Transformative Justice Knows No Borders

Learning From Community-Based Responses to Harm Around the World

By Melanie Brazzell, What Really Makes Us Safe? Project

In May of 2023, we hosted “Practicing for an Abolitionist World,” a virtual gathering for transformative justice, restorative justice, and community accountability practitioners from around the world, with the belief that community-based responses to harm know no borders and have always been global. In this new report, Transformative Justice Knows No Borders, we share learnings from that convening, including case studies from Kurdistan, India, the Philippines, and Argentina.

This report looks at the different languages and lineages people draw on in each of these places to root transformative justice practices in their local soil. Under each of their responses to interpersonal violence lies a vast network of care infrastructures that enable such responses — solidarity economies, self-governance systems, and new relationships to law and to each other. Built by movements, these are like the root systems and mycelial networks of fungi under the soil that enable plants and trees aboveground to thrive.

The genocide in Palestine, along with war, violence, repression, and rising authoritarianism around the world, have drawn our attention yet again to the interdependence of state violence at home and globally. This calls on us to weave transnational networks of resistance. We hope that this new resource can help you connect your organizing to a larger mycelial network that spans borders and states as part of the “Transformative Justice Transnational,” and that you find it useful as we collectively continue to weave transnational networks of care, healing, and justice.

An excerpt from this resource was adapted and published in Inquest: “Transformative Justice Is Global.”