| dc.description.abstract | The key question in this thesis is whether the emergence of restorative justice in Norway can be understood as a dialogical paradox, i.e. both as an instrument for state control and as a transformative field for personhood. In other words, the thesis explores how governance and personhood are mutually constituted in informal, dialogical justice processes, in context of on-going changes in the Norwegian welfare state.
Social researchers, historians and philosophers have described a significant transition from modern nation-states to corporate states, from being disciplinary societies to becoming societies of control. Due to what has been described as a generalized crisis in traditional forms of state control, and its bureaucratic institutions, a new organization of state power has emerged and is being constructed through processes that decentralize, distribute and outsource state functions to civil and private actors and agencies. Such processes rely on a neoliberal ideological discourse, whereby agents of authority and control are often presented as partners in common projects with their clients or stakeholders. In developing such partnerships states take advantage of the logic of non-state sites of governance and direct their operations in a way that enables them to ‘govern at a distance’. Thus, despite the rhetoric, critics hold that the form of decentralized corporate state power in reality intensifies the control over citizens, especially due to the blurring of the borders of state and civil society through which the power of the state becomes less visible (and thus impossible to counteract).
Emerging as a critique of disciplinary punishment, bureaucratic forms of state control and criminal justice, and of the alienation of citizens from their own conflicts, the practice and research field of restorative justice (RJ) made its coming of age during the height of neoliberalism and its attack on the welfare state and state institutions. The RJ discourse attempts at reforming the criminal justice system by decentralizing conflict management from the state to civil parties, without the interference of professional state bureaucrats. In other words, RJ sets the state in “brackets”. But despite the bracketing of the state, or maybe because of that, RJ has become in the last decades increasingly an accepted way of dealing with crime and conflict across countries and legislations.
In the perspective of the emergence of the societies of control, the relation between corporate state power, the welfare state and decentralized RJ processes remains crucial to understand. This thesis focuses on the complex dynamics of this relationship, and on the consequences the new organization of state power have for the participants of such processes, as well as the implications for the RJ field. | en_US |