Workshop: Guarantees of Non-Recurrence: Transformative Police Reform

In the fall of 2018, we organized a workshop that brought together several experts from various disciplines to exchange their expertise from diverse case-studies. We aligned two rather distinctive strands of research – police reform and transformative justice – and thereby used the lens of transformative justice to study when and how the interplay between top-down and bottom-up initiatives may lead to more sustainable and peaceful police reforms. By comparing and contrasting a wide range of empirical case studies across the globe (France, Kenya, South Africa, the South Pacific, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States) we identified several analytical and practical insights to arrive at a better understanding and ways to improve the troubled relationship between police and citizens.