Description
Promoting restorative justice in post-conflict societies has been one of UN’s several peacebuilding programmes, aiming at building lasting and just peace. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated in 2020, ‘re-connecting’ victims and perpetrators is key to prevent violence re-occurrence. However, this assumes that before violence occurs, people are connected to one another. Furthermore, in restorative justice programmes, UN’s narrative presumes that it is the ill-behaviour of some that breaks such connection. This paper questions both these interconnected assumptions, which the main relevant literature seems to overlook. Drawing from a growing body of research on restorative justice, reconciliation approaches, and communication, this paper argues that to build lasting and just peace, peacebuilding programmes need to take an overarching approach, considering areas where active conflicts and/or violence are not present. In other words, peacebuilding frameworks and narratives need to be reconsidered, starting from examining whether people are already ‘dis-connected’ from one another in no-conflict areas/times. Through discourse analyses, this paper investigates whether the social fabric is already rife with social divisions, the anti-room of conflict, examining discourses in different European countries between 2020 and 2022. It contributes important considerations to discussions on UN’s peacebuilding efforts.
