1 Introduction: A Year of Restorative Reflection

During the last year, I have worked across continents and moral vocabularies, from editing the African volume of the International encyclopaedia of restorative justice (Clamp, Hargovan, Jumbe & Omale, in press), engaging in knowledge exchange activities within Colombia’s Total Peace negotiations (Clamp 2025a; Clamp & Llewellyn, 2025; Clamp et al., 2025; Llewellyn & Clamp, 2025), presenting papers at conferences in Singapore and Leuven and writing an article for a special issue on restorative justice, civility and reintegration. Each project, though rooted in a distinct geography, has turned me toward the same concern: What does restorative justice demand of us as citizens and scholars in fractured civic worlds?

In presenting my draft paper on civility and reintegration (Clamp, 2025b), I argued that legitimacy depends less on institutional authority than on the quality of relationships between institutions and those they serve. That conviction has only deepened. Restorative justice, I now see, is not only a framework for responding to harm but also a civic disposition, a disciplined willingness to remain in relationship when the social fabric frays. Hannah Arendt (1951: 466) described the public realm as the ‘space between’ people living together, sustained by speech and action. Restorative justice, at its best, recreates that space. It makes dialogue possible where silence or polarisation has taken hold. To practise restorative justice is therefore to take up the civic labour of world-building, to protect what Arendt called ‘the fragile in-between’ that makes plurality possible. To understand restorative justice as a civic practice, we must first consider how it functions as a way of knowing.

2 Knowledge and the Restorative Imagination

Working on the Africa volume of the Encyclopaedia taught me that restorative justice is itself a way of knowing: dialogical, situated and co-created. Across chapters on Uganda’s Mato Oput (Kasimbazi & Kabaseke, in press), Liberia’s Palava Huts (Booker, in press) and Mozambique’s Gamba rituals (Igreja, in press), justice appeared not as rule enforcement but as the restoration of moral and social equilibrium. Such approaches testify to relational ontologies that understand being human as being with others (Clamp, in press).

To edit such work was to inhabit a collective epistemology. Contributors navigated linguistic diversity, colonial legacies and uneven research capacity, which meant the editorial process itself became an enactment of restorative practice. We learned to listen across differences, to acknowledge partial knowledge and to value the humility that comes with collaborative scholarship. What emerged was not a single African model, but a chorus of voices united by the conviction that justice is a relational process of moral repair (Clamp, in press).

These insights inevitably brought us into contact with broader disciplinary debates. Ongoing discussions in The International Journal of Restorative Justice illustrate the field’s struggle to balance conceptual coherence with contextual responsiveness, with scholars noting the necessity and the danger of both narrow and capacious definitions of restorative justice. Lode Walgrave (2023), for example, argues that shared terminology strengthens analytical clarity, whereas Jennifer Llewellyn (2023) cautions that overly prescriptive definitions risk erasing cultural specificity and lived practice.

The tension between definition and openness of what constitutes restorative justice was therefore ever-present. Encyclopaedias invite closure – in this context, the impulse to align contributions with a particular definition of restorative justice. Yet Iris Murdoch (1970) reminds us that moral life depends on attention: the patient, loving regard for reality in all its complexity. A restorative epistemology must therefore resist finality; it must keep the field porous to new experience, local wisdom and conceptual plurality. As editors, our task was not to fix meaning but to hold space for plurality, a practice of intellectual civility as much as scholarly rigour. What this collaborative knowledge-making made unmistakable is that restorative justice depends on virtues that hold relationships open.

3 Civility and the Moral Ecology of Restoration

In parallel with the Encyclopaedia, my recent writing on civility sought to reclaim the concept from its trivial associations with politeness. Civility, in a restorative sense, is not decorum but a relational practice that makes justice possible. It is the disciplined willingness to recognise others as equal members of the civic community, to accept accountability without humiliation and to engage in dialogue without domination (Braithwaite & Pettit, 1992; Pettit, 1997). It forms part of the moral architecture of legitimate political order expressing the norms through which citizens acknowledge one another’s standing and sustain the trust on which cooperation depends (Braithwaite, 2002; Llewellyn, 2012). Understood in this way, civility functions as a moral ecology, the relational condition that enables restorative encounters to take root (Llewellyn & Morrison, 2018).

This account stands in sharp contrast to contemporary discourse, where civility is often invoked as a call to avoidance or deference when conflict arises. In restorative practice, civility is anything but passive. It treats conflict as the raw material of understanding and demands the humility to listen and the courage to speak with integrity. Practised in this way, civility keeps people in relationship long enough for accountability to occur without degradation and for dissent to be voiced without rupture.

My collaboration with Jennifer Llewellyn in Colombia’s regional peace co-construction process with Comuneros del Sur¹ made this moral ecology visible. During workshops in Nariño, victims, communities, combatants and state officials practiced what Lederach (2005) calls the ‘moral imagination’, the ability to envision relationships that transcend entrenched patterns of violence. These encounters were not peripheral to justice; they were justice (Llewellyn & Clamp, 2025). Harms were acknowledged, responsibilities negotiated and futures imagined through relational mapping and dialogue rather than procedural scripts or institutional deferrals.

In these spaces, civility was not a courtesy but a survival ethic. It enabled disagreement without dehumanisation, allowing fragile cooperation to emerge despite histories of harm and mistrust. It regulated speech and emotion in ways that prevented conflict from collapsing into hostility, while also guarding against reconciliation becoming mere sentimentality. Through civility, participants recognised one another’s standing, held one another to account and worked toward the restoration of equal civic membership – a dynamic entirely consistent with the relational conception of civility articulated by Llewellyn and Morrison (2018).

Civility, then, is not an abstract ideal but a lived discipline whose contours become clearest in moments of deep fracture, when trust is fragile, identities are contested and the temptation to retreat or retaliate is strongest. Restorative justice relies on this discipline. Without civility, dialogue collapses into accusation, accountability becomes indistinguishable from shaming and repair gives way to resignation or coercion.

Seeing civility as a moral ecology also illuminates its institutional dimensions. Just as individuals must practise civility to sustain restorative encounters, institutions must model civility to sustain legitimacy (Clamp, 2025b). When institutions act with transparency, fairness and respect, they create the relational conditions for citizens to engage in good faith; when they act arbitrarily or dismissively, they erode the trust upon which restorative justice relies. Civility therefore has a dual character: It is an interpersonal virtue and an institutional ethic, necessary for both restorative encounters and restorative governance. This renders civility a bridging concept linking personal disposition with political order and micro-level practices of dialogue with macro-level questions of legitimacy.

4 Restorative Encounters in Context

The Restorative Practice Conference in Singapore and the Leuven Future of Law and Criminology Conference in Belgium offered opportunities to test these ideas further. Both settings placed civility and relational practice under intense analytical scrutiny, but Singapore additionally placed them under emotional and moral pressure.

In Singapore I explored the notion of the ‘restorative nation’ (Clamp, 2025c), drawing on the Builders Project, a project by the Lutheran Community Care Services (LCCS) that sought to embed restorative practice across several schools (see Kek, Lim, Sim, Li & Mui, 2025). The project demonstrated that even within highly structured bureaucracies, relationships can become the organising principle of governance. Teachers and students participating in circle dialogues redefined authority through empathy and accountability (Kek et al., 2025). This was relational governance in miniature: institutions acting with rather than upon citizens. The experience resonated with Arendt’s (1951) reminder that freedom appears not in isolation but in ‘concerted action’, collective dialogue as the practice that sustains a democratic ethos.

Yet the most significant part of my visit to Singapore occurred not at the conference, but inside the Singapore Prison Service (SPS), specifically, a maximum-security unit that has been quietly experimenting with restorative justice for nearly a decade (Kek, Lee, Nadarajan & Qin, 2024). The contrast between environment and aspiration could not have been starker. A setting defined by extreme constraint, single-man cells, no beds, and two hours out-of-cell per day hardly seems fertile ground for relational repair. Corporal punishment, still part of the system, was something I struggled to reconcile with the restorative ethos. And yet, what I witnessed in that unit rendered any simple narrative impossible.

In the afternoon, my host and I sat in a circle with nineteen prisoners and six officers, including the unit commander, to hear about their restorative journey. That SPS unit has been developing restorative programmes designed and facilitated by prisoners themselves, supported by officers who have undergone training to hold ‘relational conversations’ as part of daily practice. Within minutes, it became evident that these programmes had become lifelines: structures through which incarcerated men learned to look inward, reconnect with loved ones and articulate forms of hope that the architecture around them seemed designed to extinguish. In a context of profound deprivation, restorative practice had become a counter-script, an alternative moral vocabulary that enabled accountability without despair.

One officer described how restorative dialogue had changed the relational climate of the unit: ‘We see them differently, and they see us differently’. Another reflected on the emotional burden of working in such an environment and how restorative practice gave staff a way to engage without hardening. For me, the SPS visit sharpened the stakes of civility. In a maximum-security unit, civility is not a soft virtue; it is a disciplined counter-practice to the coercive logics that define confinement. It becomes a way for both prisoners and officers to resist dehumanisation, an ethic through which dignity is enacted despite structural conditions that routinely undermine it. The men spoke of restorative circles as moments when time softened, when they felt recognised and able to recognise others, including themselves. In their accounts, civility appeared not as politeness but as a fragile, hard-won commitment to stay in relationship under conditions designed for separation.

In Leuven, by contrast, the conversation turned toward restorative justice as moral infrastructure, a framework capable of renewing trust between citizens and institutions. My presentation argued that the future of justice lies not in perfecting systems of punishment but in replacing them with a relational model of repair (Clamp, 2025d). Punitive justice, dominant in the Global North for two centuries, is facing a profound conceptual and moral crisis because it cannot deliver what it promises: safety, legitimacy, accountability or repair. Restorative justice, when understood not as a discrete programme but as a relational theory, offers a fundamentally different orientation, one that views people as constituted through relationships, harm as relational rupture and justice as the work of repairing those relationships (see Llewellyn, 2021). In both Singapore and Leuven, a shared challenge emerged: How to preserve restorative values while scaling them within systems shaped by bureaucratic imperatives.

5 The Restorative Ethic: Humility, Curiosity and Courage

Across this last year, I have come to understand restorative justice less as a set of methods than as a moral orientation. Its practice depends upon a set of interrelated virtues that sustain the relational work at the heart of justice. Three stand out: humility, curiosity and courage. These virtues are not ancillary to restorative practice; they constitute the restorative ethic that makes repair possible in fractured civic worlds.

Humility is both epistemic and ethical. In working on the Africa volume, I was reminded daily that every articulation of justice is partial and situated. No single framework, however well developed, can claim universality. Ubuntu’s maxim, ‘I am because we are’, captures this truth: Identity and knowledge are co-constituted, formed in relation rather than in isolation (Metz, 2022). Humility, in this sense, is the willingness to recognise the limits of one’s own vantage point, to enter dialogue open to being changed and to acknowledge that justice emerges from collective rather than individual insight. Without humility, restorative processes risk becoming instruments of certainty rather than practices of attention.

Curiosity sustains this openness. It is the disposition that keeps relationships from hardening into stereotype or prescription. During the Colombian workshop I co-facilitated with Jennifer Llewellyn, curiosity required asking communities what safety, justice and accountability meant in their own idioms. Their answers often exceeded legal categories: Safety was tied to land, memory, lineage and environmental regeneration (Llewellyn & Clamp, 2025). Justice was entangled with mourning and the restoration of relationships damaged not only by violence but also by neglect. Curiosity transforms negotiation from transaction into encounter. It shifts the posture of institutions from knowing to learning, converting information-gathering into moral recognition. A restorative system without curiosity quickly becomes procedural rather than relational.

Courage is the virtue that holds humility and curiosity in productive tension. It calls us to stay present when dialogue exposes pain, conflict or complicity. Iris Murdoch (1970: 91) described attention as ‘a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’. Restorative courage is the decision to maintain that gaze, to acknowledge harm without reducing people to their worst acts and to resist the temptations of avoidance, judgment or despair. In circle processes, in peace talks and in civic life, courage is what keeps dialogue from collapsing under the weight of what it reveals. It is not the absence of fear but a commitment to relationship that is stronger than fear.

Taken together, these virtues constitute the ‘restorative ethic’ (see Cornwell, 2012): a moral orientation that aligns a relational approach to justice with the deeper conditions of civic life. They orient practitioners, policymakers and citizens toward relationship as the locus of justice (Emirbayer, 1997; Fraser, 2008; Llewellyn, 2011). They are the dispositions through which recognition, accountability and trust become possible, not only between individuals but within institutions. Legitimacy rests not on the state’s capacity to punish but on its capacity to sustain just relations between citizens and institutions. Humility, curiosity and courage are therefore not personal traits alone; they are civic virtues that inform how institutions should listen, act, decide and repair.

These virtues also invite us to imagine scholarship itself as a restorative practice, a disciplined curiosity about how others know and live justice and a willingness to enter conversations that unsettle as much as they illuminate. They offer a vocabulary for understanding why relational governance succeeds where punitive models fail: because they cultivate the moral capacities that keep people in relationship, even when those relationships are strained. Taken together, these virtues do more than guide interpersonal encounters. They sketch the moral architecture through which societies can govern restoratively.

6 Global Dialogues and the Moral Architecture of Governance

Comparing my experiences in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, I see a convergent movement toward forms of governance that take relationship, rather than coercion or efficiency, as their organising principle (Burford, 2018; Rossner & Taylor, 2024). These developments are not identical, but they are aligned in their aspiration to build institutions capable of sustaining the relational conditions upon which legitimacy depends.

Yet convergence should not obscure what is most challenging about this work. Each context negotiates its own balance between hierarchy and participation, structure and spontaneity, bureaucratic necessity and relational integrity. Arendt (1951) warned that the danger of modern institutions is not only domination but worldlessness, the erosion of spaces where plurality can appear. Restorative governance seeks to counter this tendency. Its promise lies not merely in introducing new practices but in cultivating the moral and civic conditions under which individuals and institutions themselves learn to hold space for difference.

One way this shift becomes visible is when institutions experiment with relational practice in contexts not typically associated with dialogue. In Singapore, for example, restorative practice within the Prison Service has begun to reshape interactions between officers and prisoners through norms of listening, transparency and relational accountability. Even in maximum-security settings, where everyday life is defined by rigid schedules, austere physical environments and deep asymmetries of power, restorative commitments have created pockets of relational possibility. These pockets matter because they model what institutional civility can look like: fairness enacted through conversation, authority expressed through responsiveness rather than control and power exercised in ways that sustain rather than diminish dignity.

Across these settings, leadership emerges as the decisive factor: Institutions become restorative not through programmes alone but through the modelling of relational virtues by those with authority. A restorative approach to governance therefore requires more than procedural adoption. It demands structural commitments that embed humility, curiosity and courage within organisational culture. Humility, at the institutional level, means recognising the limits of expert-driven interventions and making space for the knowledge of those most affected by harm. Curiosity requires institutions to treat communities not as problems to be managed but as partners in meaning-making. Courage is the willingness to confront the mistrust, histories of exclusion and structural violence that shape civic relationships. These virtues deepen legitimacy because they render the state recognisable as a participant in relationship rather than a distant regulator, a point central to relational theories of justice.

Importantly, relational governance must navigate its own fragilities. As I have observed in England and Wales, strong bureaucratic cultures can easily dilute restorative commitments, reducing them to managerial techniques or efficiency tools (Clamp, 2023). When restorative justice is absorbed into risk frameworks or procedural scripts, its ethical core is hollowed out. Global experience therefore demonstrates a paradox: Restorative justice thrives when institutions decentralise control, share authority and prioritise relationship, yet these are precisely the practices bureaucracies find most difficult to sustain.

7 Concluding Thoughts

Restorative justice ultimately asks us to imagine a different kind of civic life: one in which dignity is not contingent, relationships are not disposable and institutions act with the same humility, curiosity and courage they ask of citizens. Last year’s encounters have shown me that restorative justice is neither a method nor a moment, but a sustained commitment to the fragile work of living together. It flourishes in the quiet spaces where people choose recognition over dismissal, dialogue over silence and responsibility over resentment. It falters wherever institutions retreat into control or citizens lose faith in their capacity to act with and for one another. Yet even in the hardest environments in maximum-security prisons, in communities navigating violence, in classrooms shaped by hierarchy, the restorative impulse persists: the human desire to be seen, to make amends and to begin again. To take restorative justice seriously is to recognise that civic renewal will not be delivered from above but built through these relational practices, the small acts of attention that stitch the social fabric back together. If we are willing to cultivate the virtues that sustain this work, restorative justice offers more than an alternative response to harm; it offers a way to rebuild the civic world itself.