1st Edition
Peace Operations and Restorative Justice Groundwork for Post-conflict Regeneration
With a bold vision and a distinctive message, Reddy stipulates that international peacekeeping can be designed and implemented using the principles of restorative justice. To prove this, Reddy discusses the congruence of crime, armed conflict and violent disorder, critiquing restorative justice and its nuanced character as a suitable application to complex civil wars. This book provides a comprehensive survey of peace operations and then focuses on the cases of Somalia and Bougainville. The comparison between their societal contexts, their conflicts, peace operations and final outcomes are crucial to this argument. Furthermore, this shows how the constraining, maximising and emergent values of restorative justice can be applied in a peacekeeping setting, from the overall command level through to the behaviours of deployed peacekeepers - with direct contemporary application. This sharp study makes for evocative reading as it introduces the new concept of regeneration as key to any restoratively arranged peace operation. Military, police, NGO and civilian peacekeeper practitioners, as well as academic theorists, can use this unique work to produce better and more lasting results for conflict ridden communities.
Biography
Dr Peter Reddy is a practicing lawyer in Canberra and regional New South Wales. Peter received a PhD in law from the Australian National University and a Master of Criminology, focussing on human rights violations, from the University of Western Sydney. He has previously worked in the private security industry, managed companies in the training and employment services sector and formerly served in the Australian Army. His current research interests include resistance and dissent within authoritarian states and organisations, and a comparative study of violent and non-violent quests for autonomy and independent statehood.
'Although peace operations have been high on the international political agenda since many years, a clear understanding of how to construct positive peace in post-conflict countries is still lacking. Drawing on the many insights from restorative justice theory and practice, Peter Reddy has written a very convincing book that should be on the shelf of every policy-maker in this field. His conclusion is unambiguous: addressing all the harm done and involving all the stakeholders are key to success.' Stephan Parmentier, Leuven Institute of Criminology, Belgium, and Secretary General, International Society for Criminology 'Peter Reddy provides a fresh approach to successful peacekeeping. He does this in a methodologically interesting way by taking a failure story of peacebuilding (Somalia) and shows successes within the failures. Then he takes a success story of peacebuilding (Bougainville) and shows failures within the successes. Theoretically, restorative justice principles are found to help to define crucial ingredients for success. The result is a profoundly important contribution to the literature on how to sustain peace.' John Braithwaite, Australian National University, Australia ’This is a bold and ambitious book with important insights for all engaged in the theory and practice of international peace operations. Drawing on the contrasting cases of Somalia and Bougainville, the author's critique of conventional approaches is followed by the elaboration of a compelling alternative framework founded on the regenerative potential of restorative justice.’ Sinclair Dinnen, The Australian National University, Australia
