Restorative Justice and Reparations

In her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Martha Minow begins a chapter on reparations with a brief discussion of restorative justice. She characterizes restorative justice as seeking “repair of social connections and peace rather than retribution against offenders;” she describes it as “building connections and enhancing communication between perpetrators and those they victimized, and forging ties across the community. . . .” Later in the same chapter, however, when talking about monetary reparations, Minow says the “core idea” behind reparations is compensatory justice, the view that “wrongdoers should pay victims for losses” to wipe the slate clean. Several recent discussions of reparations for historical injustice and mass political violence reject the idea that compensatory or, as I will call it, corrective justice is the relevant or primary category for reparations involving groups or large numbers of individual victims of injustice. Roy Brooks considers the “tort model” of pursuing compensation from institutions and private parties through legal action, a secondary, morally deficient and relatively unpromising avenue. He advances an “atonement model” of reparations premised on “the post-Holocaust vision of heightened morality, victim-perpetrator identity, egalitarianism, and restorative justice.” Although Brooks does not define restorative justice, his account of atonement makes apology central and sees monetary and other reparations as necessary to make apologies believable. Janna Thompson situates her argument for historical obligations to repair past wrongs, such as the theft of lands from indigenous people or the injustice of slavery, in a conception of “reparation as reconciliation” in contrast to a “legalistic” one of “reparation as restoration.” The aim of reparations on this view is “to repair relations damaged by injustice— not to return to a state of affairs that existed before the injustice was done.” Ruti Teitel, in her extensive study of transitional justice practice, finds that “reparatory practices have become the leading response in the contemporary wave of political transformation,” but that reparatory practices in political transition “defy categorization as either criminal or corrective justice” by both redressing individual rights violations and signifying responsibility for criminal wrongdoing. Naomi Roht-Arriaza appeals to “a basic maxim of law that harms should be remedied” in a discussion of reparations for mass violence, but argues that individual court-ordered reparations are both impractical in cases where there are many victims and inadequate to address collective elements of harm in situations of mass conflict or repression where communities are targeted for violence and are