Restoring Justice and Security in Intercultural Europe (Routledge Frontiers of Criminal Justice)

The intercultural contexts and new configurations in Europe offer fertile ground for social conflict, tensions and threat. This book challenges predominant and fear inducing approaches of justice and security as they appear in intercultural contexts, and develops alternative understandings by exploring both theoretically and empirically the potential of dialogic and restorative justice oriented actions in sensitive areas of living together. The book offers unique opportunities for rethinking frames of (in)justice, (in)security, and their intersections, and for reshaping European practices and policies in a more sustainable way.

This book is based on an innovative and exploratory action research project in four European countries, which challenges the obsessive focus on security concerns, the merging of the security discourse with intercultural contexts, and the emphasis on technology and surveillance as a way to conceive the doing of security. Both the project and the book offer another vision on what security means and how it can be done, by multiplying participatory encounters between different groups in society, promoting opportunities for deliberations and dialogue about alternative forms of conviviality.

The 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.

Brunilda Pali is a postdoctoral researcher at the KU Leuven Institute of Criminology. She has worked as a researcher on several EU-funded projects, besides the FP7 project ALTERNATIVE. She publishes on multiple themes, including restorative justice, critical criminology, security, social movements, gender, and arts. She is co-editor of the book ‘Critical Restorative Justice’.

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.