Ex-prisoner leadership and legitimacy: community-based restorative justice in Northern Ireland

Within such research, these individuals are often portrayed as threats to be managed, rather than as agentic subjects with the ability to actively contribute to societal peace-making efforts. <br><br>Using the case of Northern Ireland as an example, this thesis explores ex-prisoner led initiatives in the field of restorative justice, examining how ex-prisoner leadership impacts the micro-dynamics of restorative processes and the mechanisms involved in wider societal peacebuilding.

To do this, the thesis analyses the particular example of Community Restorative Justice Ireland (CRJI), tracing the organisation’s history and locating it within the wider context of community-based restorative justice. The research explores how ideas were ‘travelled’ from other areas of the world and were adapted to Northern Ireland in a way that augmented and legitimised local organic practices, producing a unique variant of restorative justice that included ex-prisoners as practitioners. <br><br>Although restorative approaches have become exceedingly popular in recent decades, most schemes involve prisoners and ex-prisoners as participants within the process, where they serve as the ‘offending’ party within restorative encounters.