A Just Culture: restoring justice towards a culture of human rights

This project seeks to investigate the possibility that the binary opposition between retributive and restorative forms of justice that structures the discourse on justice is unhelpful and unnecessary, particularly for societies seeking to extricate themselves from violent conflict and move towards building peace and democracy. It argues for the importance of considering restorative justice as conceptually and historically prior to the possibility of retributive justice rather than the negation of one or the other, as well as advocate the potentially greater transformative power of the values of restorative justice in the context of post-conflict peacebuilding. The theoretical arguments of the paper culminate in an analysis of its application in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.