Australia

John Braithwaite

2024 Balzan Prize for Restorative Justice

For his contribution to the theoretical development and dissemination of the practice of contemporary restorative justice, for his commitment to the service of institutions and social construction, for his work of high scientific and editorial dissemination, for his dedication to the cultural growth of the youngest generations in the values of restorative justice.

“Champion of Restorative Justice” is the title of one of the countless civil and academic awards given to John Braithwaite (Champion of Restorative Justice in the ACT – Australian Capital Territory Government 2015). And the title “Champion” is really no exaggeration.

But what is restorative justice according to Braithwaite? If we open his website (www.johnbraithwaite.com), we read the following description: “Restorative justice restores victims, restores perpetrators, and restores communities. It is about the idea that because crime hurts, justice should heal.” Offence is captured in its dimension of the exercise of power over the victim. It is a violent action that causes a wound (physical, material, or moral) and justice must be a healing process.

The possibility of healing offered by restorative justice has at its core a series of freely accepted encounters – conferences – between the victims, the offenders, and possibly other persons significant to each other. With the help of a mediator, very simple but radical and decisive questions are addressed. What happened? Why? Which people were affected? Why them? What can be done to offer a future perspective to all those involved? Participation in these meetings implies that the offender takes responsibility in front of the victims and the community involved, with the aim of reintegrating the offender rather than publicly humiliating him or her. “Reintegrative shaming” is the concept elaborated by John Braithwaite in this regard.

Thirty years of restorative justice practice show that these encounters bring great relief to victims and a significant decrease in recidivism.

John Braithwaite is one of the founders of restorative justice studies and practice in the contemporary era – that is, the field of study that developed indicatively from the mid-1990s onwards, in the wake of the experience of Nelson Mandela’s South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There is no book, article, dissertation or doctoral thesis; there is no academic conference or civic gathering on restorative justice that does not refer to the work of John Braithwaite. Restorative justice would not have developed to what it is today and certainly would not have gained either the necessary academic credibility or the trust of international and national institutions without Professor Braithwaite’s studies and practical efforts, which now span more than fifty years.

His interest in restorative justice is a spin-off of his research focus on economic regulation (his innovative idea of responsive regulation in particular should be emphasized) and on the problems of white-collar crime (especially the phenomena of corruption) as part of a more general sociological interest in the expressions of economic and social “domination” that tear the social fabric apart.

Hence Braithwaite’s work focuses on the effects of crime on victims and their needs, which led him to grasp the inadequacy of retributive justice and the traditional judicial process and, in response, to develop new forms of justice, including restorative justice, the primal traces of which can be found within Indigenous cultures.

A number of concepts that have become general knowledge are the result of his theoretical elaboration, such as those of “responsive regulation”, “reintegrative shaming”, and “restorative diplomacy”.

The breadth of his publications is boundless, both in terms of interests cultivated and the number of volumes and articles published.

The number of students who have completed a PhD in restorative justice under his supervision is close to one hundred. A community of scholars has developed around him, spreading the culture and studies of restorative justice around the world.

An exponent of a republican culture, in the classical sense of the term (see among many Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice, written with Philip Pettit, Oxford University Press, 1990), Professor Braithwaite has never closed himself up in his ivory tower, but rather has spent a great deal of energy in building social realities and places in civil society where restorative justice could be practised. At the same time, he has contributed decisively to underpinning social practice with a recognised normative and institutional architecture that could create a complementary system to traditional justice.

Among his masterpieces one cannot fail to mention Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation, Oxford University Press (2002); Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge University Press (1989) to which a special issue (2020, no. 1) of the most important scientific journal in the field, The International Journal of Restorative Justice, was dedicated on the thirtieth anniversary of its publication. Also worth mentioning are the essays collected in the volume Regulation, Crime, Freedom, Dartmouth (2000; reissued 2018 by Routledge), which brings together some of Braithwaite’s most representative studies, and is published as part of a series of Collected Essays aimed at making available the most significant works of scholars who have made a particularly significant contribution to the development of legal studies.

In more recent years, Professor John Braithwaite has developed thinking on restorative justice in relation to the major problems of our time: sustainability, war, peace, climate change, finance, health, and crime prevention. See for example the volume Simple Solutions to Complex Catastrophes: Dialectics of Peace, Climate, Finance, and Health, Palgrave (2024).

In this regard, with thoughts turned to the major conflicts of our time, the decades-long project under John Braithwaite’s leadership, Peacebuilding Compared, which tracks the world’s major armed conflicts and peacebuilding processes up to 2030, deserves special mention.

As Professor Braithwaite is fond of repeating, restorative justice is a viable avenue for both the great dilemmas of our time and the small but burning conflicts that plague everyone’s daily life.