Communities in restorative justice: insights from Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace

Description

Lorena Cecilia Vega Dueñas, Juliette Vargas, and Laura Ordóñez-Vargas examine the place of communities in Colombia's transitional justice court, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. Restorative justice usually separates victims, offenders, and communities into distinct roles. The trio focus on one large case, Macrocase 05, where violence struck whole peoples and territories at once. Their analysis is conceptual, built on the court's own framework and records.

Where violence targets entire groups, they argue, the line between community and collective victim blurs until the categories nearly merge. That blur is not a flaw in the court's model but one of its defining features. It widens what communities are for in restorative justice: not neutral surroundings, but wounded parties with standing of their own. The authors offer the case to justice designers elsewhere who must fit restorative ideas to mass, collective harm.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/PMC13647457