Peacemaking Criminology

The term peacemaking criminology is derived from the title I gave to a volume of readings Richard Quinney and I edited in 1991, Criminology as Peacemaking. The chapters in the book were primarily papers that had been delivered for several prior years at “peacemaking” sessions, organized by Kevin Anderson, at American Society of Criminology meetings. In short order, criminology and criminal justice texts were calling peacemaking a new school of research in critical criminology. In 1998, John Fuller published the one criminal justice text (so far) explicitly from “a peace-making perspective.”

Peacemaking stands for the positive things we can weave back into the social fabric in the wake of violence. It stands in contrast to an approach to social control [Page 1132]called “warmaking,” which tends to fight wars on crime. Warmaking focuses on what others ought to do to identify, isolate, and subdue criminals. Peacemaking begins by listening to those most directly affected by violence—victims and offenders—and then works to build safe, trustworthy social relations in the wake of violence. Peacemaking encourages people to do what they value, instead of opposing what people do wrong. Many criminologists and students seem attracted to peacemaking because of its accentuation of the positive—a relief from all the negativity in traditional criminology and criminal justice.

Peacemaking criminology has repeatedly been criticized as a hodgepodge of warm and fuzzy criminological sentiments with no data and no unifying theory. Indeed, a wide variety of people want to be known as engaging in peacemaking or its cousin, restorative justice. Not long ago a student in a senior college seminar on “New Directions in Criminal Justice” eagerly volunteered to make a class presentation about his work with teenaged men who had molested children. On one hand, it was admirable that he was among the rare people who would even work and even talk with such social outcasts. On the other hand, he endorsed an institutional order that staff reject any attempts of the young men to explain their behavior, on the grounds that explaining only meant excusing the behavior, which the detainees needed to learn was utterly socially unacceptable. To me, failing to listen to anyone speak what he or she honestly wants to share is violence itself. I would never call this program peacemaking. It reminded me that I do not own the term, and it aroused my ambivalence. I am glad that so many people in the field and in academia want to see their work and study in a positive light, but to me, peacemaking does have a unifying theory, in which much of what people call “peacemaking” is considered violence—is in fact war-making.