A large daffodil grows out of a concrete block. The block is a prison cell with metal bars. The daffodil's stem, leaves and roots are breaking through the block and causing cracks. Text reads: Imagining long-term solutions to violence, including sexual harassment, is part of a larger abolitionist project to foster community-wide changes instead of distributing individual punishments.
Illustration credit: Naomi Ushiyama.

Transformative Approaches to Conflict Resolution

By ,

Introduction

This article introduces some of the key concepts of transformative justice and provides links to a wide array of resources. If you have additional materials that should be included in this list, please contact the Commons Librarians. Please note the organisations and services listed have an Australian focus but there are initiatives in many other parts of the world. 

Note: Many of the listed resources link to content that includes discussions of violence and abusive behaviours which may have intense connotations or bring up difficult feelings and memories. Please consider ensuring that you are in a safe location and have options for support if needed.

Key Concepts

Community Accountability

Community accountability is a strategy for creating environments where it is possible to be accountable to address violence within our communities (rather than relying on the police/prison-based punitive system).

Community accountability strategies include:

  • Provide SAFETY & SUPPORT to community members who are violently targeted that RESPECTS THEIR SELF-DETERMINATION.
  • Create and affirm VALUES & PRACTICES that resist abuse and oppression and encourage safety, support, and accountability.
  • Develop sustainable strategies to ADDRESS COMMUNITY MEMBERS’ ABUSIVE BEHAVIOR, creating a process for them to account for their actions and transform their behavior.
  • Commit to ongoing development of all members of the community, and the community itself, to TRANSFORM THE POLITICAL CONDITIONS that reinforce oppression and violence.

The text above and image below are from ‘What are Community Accountability & Transformative Justice?‘ 

A diagram outlining the Community Accountability strategies fully listed in the body of the article. The diagram is made up of four circles surrounding a central oval, like a flower. The oval has the words COMMUNITY ACCOUNTABILITY and arrows to each circle. See the bullet points in the article for text of each circle.

Transformative Justice

Transformative justice describes a systems approach to identifying root causes of conflict and responding to these as a community – including developing various harm-reduction processes to interpersonal violence within communities at the grassroots level rather than relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Beyond Survival, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2020)

What is Transformative Justice? – A video by Barnard Center for Research on Women, featuring Adrienne Maree Brown, Mia Mingus, Stas Schmiedt, Ann Russo, Esteban Kelly, Martina Kartman, Priya Rai, and Shira Hassa (2020)

Restorative Justice

Restorative justice practices develop processes “whereby parties with a stake in a specific offence collectively resolve how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future” (ALRC). While these approaches can contribute to transformative justice, sometimes they function as an adjunct to punitive systems of justice (e.g., see the ADRC History of Restorative Justice in Australia and, for a critique, the Undercurrent Podcast on Principles and Frameworks for Accountability)

Transformative justice is a decolonizing and anti-oppression approach [that] addresses oppression by systems of domination, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, elitism, classism, and ableism within all domestic, interpersonal, global, and community conflicts. In short, transformative justice is restorative justice plus social justice. Transformative justice expands the social justice model, which challenges and identifies injustices, in order to create organized processes of addressing and ending those injustices. Transformative Justice Journal (2020) Vol 1.1 p.2

Tools

Books

Podcasts & Videos

News Clippings

Research

Additional Resource Lists

Organisations & Services (Australian based)

Further Questions

  • How are social change movements incorporating community-approaches to interpersonal conflict – both within these movements and in terms of facilitating community-based accountability and justice practices within broader society?
  • How might community-approaches to justice be relevant to settlers practicing accountability (individually and collectively) for the harms experienced by Indigenous people as a result of historical and ongoing colonial practices?

If you have thoughts on these questions and/or additional materials that should be included in this list, please contact the Commons Librarians.

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