Foucault, Disciplinary Power and the Phenomenology of Victimization and Restorative Justice

Abstract

The legal, political, and socio-behavioral fields of Victimology and Restorative Justice seek alternative approaches to recognizing Victim’s Rights, bearing witness to the harm and trauma victims experience, and to finding new ways of creating restorative healing and justice for both victims of crime.   Most contemporary theories of Victimology and Restorative Justice are framed and informed by the Modern, Enlightenment paradigm.  The Enlightenment paradigm is built on three mutually important and reinforcing—philosophical, scientific, and political—claims about the meaning and purpose of human nature, scientific knowledge, and the legal and political arena.

While the work currently being done in the fields of victimology and restorative justice are crucial and transformative to victims and the search for justice, the question of whether the core philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment paradigm are the most accurate way of interpreting these phenomena may be raised.  Is it possible that the core philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment, as important and instrumental to progress as they have been, keep us from seeing other ways of interpreting these ideas and issues?  Is it possible to conceive of the subject/individual, victim, and the search for justice from a Foucaultian and postmodern perspective?  Investigating these themes and their intersectionality from a Foucaultian perspective enables us to expand the “happening” of what it means to be a victim and redirects our search for justice and what it means.