Peace as an Active Goal with Jennifer Llewellyn

Ceejay Hayes:

This is CounterPol. Today I'm speaking with Jennifer Llewellyn about restorative justice. Restorative justice seeks to repair harm by providing an opportunity for those harmed and those who take responsibility for the harm to communicate about and address their needs in the aftermath of a crime. You'll see restorative justice principles applied at all levels, from individual criminal cases to national truth and reconciliation commissions. I'm interested in the potential of restorative justice principles for depolarizing democracies. Can these principles re-establish healthy relationships between ideologically opposed groups? Jennifer brings up a surprising correlation between traditional approaches of justice and the current crisis of polarization in democracies. As in previous episodes, I used the U.S. as my frame of reference, so I'm curious if our observations are relevant in different contexts. Still, this conversation offers us a framework for existing in better relations with our peers. I hope you enjoy.

Jennifer Llewellyn:

My name is Jennifer Llewellyn. I am a professor of law and chair in restorative justice at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University, which is located in Nova Scotia, Canada. I live and work and play here on the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people, otherwise known as Mi'kma'ki, and that's had a significant positive impact on my work and on the work that I do elsewhere in the world. And so I'm grateful for that. I'm the Director of the Restorative Research, Innovation and Education Lab here at the Schulich School of Law in Dalhousie. And that is an organization that came to be sort of out of a way of working across government and community and across academia with other researchers and practice experts to really take the opportunity to think about justice differently and the implications of thinking about justice in a restorative way rooted in relational principles, the difference that makes to the way that we secure just societies, the way in which we live in just relations at all levels, societal levels, institutional, organizational levels, and interpersonal levels.

Ceejay Hayes:

I want this to be a conversation on how restorative justice principles can help us to depolarize and serve as a strategy for coming together as communities who share national or regional identities. But before we could do that, can you just quickly explain what restorative justice is? What are the foundations and the processes that make restorative justice different from traditional, more punitive forms of justice and what the role of is in restorative justice?

Jennifer Llewellyn:

Restorative justice is, I think, first and foremost, at least in the way in which it informs my work, is a theory or an understanding of what justice is actually all about. So it starts from the premise that justice is actually at its core about just relations. about how we structure our relations, not just at interpersonal levels, but for sure how we understand our relations and interactions with one another, but also sort of all the way up and all the way down. So all the way up to the sort of societal level or nation-to-nation relations. that the call to do justice or our imagination about what a just world would look like actually has to pay attention to how we're connected to one another. So this kind of idea that justice is actually about just relations. If that's the shift in the way we think, then that causes us or has to have us sort of pause and think about the ways in which we work towards those kinds of just relations. What do they require? requires us to pay attention to our context, our cultures, our circumstances, like who and how we are with one another and where we're situated. So it asks different questions that become really important to the work of doing justice. But it also has us rethink our strategies and approaches and processes to doing that work. Once we see that justice is about just relations, then we have to have strategies and processes and approaches that are up to doing that relational work, to building and fostering those kinds of just relations, and to doing the kind of work to look at situations through that lens and to understand what's not working, what's unjust, what's causing us to experience harm, to cause others harm, And that's a different kind of lens. It is true that we rely more in trying to work relationally for justice on processes that are more inclusive, that bring people together in environments where they can come to understand what's happening, come to understand one another. tend to be to privilege communicating with one another about what matters most about what's happening, that tend to be less focused on securing accountability by equal measures of pain for pain or by looking back or paying only attention to the rules that were broken, but more often looking at the harms and the needs and the responsibilities that are generated by what is happening and looking forward to what do we need to do about that. And so that looks different, looks less like courtrooms with two sides and a judge deciding what's the truth and what's the appropriate remedy or punishment. Looks more like finding ways to identify who has been affected, who has responsibilities, who can help in circumstances and designing processes where they can come together to figure out what's actually happened, what needs to happen next. And so we see leaning into some of the knowledge of indigenous wisdom of faith communities, of traditional customary ways of doing justice for a long time around the world, looking to processes that are able to convene and bring communities and those affected together to see each other, to understand each other, and to then make plans for how they're going to live together better in the future. I think that's key to this conversation that we want to have about what do we do in the context of depolarization, of the divisions at societal levels, at levels of identity and ideology. What do we do about that?

Ceejay Hayes:

Thank you, because that's a really thorough description, and it ensures that it's very clear. We can sort of muddy the waters of restorative justice, thinking of it just as non-punitive, when it's much more an understanding of our relationships to each other, to the circumstances at hand. And it doesn't necessarily rely on a tit-for-tat or some kind of punishment, but a shift forgiveness and then moving on. So I want to think about this in real terms, you know, because when you think about and when you read on effective polarization is the term you'll see used to describe the kind of polarization that happens in democracies, it is by definition hostility from within an in-group to towards an outgroup or an other. And that is being exacerbated, certainly in the U.S., but in democracies all around the world, where you have populist figures who rile up an electorate and then suggest that, like, it's not one's fault, but it's an other fault. It creates hostility and tension within groups within a single national context. And so what can we sort of learn or understand about victimhood, threat, understandings of an other from a restorative justice principle that can allow people who exist in different communities, different ideologies, different identities to not see each other as hostile, but as someone with whom I simply disagree with.

Jennifer Llewellyn:

Your description of polarization is important. It really, I think, reveals at a core level the significance of a restorative approach to understanding justice, to sort of beginning to address or move in a different direction from the kind of polarization we're seeing. So the first thing I'd want to say about that is the polarization in the way in which it's being replicated, secured in our current circumstances really relies on this kind of logic of adversaries, of defining as against the other. of simplicity in some sense, right, of being able to reduce things to either one thing or another. I am either in or I am out. I define myself, my identity, my beliefs, my power, my place in contrast to another. You know, that's a kind of way of thinking, a way of seeing the world that is, I think, deeply rooted in sort of liberal individualist traditions. Western traditions reflect this very often, come out of this idea of a kind of enlightenment. But they're also really reflective of the stories that we've come to learn and understand about ourselves and society through our experience with criminal justice, with a system that actually has developed in order to protect law and order, to protect the order of things. to protect it against threat from others. If you look at the kind of origins of how we got the criminal law that we got, Harold Berman writes a great book called Law and Revolution that really helps us see that what feels so natural and inevitable to us about what happens when we feel under threat or when things are wrong about what's deserved, about how we have to respond, really evolved as a system and a choice of kings, of the crown. to assert power and privilege and control over his or her subjects, and so to kind of see crime and harm as a threat to their power, as a potential damage to the king's peace. to the peace that keeps kingdoms together and keeps them able to resist threats from others, or to the king's bounty, to the king's benefits. Because if your subjects are fighting or killing each other, that's actually then a harm to the crown. And over time, our criminal justice system has incorporated other values where we try to think about what do we need at a level of society to be safe and well. But we never really questioned this kind of core commitment that runs underneath criminal justice, which is about maintaining the privilege and power of those who are benefited by the current order. This may be a slight aside, but, you know, I think in lots of our current debates about the transformation we need in public safety and the real serious concerns we have about the way law enforcement is serving its function in the context of public safety, that is to not make many of us feel very safe at all and to actually be harmful to a large number of people who aren't in that privileged group. You can't really make that critique without knowing that, in fact, the institution is designed to be doing exactly what it's doing. It is designed to maintain law and order. as against threats. It, at its core, does this othering that you're talking about. So maybe I'll pause there and shift and say, because this idea of the other, of I can't define myself as a victim and legitimate my needs and my harms without pointing, as the justice system requires, to an offender, to someone who is to blame for those harms, And in so doing, that requires people to narrate, to identify their entitlements, their harms, their experiences as against another, to legitimate their need for response and care and concern by blaming another. It does several things. It has us literally look at others as suspicious and threats and problems. It has us reduce our vision for what's happening to these two sides, to one against the other, which lets those politicians do the thing you're saying they do, which is come up and gin up our fear against another. to find a subject that because you are feeling harm, someone else must be to blame. And it distracts our attention from the complexity of those problems. The complexity of those problems that are rooted in our histories, that are rooted in our social structures, that are rooted at systemic levels. In some ways, it kind of puts blinders or blinkers on us from looking at it in messier, more complex ways, because quite simply, Simple solutions are easier to tweet, easier to sell, easier to get people riled up about, easier to message. That's why it's really easy on social media to be mean or divisive, but much harder to be productive and nuanced and calling people together around things. And so I think that logic of what justice is or what it requires is sort of either or, adversarial sides, the propensity to see justice to require blame, the laying of blame, the discharging of punishment in response to blame that justifies our actions is actually feeding not only those who are seeking to maintain privilege and cause polarization, but feeding it on the left and the right, because it's also feeding our search for solutions. through justice that requires us to acquire legitimacy for demanding change by being a victim, by finding more simple problems that we can call out or cancel or expel, that those are also being impacted, those strategies, by this divisiveness. And so I think restorative justice offers us an understanding of justice that insists on looking for the messiness, for the interconnectedness, for the relational nature, the complexity in our relationships and structures. And if we start to look for that complexity and have to contend with that, it doesn't allow for those very simple categories. One of the mechanisms we use in restorative justice to bring people together often are circles. You know, we do that badly when we just misappropriate indigenous kinds of traditions and understandings. But when we lean into the wisdom of those traditions and understandings, that is about a relational worldview and the significance and importance of understanding relationships and their complexity and the way they happen between and among people and groups and with the earth, We start to recognize you have to bring people together in processes where they have to be able to be called in and called together, not just on one side or the other, but to be able to sit in more complex realities and to come together around those problems and to see each other as sitting in multiple positions, in different positions vis-a-vis one another than just for us or against us.

Ceejay Hayes:

In my observations of tracking the growth of affective polarization in democracies, in the US in particular, it correlates quite heavily to a popular demand for racial justice, for gender justice, for class-based justice. And so at a time where the electorate gets more polarized is the same time where we're calling for accountability and naming certain problems within the system that demand accountability from certain groups of people. If I just use a race and racial justice as an example, there is a call from people of color, from Black Americans in the U.S. context very specifically, to both whiteness as a thing we are socialized into, but also as an institution. This thing has precipitated so much injustice and has baked injustice into the fabric of U.S. imagination. At the same time, however, something I've just been sort of observing, is that whiteness does not guarantee security in the U.S. And there are a lot of white people who feel insecure in the U.S., especially, I would say, over the past sort of 50 years. There was this one Pew Research study I saw where the only group of Americans to see their share of the population in poverty grow were white Americans. And you have the deindustrialization of the U.S., which strips the U.S. of this social mobility that allows people without a college degree, mainly white people, to achieve middle class status. And so you see the shrinking of the white American middle class. You see more white people becoming more impoverished. You're seeing suicide rates among white men top that of all other social groups. At the same time that we are calling for the acknowledgement of racism and what makes the U.S. the U.S., that cannot be ignored as polarization deepens in the United States. When we're thinking about restorative justice, it can't be just a sort of victim-perpetrator narrative. But I think there is a lot of pain associated and there's a lot of historical generational trauma around racial injustice, and also class injustice, and gender injustice, and xenophobia. What is a more productive way for understanding ourselves? Me, as a Black, gay, first-generation American, maybe situated next to a white, straight, sixth-generation American from an upper-class family. how do we better understand ourselves and better... operationalize justice in a way that gets us all working towards the same thing. And baked in that is sort of how do we address accountability? How do we address retribution? How do we address remediation? How do we address all of these things so that when it comes time to pursue justice, it doesn't devolve into this victim perpetrator and thus highly polarizing kind of narrative?

Jennifer Llewellyn:

That's a great, more than a question. That's a great kind of analysis about the sorts of things that we need to be able to be thinking more seriously about that are raised by this issue of polarization. And I think I'd say a few things that come from this question of polarization and how do we understand it, what's happening and how it's achieved and in whose interest it's achieved, right? So, I think one of the real opportunities of thinking about restorative justice processes and thinking about them beyond the way in which some people have encountered them as simply alternative mechanisms developed either within or by or alongside the criminal justice system, where often they look like attempts to bring victims and offenders together to sort of mediate their disputes and in so doing still lean into this idea that those disputes can be fully understood or fully responded to as if they're about their interpersonal interactions or harms one to the other or responsibilities to each other. That is true. It is not only true. A great number of those things that come to the attention of the criminal justice system are reflective of how our relationships are structured by our histories, by our prevailing social structures, economic structures, and the ways in which those deeply reflect racism, gender discrimination, like deep-seated social inequalities. But those go to In your question, you said to me that this has to do with who we are and how we see ourselves and how we see others. And there really are ways in which the current effective popularism and polarization is being achieved by our lack of being able to see and know one another. that there is a strategic advantage to having people be fearful of one another, and the calls for justice that are heard through the lens of the criminal justice lens, that it will be punitive, that justice, if we are going to be heard rightly and fully for the claims to remedy to fundamental shifts and changes that would be required for a more just world, but that that's only going to come on the back of being able to find particular offenders or particular people who are to blame. that when that is how that's heard, even when that's not how that's said, when that's how that's heard because of our structures and understandings and the processes available to us for justice, when it's heard in that punitive way, it actually deepens or fosters the conditions for division, suspicion, fear, violence. And I think one of the hopes I have for the potential of a restorative approach is that those who are calling for justice might be able to then say, and here's what this requires of us. It does require the opportunity to create processes at the community level, like not just sort of a big kind of political levels, but right down sort of at the kind of grassroots where we have ways to invite one another into conversation about what is happening. And then able to say, once we've kind of seen the truth through each other's eyes, and I don't mean truth is just relative and everybody has their truth, but truth is relational and complex. And if we can't find ways to story that, we don't then have the opportunity to do what's necessary for sort of transformation, which is this play on words, right, this restorying our future and doing that together. So, you know, one of the interesting things I think about what continues to feed this kind of polarization is that we are isolated and alienated from one another. And that our fear that we will be to blame or we will be called out or we don't know the right language or we'll make a mistake keeps us apart from one another, keeps us defining ourselves apart from one another, believes that we will secure our safety and well-being by being apart from one another. in ways that doesn't benefit anyone other than those in power, other than those who benefit from us not actually seeing clearly that this polarization is actually about protecting the privilege and power of a few. And so what's the promise and hope of restorative justice in this kind of context is that it changes the assumption of what the work of justice looks like. It doesn't happen after the truth telling and after the truth determination and after that. It happens as we try to understand from one another, how are you experiencing the world? What is happening for you? It's very hard to ask people to see other people's pain when they are in pain. And there have to be ways for us to be able to say pain and harm and disadvantage and injustice is not a zero-sum game, that we can see the complexities of each other's lives and still be able to say, just because you are suffering as a shrinking middle class and where you don't feel your children have opportunities either, or where you are the working white poor, doesn't mean that you don't still have responsibilities to others who are existing in a system that in our history and exists continuing today in a racist structure. That means that their children have very different experiences of the world. But when we make it this kind of zero-sum about you can't accept any responsibility, otherwise you're an offender or you're being blamed. Because as soon as you accept responsibility, you can't also articulate harm. It's that colonizing of our way of thinking that keeps us unable to come together and to be able to see and understand each other's needs. If we oriented things around meeting each other's needs and understanding what those needs are and what kinds of structural change they require, we would be able to call more people into that work. We would, I think, destabilize the conditions that allow this polarization, which is this kind of fear of the other. And I think that happens at the grassroots. I think there's a lot to be learned from some of the really important and significant community-based work Lots of it in the United States around transformative justice efforts that are happening outside of systems and outside of political structures at the community level. I think there's lots to be learned from efforts to try to bring communities together, but not to do that too quick or in too surface a way, but actually to prepare and work within our own communities to understand ourselves, to be able to come together with others. and not move to solutions too fast, not move to what do we owe to one another too fast, before we actually do the work of understanding one another's stories and experiences, and understanding what matters most to us about those, and figuring out together how we make that matter in terms of the shift and transformation in the future. Because I think there is a way in which this polarization goes so deeply to our identity, that that's an important starting point. If we don't have processes where people get to show up as their whole selves, where we get to acknowledge right out the gate that this is about who and how we are and what matters to us, that this is about our identities. And those are formed in terms of how we understand each other in the world and our positions. We have to create safer space for us to be able to talk about what's happening to us in this identity grounded way. so that we can begin to understand one another at that level, and then look at how we're able to be those people in the world, and what we need to be able to create these kinds of just relations in the world, what we need from one another. I think that shifts us from accountability to thinking about our responsibilities to one another. You can demand accountability from someone you don't know. If you want people to take the kind of responsibility you need them to take every day, to show up differently in the world, to think about the kind of generational level work we have to do to change how we see ourselves, how we see the world. That has to go deeper. That has to be stickier for people. You can't order people to do that.

Ceejay Hayes:

I want to talk about the relationship between identity and information. What has been coming up quite a bit in the context of polarization is the spread of what is labeled misinformation or disinformation. I work with people who work on the spread and the mitigation of disinformation, but I've always thought that as a label is contentious because at the very onset adds a label to a series of information that quite a few people accept as true, but it's not factually rooted in things that are verifiable and that are evidence based. But identity and where you pick up information, they're so deeply interlinked. And so the question I want to ask is, how do you confront this dissonance in what is accepted as factual? And how do you, in conversation, get people to understand that how you absorb information can be biased or relational and cannot tell a whole truth? but in a way that invites somebody to think critically through that without it being a threat to their identity. I think that happens quite a lot when we try to mitigate disinformation in the context where we're so heavily polarized and we want to believe what we want to believe from who we want to believe it from.

Jennifer Llewellyn:

Misinformation is about what you believe and why you believe it and who you believe. Those are questions about where you feel you belong, what you understand, where you feel understood. Then the holding on to the information that justifies that. I think we think that if the misinformation wasn't there, people would believe differently. This is not a new problem, right? If this is about ideology, it is about what we hold on to, how we make sense of the world, how we find belonging, how we find connection, how we feel seen, how we feel affirmed in the feelings and the experience we're having of the world. That creates the conditions in which people can stoke that, can build those beliefs. They use facts. Sometimes they're real facts and they're used incorrectly. Sometimes they're just made up facts. But they're using this for a purpose. Social media is a really fascinating development. in terms of our paying attention to how significant and important the relational reality of the world is. Why it is so hard to dislodge misinformation and to correct it and think that will fix what's happening in the world is because it's coming from people we love and trust. It's coming from groups we want to belong to. It's coming from places and spaces that make sense of who we are in the world. how we are connected, how we are seen. So the antidote to that has to be increasing opportunities for people to be seen and to matter and to feel they belong to more diverse groups. Because they'll look to different places for information. Or because then when information comes up, our judgment of that information will be informed by our experience with others. Jennifer Nadelsky is a legal scholar and political scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto now and writes about relational theory. One of the really important pieces of work she did was around the faculty of judgment. which I think is really helpful and significant here when we think about the importance of restorative processes that bring different people together to understand how they see the world or how they see incidences or issues, how they understand what's happening, how they come to understand that differently. We might think about that in everything from fairly simple school-based processes where we bring kids together in classrooms to share how they're experiencing the world on a regular basis all the way up to Truth Commissions, the South African TRC and the Canadian TRC. What Jennifer Nodelsky did based on some of the work of Hannah Arendt was to think about this faculty and idea of judgment, which is something we exercise all the time and every day. And what Jenny Nodelsky says to us is, if you pay attention to this process that we all undergo where we try to have an opinion about something, how do I ensure that my opinion is a good one? How do I exercise good judgment? She says this is a relational faculty. You can't develop this just alone. You have to develop this and refine it and exercise it through relational means. If you do that kind of thought experiment where you think about when you've made a really hard decision, normally what you do to make sure that your first blush opinion is actually a good judgment is you call somebody you care about. who you love or you trust their judgment or they're in a professional role that is similar to yours and you want to know what they would do, how they would think about it. Not because you want to substitute your judgment for theirs, but because you want to be able to assess whether your own judgment is good. The problem is if we only ever travel in circles of people who look and think like us, which is what the sort of echo chamber of social media is doing, because it curates the views we see every day, then the voices in our head, the community of judgment we can call upon when we're making decisions, when we're deciding what we think about the world, sounds just like us. We can't actually interrogate our first blush experience against other views because we've no experience of those other perspectives. We don't understand them. We don't trust them. So part of the beauty of restorative processes is not just that we use them to like negotiate and come to decide as groups and communities what is true, how do we make sense of this, how do we move forward on the basis of a shared understanding about what matters about what's happened. That's true. That's true in a kind of a practical group-based way. It's also true, though, that those experiences of sitting in processes where you can hear and understand the perspective and how others think about and judge in the world makes the difference. When we go back on our own or when we go to our social media and we pull up information that we have a way of judging whether that is true or right or what we believe that is informed by those other perspectives. like sort of voices in our head, but you can't get those if you have no experience of others. So you can't get those without deliberately creating opportunities in our social institutions, in the places and spaces where we learn, where we pray, where we play, where we work, where we actually get to sit down and hear from one another. And if we could see it as a less threatening, as kind of a gift that helps us figure out what we think, then it's not this kind of wag your finger sensitivity training, put people in a room and tell them to think better. It's an opportunity to see through someone else's eyes.

Ceejay Hayes:

I think in these sort of polarized times, it's really easy to react to an opposition with violence, with I dislike this person and I don't wish good for this person. And I'll be honest in saying that I don't think that that pivot towards violence is irrational. There are certainly communities who have experienced their disenfranchisement by violence. And so that reciprocation does not feel illogical to me. On the other hand, there are communities who did not have social hierarchy through violence. And so they lean to violence because that's how they know they get to stay in their protected privileged positions. What would you prompt people with so that they don't lean on violence in addressing or coming into conversation with their opposition?

Jennifer Llewellyn:

You know, I don't want to be naive in the response in the sense that I think I share your understanding of where there is real threat to the well-being and the safety of individuals and communities right now. At a political level, we have to bring as much pressure as we can to ensure that there are baseline conditions of safety, you know, that we don't stoke the conditions where people are more vulnerable to threat and violence. So I think that is to say, I also have some understanding and don't sit in sort of smug judgment of the conditions in which people respond violently. I think there are important opportunities to ask people, what do you need? What do you want people to understand? How do you want to come into this conversation if the conditions were ideal? So that is to say, rather than demanding something of people, I think the most important way to sort of begin that conversation about how are we going to come together is to invite people to find a way to help. I don't think this is always the case, but I think it's more often the case than we assume, that when you ask people to be their best selves, they can surprise you and actually do that. When you ask people, will you come and help, when you invite individuals in and give them a reason to show up that isn't come because you're the problem, but come because you need to be part of the solution. come not because we're going to hold you to account, but because you do have responsibilities here. You do have a role and a responsibility to be ensuring your communities are safer, to be ensuring your kids don't experience the world in the way that these people do, right? You know, I'm reminded here often of the incredible example and wisdom of Nelson Mandela, of course, in his insistence on what it looked like to live this idea of Ubuntu. Now, not in a crass way that says, like, my self-interest is served by you showing up, but really in a deep appreciation that if the world's going to get better, we're going to have to contend with the difficult fact that our humanity is tied up in one another, that we actually do need to figure out how to foster the humanity of others who turn to violence or who benefit from violence in a way that finds another path if we're going to be able to realize the world that we deserve and that we want to live in. And I don't think that's easy. I don't think that's trivial. I don't think that's asking people to hug and make up. And I don't actually even think that the language of forgiveness, while I think the world can hope and pray that one day there is a more forgiving and understanding world, I don't think that should be our objective. And I don't think that's where you lead, to ask people to come and to reconcile in the sense that they have to make peace and make nice. But I do think there is a call to the real hard work of what justice looks like when you're done calling for it in the streets, is the messy work of making it, of building it, that has to start with Who and how are we going to be with one another? How can I see who you are, even if who you are and how your identity has been formed is contributing to significant harm? Because we don't start there. Instead of building their humanity, being seen and understood and heard of this movement, they become prey for those who want to give them a place to belong.

Ceejay Hayes:

That is among some beautiful answers. My sort of last question, we've seen governments and political entities operationalize restorative justice in a few contexts. Can you just sort of talk through the ways that some governments have operationalized? restorative justice principles and what they could say about how politicians, governments, NGOs, researchers, any entity can approach depolarization in our democracies.

Jennifer Llewellyn:

Where it's having the greatest impact, I think, is where it's inviting people to see that the work of justice, the building of a just society, isn't just the preserve of our justice systems or of truce commissions, post-violence, but actually has to be the work of all of us every day in all the places and spaces we are. Across our institutions, the work to transform how we think about justice also will transform how we secure it. And if we're building just relations on the every day, we're going to be addressing those places where polarization is actually built and bred. cultures of polarization, they're built, they're reinforced, right? They're experienced every day, and so we need to be destabilizing them by building something else, by building something in its stead. I think it's important that governments start to create some space for people to glimpse that there's a different way of doing justice, there's a different way of responding. And so I don't want to deny the significance of those moments where governments are getting out of the way or creating pathways for people to think differently about justice or to try different practices. At the same time, it can't be that we rely on or leave this work to governments for a whole bunch of reasons, including that institutions are kind of built to be hard to change. That's their function. And insofar as what we're seeking is this more fundamental level of transformation about how we see each other and how we structure life and how we uproot the histories of the ways in which we have excluded and ensured the success of many institutions by the systemic marginalization and inequality of some, that's going to be destabilizing. And we can't leave that to government programs or practices, or we will watch restorative justice, like all other initiatives, kind of co-opted in service of those institutions. They'll kind of swallow them up. And so if we want it to be transformative, I think the real difference that we should be looking for and the kind of hope and the promise of This idea is when they're also happening without the government, where the government's kind of following the community's lead. So you can see that some of the incredible work done at the community level, whether it's restorative justice for Oakland youth, this RJ program in Oakland, California, whether it's Mimi Kim's incredible work on transformative justice in communities that are operating outside of the state systems and certainly outside of the state security systems to secure and protect justice. for themselves, a sort of chat program in California is one I can think of as well, or where we're seeing this emerge at the level of schools and what's happening for young people in their classrooms, on their playgrounds, and as they're thinking differently about how they see each other and what they owe to each other.

Ceejay Hayes:

There's a lot of pessimism and just feeling like the skies are quite gray at the moment. Can you give us any sort of words of encouragement or anything to look at to say, like, actually things can and will, in fact, get better?

Jennifer Llewellyn:

I think we've had some incredible examples, remarkable examples. where people or processes have kind of shocked us with their ability to take a different path from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the movement that that created to be able to think about what do we need in the wake of some of our most intractable challenges and failures at societal levels. to, in my own home context, the restorative inquiry for the Home for Colored Children, which responded to generations and decades of abuse in an orphanage and a care home facility. In all of those examples, we see this incredible vision for justice often by those who have been most harmed, whether that is a Bishop Tutu or a Nelson Mandela or the former residents of the Home for Colored Children in this case who imagined what justice would look like about them but not without them and with these principles of how do we leave no one behind, how do we call people into this journey to light. where we've seen these incredible models of what justice can look and feel like, which gives me hope. I don't think those are heroes. I think they're remarkable because we don't pay attention to those opportunities to make that choice in the way in which we respond to the urgency of harm and violence. And I think if we celebrated those more, if we promoted those more, if we made a choice to join and amplify and elevate those voices and those people who are working for change in that way, we would feel more hopeful. Because I think there is hope. I think there is resilience. I think the incredible moments where we glimpse people finding a pathway forward, that can build relationships across divisions means that it is not only inherently possible, it's the only thing that we've actually seen work in an enduring way. And so I look for those examples and I try to be an ally to those folks that work, those examples, and there are lots of them. Jennifer Llewellyn, thank you so much. Thanks so much for the opportunity and the incredible work you're doing on the podcast.

Ceejay Hayes:

If polarization is an exacerbation of the us-versus-them dynamics present in traditional forms of punitive justice, then restorative justice offers a roadmap into fostering and nurturing peaceful coexistence with those we perceive as threats to our well-being, as polarization implores us to believe. In other counter-poll interviews, I am left questioning how culpable the public is for the deepening entrenchment of polarization in democracies. After talking with Jennifer Llewellyn, it is all the more clear how much agency we as citizens have in resisting and reversing social polarization. It is an active process that goes beyond having conversations to discover our shared attributes. Applying restorative justice principles to depolarization necessitates that we work through feelings of fear, contempt, or animosity to understand how our most dissimilar peers relate to ourselves. Restorative justice emphasizes the need for accountability, action, intent, and forgiveness, none of which are passive activities. It is work. But if we collectively decide that we are done living with the latent risk of social polarization, showing up to do that work becomes the first step towards repair and cohesion. Thanks again to Jennifer Llewellyn for sharing her wisdom with us, thanks to Jac Boothe for editing, and thanks to you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of CounterPol, please share with loved ones and leave us a review. Thanks for listening.