Leuke single Moeders zoeken hier een Date. Schrijf Je Vandaag nog in!
Table of contents
- Current Local Time in Leuven, Flemish Brabant, Belgium
- Take the IELTS test in or nearby Leuven
- Travelling to Leuven, Belgium on the Eurostar
The theoretical concepts were thus evaluated in practice. Thus, citizens acquire the necessary capabilities for safeguarding security. In action research, researchers actively involve both citizens and institutions in the set-up, implementation and evaluation of the research. Besides the restorative objective of including citizens in the handling of their own conflicts, another objective was to give scientific input into the further understanding and development of action research methodology within the security field.
Selecting such diverse settings did complicate the comparison, but at the same time helped us to draw general lessons relevant for diverse contexts in the whole of Europe. Objective 3: Compare diverse settings in order to learn lessons for Europe Considering the diversity challenges that Europe is facing today, the project set out to include intercultural settings, with the aim to draw more general lessons. Therefore, as mentioned above, settings were chosen that, at first sight, included conflicts on a micro-, meso- and macro-level.
Comparison was not only challenging because of the different nature of the settings, but also because of the implementation of very different practices including mediation and circles as restorative justice models sensu stricto, and the development of broader community work approaches.
Furthermore, research methods were diverse, including observations, interviews, surveys, film making, and recordings of community gatherings and workshops. In order to compare the four settings, an innovative framework was to be designed through which the data could be systematised and analysed. Goals of the dissemination activities were: to gain attention of all target groups mediation services, municipalities, policy-makers, intercultural organisations, the scientific community and professional SMEs on the application of restorative justice in intercultural settings; to inform and increase public knowledge about the benefits of mediation, especially in areas of potential conflict in multicultural settings; to confront and compare findings with other projects and practices in the security field throughout Europe; to stimulate and support implementation by contributing to the development of alternative restorative justice-oriented models of conflict resolution in different European countries; and to plan further cooperation and discuss a further research agenda.
To this end, various activities were foreseen: 1 Filming was used as a participatory research and dissemination tool: citizens were invited to assist in the filming process on-site and to co-decide on what activities to film. The evaluation of the practices then informs both the comparative analysis and the theoretical framework.
This is a continuous and cyclical process in which theoretical concepts are first written out, then operationalised and evaluated in practice. Concepts are adapted and revised where needed and then again evaluated in practice. These grids were collected in a web-based system in order to be analysed.
In what follows, we summarise the leading theoretical concepts, the main findings of the action research as well as the comparative framework. This summary cannot do justice to the complexity of the research and the local realities. Theoretical framework: justice, security, conflict transformation in intercultural settings and restorative justice approaches 1.
Justice When it comes to justice, the project refers to scholars such as Rawls, Habermas, Young and Fraser since they provide a political conception of social justice in relation to the increasing plurality in democratic societies.
- Leuven Alternative City tour | ESN Leuven?
- Catholic University of Leuven.
- man dating sites Eghezee Belgium;
- Take an IELTS test in or nearby Leuven!
Rawls focused on justice as a means of narrowing the range of public disagreement and maintaining social cooperation, and highlighted that rights belong to a political order. He pointed out that only political justice, namely justice as fairness, can allow a plurality of conflicting doctrines. Since Rawls, justice has become to coincide with the concept of social justice within a distributive paradigm, defined as the proper moral distribution of social benefits and burdens among members of society.
Fraser in particular elaborated on questions of participation and democratisation through proposing a politics of representation in which framing the questions of justice becomes a matter of democratic deliberation. For her, the more general meaning of justice is parity of participation: justice then requires social arrangements for all adult human beings to be conceived as partners of interaction who possess equal worth in order to participate as peers in social life.
Fraser perceives two obstacles to participatory parity, namely economic structures that deny people resources to be able to act as peers distributive injustice or institutional hierarchies of cultural value. Besides the economic and cultural dimension, the political dimension refers to who is included and who is excluded, and is thus mainly concerned with representation. Security Since restorative justice approaches have not been linked to security or intercultural conflicts, the project first set out to develop a framework on what security entails.
Various themes, such as migration, are indeed becoming more and more securitised, which may be related to a heightened focus on cultural differences, growing intolerance and hidden racism. Once a topic becomes securitised and thus subject to strengthened and stricter reaction, reversal of this process becomes difficult. Next to the convergence of external with internal security leading to a merge of security with culture and identity a second tendency is the constitution of in security in terms of risk, visible in routinised day-to-day practices and apparatuses of security see Pali for a discussion.
Rather than adhering to a restricted view on security as technological measures, we opted for a positive understanding of security as a lever to emancipation and thus operating within a framework of human security. When studying the tension between justice and security in nowadays society, restorative justice has come to the fore as an attempt to combine the moral approach of confronting the past what happened? Crawford , Shearing Avruch s. The neighbourhood and state can be involved and norm-clarification becomes possible see Walgrave However, in conflict situations the use of these terms may sometimes not only result in confusion, but also in maintenance and escalation of conflicts.
The framing of the conflict as comprising an intercultural element will then depend on various factors, including public opinion and politics Ragazzi The topics mentioned formed the central points of attention throughout the research and have been addressed in various reports. Here we highlight how restorative justice is defined in theory and what practices are mostly discussed in restorative justice literature.
Restorative justice in theory Justice has been interpreted in the restorative justice literature mostly in the narrow sense of criminal justice.
Current Local Time in Leuven, Flemish Brabant, Belgium
Therefore, the theoretical debates have often discussed restorative justice as an alternative to punishment see Walgrave for an overview. The lifeworld or social element entails that crime is considered as a disruption or disturbance of social relations. Therefore, a response to crime means starting from the concrete personal and social experience of the parties involved and addressing the needs originating from the harm experienced.
The lifeworld element corresponds to the element of recognition in social justice, as a reciprocal interaction to overcome societal dynamics of domination and submission Benjamin Through restorative justice, a social dialogue around the boundaries of wrongdoing can be held Walgrave This can then contribute to grass-root democracy in which the citizen and the community play a crucial and active role Braithwaite The idea of reparation is more down-to-earth than the concept of restoration as returning to the original state. Reparation is future-oriented and may be linked to an ethic of responsibility.
It can thus be brought closer to the distributive dimension of social justice. Instead an intervention must lead to transformation of certain elements within the social situation. Restoration then entails not only restoring the situation, but also adding new elements thus making things right with a vision on the future restoring the future.
The main practices seen as core to restorative justice are mediation, conferencing and circles. The mediation process offers victims and offenders an opportunity to meet in a safe, structured setting and engage in a mediated discussion of the crime. Broader models of social mediation and other practices based on non-violent communication could offer concrete examples of how to address conflicts in broader settings besides crime and the criminal justice system, to which restorative justice practices were mostly confined.
Training on the topic, including mediators with a migrant background or bringing in translators in a mediation are the methods most used to address interculturality. Concepts such as ethnicity, gender, age and time were explored. Moreover, the concepts of participation, identity and victimisation were analysed along the following lines.
Active participation is not only central to our understandings of restorative justice but was also an important concept to understand the Viennese context of social housing. Applied and restricted to the field of criminal law it meant a more satisfactory, more sustainable, a more humane way of going about conflict regulation. Beyond that the wider political implications of active participation of those concerned was expected to both promote democratic values and serve as an exercise ground for democratic practice. Chapman, Campbell and Wilson connect the concepts of belonging and community to identity.
They demonstrate how, on the one hand, identity can easily lead to ethnocentrism and radicalisation if activated by social and economic conditions and political leadership.
Take the IELTS test in or nearby Leuven
This concept of identity accepts that identities are never unified and singular but multiple and constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. Far from being a static thing then, identity of self or of Other is a historical, social, intellectual and political process Vanfraechem Victimisation in the narrow sense may refer to the breaking of penal law and the effects this has on the crime victim.
In the broader sense, victims of other types of man-made harm, such as road traffic accidents or negligence, may be included as well. In case of hate crime for example, tertiary victims could be the people belonging to the same group as the victim, who was targeted because of certain characteristics: as the community has the same characteristics, its members could feel targeted as well Spalek Social recognition of the victim status, protection of certain rights and providing support and protection depends on many factors.
Action research: implementing restorative justice approaches in intercultural settings We explicitly opted to implement restorative justice approaches in intercultural settings because, on the one hand, diversity is increasing throughout Europe and, on the other hand, these settings can be viewed as security-sensitive areas: since the discourse is increasingly equating diversity with security threats, we wanted to examine whether this is indeed the case.
Although we did not carry out quantitative studies as a general method for the project to evaluate e. Since the project is based on restorative justice approaches and culture proves to be at the heart of conflict resolution techniques see Hoffman , we found these intercultural settings to be most challenging to develop restorative justice practices and theory further.
Furthermore, we studied both the phenomenon of conflict and the conflict responses. To get as broad a view as possible, we looked at conflicts at the micro-level between individuals , at meso-level between communities and at macro-level on society level. The settings were chosen accordingly: micro-conflicts between neighbours with a migrant background in social housing in Vienna Austria , meso-conflicts at the level of small town with Roma Hungary , and macro-conflicts between citizens of different ethnicity border towns in Serbia and between people of different religion Catholics and Protestants or with immigrants and drug users Northern Ireland.
Through this holistic perception of conflicts related to intercultural issues, we hoped to arrive at findings that can be translated throughout Europe, always taking the local situation into account.
Travelling to Leuven, Belgium on the Eurostar
The research shows that societal ecology Bolivar et al. Therefore, during the first year, the action researchers studied the local context to evaluate how restorative justice approaches could be implemented. While the idea was to then start implementing these practices, in all settings it became clear that further work was needed to provide the conditions for implementing restorative justice: community work and trust building as well as training citizens in conflict resolution and non-violent communication proved to be necessary.
Researchers and researched are equal in the discussion, and a priori expertise from only one corner is not accepted.
- Leuven | Belgium | Britannica?
- dating sites free Oudenburg Belgium.
- Case Study.
- Catholic University of Leuven | university, Leuven, Belgium | Britannica!
But expertise can be specific: knowledge about own experiences and insights on the one hand, and expertise about collecting, analysing and presenting data on the other hand. To reconcile their different perspectives and to make use of theoretical concepts for analysing and interpreting the material produced, they have to become partners in a dialogue. The dialogical turn characterising the restorative approach does therefore also become manifest in the rationale and practice of action research.
Reliance on the authorities to step in and to enforce various sets of rules, using administrative fines and ultimately eviction is still the most pervasive and the dominant mode of reacting to conflicts - the same kind of conflicts that have been there for decades: noise, garbage, pets, cars.
At one research site Bassena , the action researchers conducted workshops on intercultural communication capacity building. Two communication workshops were to prepare the ground for the group to enter an actual conflict resolution process, which could potentially lead to a restorative circle. These two communication workshops were followed by workshops on restorative circles, during which the participants discussed the existing tensions in the group.
Our overall aim consisted in strengthening the capacities of the participants to work out and to resolve conflicts in their neighbourhood on their own, without resorting to authorities. However, in most conflict cases we heard of during our workshops, participants had in fact already started self-initiated activities to improve the situation.
It was therefore important to find out which strategies had been tried so far and to which degree and in which respect these strategies had been successful. We have further promoted this attitude by identifying possibilities for action in each of the case-stories narrated by the participants. The pivotal aim was always to enable the participants e. Working on a community level: Roma and non Roma living together in Hungary In Hungary, the idea was to include a town in which a Roma community was present. The action researchers approached a small town just outside of Budapest, in which Roma and non-Roma seemed to be living well together in order to learn about existing conflict resolution methods.
On the other hand, there were indeed some inhabitants worried about Roma, while Roma themselves were experiencing exclusion. According to the protocol, mini-research-teams would be created around each case referral, which resulted in a case study. A four step research methodology was designed taking care of the respective phases of referral, preparation, encounter and impact.