Action Research in Criminal Justice : Restorative Justice Approaches in Intercultural Settings

To understand how people experience justice and security is a challenging task in times of unrest, marked by growing perceptions of insecurity, discrimination and uncertainty. The European project ALTERNATIVE aimed to understand justice and security experiences related to conflicts in intercultural settings, when citizens are given the means to actively contribute to these processes.

This book relates how the project was set up as an action research through the concrete description of four action sites: social housing estates in Vienna, Austria; a small community in Hungary with a Roma population; three border towns in Serbia; and three communities in Northern Ireland. These four sites have been compared through an innovative methodology, which leads to a deeper understanding of the impact of participatory and restorative justice oriented processes, and - in a more general way - of what action research may entail in the criminological field. Bringing together researchers and case studies from around Europe, this book examines the scientific potential of action research as a methodology in criminal justice settings.

This book is one of two volumes resulting from the work by a group of researchers in six European countries having cooperated intensively during four years in ALTERNATIVE, an action research project funded under the EU Seventh Framework Programme.

Inge Vanfraechem is affiliated researcher at the KU Leuven Institute of Criminology, where she has worked for many years as senior researcher and co-promoter on national and European projects with regards to restorative justice. She also runs her own business in consultancy and research (Libra).

Ivo Aertsen is Full Professor of Criminology at the University of Leuven and leads the Leuven Institute of Criminology Research Line on ‘Restorative Justice and Victimology’. His main fields of research and teaching are victimology, penology and restorative justice. He is Editor-in-Chief of Restorative Justice: An International Journal. He was the academic coordinator of the European FP7 project ALTERNATIVE.