Healing-Centered Restorative Justice

This concept paper maps out an approach to restorative justice that enriches current trauma-informed understandings and promotes healing and repair. The paper draws upon many sources, including qualitative research undertaken between 2021-23 in Israel/Palestine and New Zealand/Aotearoa, and an ongoing collaborative research project in the U.S. It also incorporates gathered wisdom on trauma and healing from leading experts across many disciplines. The paper begins by delineating different understandings of trauma, including personal, collective, historical, and structural forms. It then highlights three critical perspectives that offer useful insights into how the field of restorative justice can more effectively achieve its transformational potential: (1) Indigenous/collectivist perspectives; (2) positive psychology-related perspectives; and (3) transformative justice/abolitionist perspectives. The paper goes on to reframe these critical perspectives as core features of healing-centered restorative justice: first, a contextualized, multi-dimensional understanding of trauma; second, a strengths orientation toward human behavior; and third, a relational worldview grounded in interconnectedness, mutuality, and shared responsibility. By adopting this holistic and humanistic framework, restorative justice scholars and practitioners can develop effective and culturally sustaining conflict transformation processes that contribute to healing and repair at individual, interpersonal, and systemic levels of society.