Restoration and transformation through meaningfulness – A brief exploration of the intersections between Restorative Justice and Elicitive Conflict Transformation through the scope of Transrationality
I have dedicated my research effort to an inquiry around the prospect of transrational peaces out of justice. I start out of Wolfgang Dietrich’s exception on John Paul Lederach’s idea of Justpeace, to make my critical stance towards the Brazilian criminal justice system. Subsequently, I unfold the Elicitive Conflict Transformation possibilities through the Restorative Justice lenses, primarily based on the ideas of Howard Zehr.
Interacting with the ideas of Zehr, Lederach, and Dietrich, I realized that they emphatically stress the relational aspect underlying the notions of justice, conflict and peace(s). That motivated me to explore human communication through the perspectives of authors from the fields of Biology and Psychology, in addition to that of Peace and Conflict Studies.
The yearning for belonging and bonding out of our relational human condition led me to tease out a biocultural need for meaningfulness. A need, as I have concluded, that must be appreciated for the sake of conflict transformation.
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This experience has been rewarding and fruitful as it has been an arduous work, on the psychological and physical level. Out of my own personal critical perspective on the criminal justice system, I twisted myself up, as I have open-heartedly dealt with my military family ancestry and with the historical contexts upon which the Brazilian nation-state has established its foundations. It was a very intense writing effort, especially as I have dedicated myself to it exclusively within a relatively short period of time in the seclusion of my home. At times, it felt as if the writing was done through me rather than by me. The bottom line is that all this soul searching of mine provided for healing out of the meanings I ended up constructing throughout the reflections I engaged myself with.