Injustice is understood to be a violation of relationships and, therefore, justice is repairing the harms that have ruptured those relationships. Doing justice in the wake of harm requires that those who caused harm have opportunities to take accountability and ‘do sorry’, in the words of Danielle Sered, in ways that can lead to reconnection and reintegration with their communities (Sered 2021). Justice is understood in healing ways and attention to the specific harms, traumas, and injuries of victims is at the centre of the work. These experiences, for Tutu and many other interpreters of the TRC, create opportunities for mutual humanization even when addressing horrific harms.

Healing and accountability are related to one another. And they contribute in different ways to ‘encounters of humanization’ that make accountability, repair, and healing possible. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a psychologist and researcher who served as one of the commissioners of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She has argued that what happens in the kinds of encounters that are central to restorative justice is ‘empathic repair’ (Gobodo-Madikizela 2017). That is, the repair of an ability to see another – especially one who has harmed you or you had to dehumanize in your own mind to harm – as a fellow human with whom you are connected; a human whose humanity is connected to your humanity. In other words, a repair of ubuntu. Such encounters facilitate healing and the possibility of new futures of living together as members of shared community.

The South African experience, then, contributes to the relational insights of the Anabaptist and Indigenous approaches to restorative justice already described. Anabaptists describe relationship as covenant, Indigenous North American communities centre ‘being a good relation’, and Bantu-speakers such as Desmond Tutu emphasize ubuntu. Each moves us toward a theological anthropology of interconnectedness and interdependence which demands a vision of justice as one of humanization, accountability, repair, and healing. Restorative justice, in other words, demands Christians reject dominant visions of the human (mostly modern and Western) that centre individualism, rational self-interest understood as maximizing profit, and hierarchies of the human that separate people based on race, gender, class, ability, and the like. Instead, restorative justice invites its participants to see their own wellbeing inherently and necessarily interwoven with the wellbeing of others – even those who one may have harmed or been harmed by (Pointer 2021: 125–127).