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“If we learn how to take these risks, and how to navigate conflict together, we are going to be so much stronger down the line, in our most difficult moments, when the stakes are unbelievably high. And if we can figure out how to stay together, in spite of our fuck-ups and frustrations, we are going to have what we need most in a crisis, which is each other,” says Movement Memos host Kelly Hayes. In the second part of a two-part conversation, Hayes and guest Tanuja Jagernauth discuss why conflict transformation can be so difficult, what happens when efforts at repair break down, and why conflict resolution skills are survival skills in fascist times.

Music: Son Monarcas, Katori Walker, and David Celeste

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. In our last episode, Tanuja Jagernauth and I began a conversation about conflict in movement spaces: how we talk about harm, how conflict gets misnamed or weaponized, and why so many people are trying to navigate difficult situations while exhausted, overwhelmed, and under enormous pressure. Today, we are continuing that conversation, and digging into some of the methods and tools people use to navigate conflict — and why those approaches can sometimes leave people feeling disappointed or let down. We also talk about how to make better apologies, how to receive feedback, and other social skills that are often lacking in our movements, and in society at large. Whether we realize it or not, conflict resolution skills are survival skills. Because building movements together is going to generate conflict, and the truth is, we can only survive together.

If you missed our last episode, you’ll definitely get more out of this one if you start there. You can also learn more from Tanuja by checking out her new zine, Healing Justice & Our Call to Practice, which is available from Haymarket Books.

Rupture and Repair Under Fascist Conditions

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KH: Tanuja, welcome back to Movement Memos.

Tanuja Jagernauth: Thank you so much, Kelly. I am really excited to continue our conversation.

KH: Well, the response to our last episode, where you and I began this conversation about conflict resolution, has been huge. People have been saying that they really needed this, and that they’re getting a lot out of it, so I am really grateful for the chance to dive back in on this topic, and of course, I am so grateful to you for making the time to join me again for this sprawling two-part conversation.

TJ: You too, Kelly, and this could easily be a 10 part. So we will do our best and hopefully this can be just a jumping point for folks’ exploration and dialogue.

KH: Absolutely. Since we’re going to be talking a bit today about mediation, restorative justice, and transformative justice, can you start by saying a little about your own relationship to these frameworks and the experiences that shape how you think about this work?

TJ: Absolutely. Thank you, Kelly. So I basically learned everything that I know about conflict transformation and transformative justice from Black and Brown and queer sex workers, drug using activists and organizers, and other people who are literally trying to figure out how to survive and shift their own conditions without involving the police or the state or social services and harmful institutions.

And so when I talk about restorative justice and transformative justice and mediation, my positionality is very much rooted and aimed toward transformative justice and things that I’ve learned from experience. And so I want to really lift up and express gratitude for Shira Hassan, who taught me and some others the Clearing Circle, which Shira writes about and offers in Fumbling Towards Repair with Mariame Kaba.

I want to thank folks like Rachel Caidor and Coya Paz and Vickie Sides from the Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline where I worked decades ago, but it really set me up and oriented me toward Black feminist teachings and feminist work in general and a form of prison abolition that is deeply feminist. And I’m also grateful for what I’ve learned from and keep learning from Spring Up and their offering. So as I respond to these questions, that’s where I’m coming from.

KH: So, these processes — transformative justice, restorative justice, and mediation — can be incredibly helpful, but we’ve also heard from people who’ve felt let down by them. Can you talk a bit about what these processes are and why people are having mixed experiences with them?

TJ: Love this question, Kelly. And so I think of restorative justice, transformative justice, and mediation as related frameworks and processes, but they’re very distinct, but they’re all ways of addressing conflict, harm, and sometimes abuse and violence. So starting with mediation, it’s usually a facilitated process for working through conflict where people are hopefully partnering, rooted in their self-determination and their agency, to better understand one another and leave a process of mediation with clear agreements, new boundaries perhaps, and next actions that they will both agree to taking.

Restorative justice is a way of responding after harm has happened, and it centers the needs and the obligations that emerge from the harm that occurred. It gives the person who did harm an opportunity to take responsibility for the harm that they’ve created and to meet some of the new obligations and hopefully do what needs to be done to bring about some form of repair.

Then transformative justice includes the work of seeking repair, but it, in my opinion, goes further and it goes deeper, and it asks what conditions were present that made the harm or the violence or the abuse possible in the first place. And it really asks us collectively to reflect on what needs to change on the level of conditions so that we are not reproducing the harm or the violence or the abuse.

All of these processes, while they are distinct, and there’s so much good content out there you can dig into if you want to learn more, but what they have in common is that they’re all really trying to help us address our difficult situations and our harm and our conflict without simply throwing people away. We are all so deeply mired in patterns and practices of punishment. And as we know, punishment can feel satisfying. As Jenny Viets says, “punishment is quick.”

So when we are able to blame someone or point the finger at someone or expel someone, we might feel like, “Okay, the problem’s over. We solved it.” But when we try to engage with RJ [restorative justice], TJ [transformative justice] or mediation, we’re really asking something much harder of ourselves and each other. They really ask us to see each other not as flat characters in a binary story of I’m innocent, you’re guilty, but really to see each other as whole and complicated people, all capable of harming others and being harmed.

These processes are asking us to stay complex, to stay with each other, and to grapple together with what repair, accountability, and change are actually going to require. All of these processes, when they’re working well at their best, they are invitations for us to become more human with each other. So all of these processes ask us to be honest with ourselves and each other, not just about what someone else has done, but about our own shadow sides too.

So these processes ask us to be honest about our defensiveness, our tendencies to desire punishment, our pettiness, our fear, and our wish for quick resolution, or our wish for a time machine in which we could go back and make it all go away. If we’re not grappling with these parts of ourselves and being really, really honest and creating a process that is ready and able to intervene when these things emerge, not if, I really feel we can see these shadow sides hijack our processes and can lead to some of the disappointment that people experience.

When people say they’ve had mixed experiences with RJ or TJ or mediation, that makes a lot of sense to me. And one reason that these processes can be disappointing to folks is sometimes they’re being asked to do too much. They may be being used in situations they are not actually suited for. So for example, mediation can be useful in some conflicts, but it may not be the appropriate response or the container for handling abuse. I would look to transformative justice processes for something like that. And so when we’re approaching conflict transformation, clarity matters so much. We have to be clear and honest about what kind of situation we’re dealing with and what method is going to be best suited for that situation.

Going back to the terms we defined in the last episode, we can ask ourselves, “Are we dealing with a disagreement? Are we dealing with a harm, or are we dealing with abuse?” Again, if we misname the problem, we are much more likely to reach for and apply the wrong process, and that can absolutely lead to a dissatisfying outcome.

Another reason I think people have mixed experiences with these kinds of processes is that they are not quick. They require real preparation, lots of pre-work, pre-conferencing. They require real willingness to be in it and stay in it. They require real support, not just for the people who are involved, but for the facilitation, we need to take the time to set that up.

So in total, these processes require a lot of capacity from everyone involved. In RJ, in restorative justice, there may be a real effort to understand what the harmed person needs and what obligations now exist after harm has occurred. We also will take the time to figure out whether the person who caused harm is willing and able to take responsibility and participate meaningfully toward making the situation right. At the same time, this kind of process can feel hollow or it can even do further harm if that person who caused harm is feeling coerced or being coerced into participating. And that, in my opinion, really asks questions about, how did we prepare for the process?

The process can feel unsatisfactory if a community is rushing to bring two people together toward closure. If we’re too invested in the appearance of or the performance of accountability, than actual accountability, I think we’ll also set up a process that doesn’t really bring us to repair.

When we’re trying to practice transformative justice, the challenge can be even bigger because transformative justice is not just asking, how do we respond after harm? It is asking us to look at the wider conditions in which harm occurred. It relies upon and requires real relationships, and it’s really asking us to take an honest look at the systems that made the harm possible in the first place.

Transformative justice in contrast to restorative justice doesn’t always have to look like a circle. I think that’s really important to raise. Transformative justice processes can be a wide variety of interventions that happen over a longer period of time. It’s going to ask and really make us create ways to prevent the harm that took place. It’s going to bring in various ways to intervene. It’s going to point us toward what repair needs to look like, and again, the transformation of the conditions that made the harm possible. So it means our community has to be ready, our relationships have to be in the right place, and we really have to ask ourselves if we have the collective capacity to hold this kind of process over time.

So many of us are trying to do this work in imperfect conditions, and we do this work imperfectly. We’re carrying our own trauma, we’re carrying our own exhaustion, and we’re holding all of the contradictions that we hold. And so, of course, the results can be mixed. Of course, facilitators are going to make mistakes. And I think as we set up these processes from the very beginning, we can build in an acceptance of these things, and that’s where setting up really solid, honest, clear agreements can really help us.

Many folks who do this work are doing very deep and careful work. And at the same time, I think folks can be disappointed in these processes when the language of these processes is being used, but sometimes without the depth or the skill or even the political grounding that really makes them meaningful and rooted. It makes me think of institutions sometimes that adopt the language of RJ or TJ and end up flattening them or diluting them or simply misusing them.

And one thing that I took away from a recent webinar from Spring Up is that it’s actually important to acknowledge that institutions like nonprofits, while they can do really important accountability work, they can be more accountable to community, they actually aren’t situated to do transformative justice work. Transformative justice work is truly meant to be done by individuals outside of institutions and social services and any other containers of the state.

TJ is meant to be done with folks who are in community as much as possible. And so that can also be a dynamic that we’re seeing when folks come away really disappointed by a process that claims to be transformative justice, but it’s being held by, say, a nonprofit or a different kind of institution where we have to be careful that we are using the right language for what it is that we’re doing.

KH: So once people are in one of these processes, what do you think tends to help it go well, and what tends to get in the way?

TJ: So folks can be let down by the process of conflict transformation. Potentially if they are missing one of the three things, one of the three conditions that Kazu Haga recommends for a generative conflict. And those three conditions are relationships, skills to handle the conflict, and structure to handle the conflict. So I think according to Kazu Haga, we want to have at least two of the three of those conditions in order for the conflict transformation process to go well. So I think if folks are feeling let down by a process, let’s look at, okay, what was the state of the relationships, skills, and structures? And some questions that I think I would ask folks if they’re feeling let........

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