Exploring Social Restoration In Taiwan Strait Relations Through A Restorative Justice Perspective: Dialogue And The Possibilities Of Peacebuilding
Updated: Sep 3
Liu, Yu Wei, Associate Professor, Department of Law, Hsuan Chuang University, Taiwan.
Page: 4119-4129
ABSTRACT
Taiwan and mainland China have remained politically divided for decades. Cross-Strait relations have long been shaped by the interplay of memories of war and conflict, divergent political perspectives, and social divisions. Consequently, the challenges confronting the Taiwan Strait extend beyond the domains of politics, security, and international relations to encompass divergent collective memories of history, group identities, experiences of victimization during wartime, emotional trauma, and a lack of mutual understanding. These factors have contributed to divergent narratives concerning who has suffered harm, what constitutes justice, and how the other should be understood, thereby generating mutual distrust, adversarial perceptions, and fractures in interpersonal and social relationships. Accordingly, approaches to peace in the Taiwan Strait that focus primarily on military deterrence, political negotiation, and the prevention of armed conflict may remain insufficient to address the relational harms and social fractures accumulated through prolonged conflict and political division. This article adopts Restorative Justice (RJ) as its primary theoretical perspective and draws on Soulou & Matczak’s (2023) discussion of RJ in wartime to examine the potential extension of RJ beyond its traditional domain of criminal justice into the broader fields of social conflict, relationship restoration, and peacebuilding. RJ is not limited to responding to harm through the attribution of responsibility; rather, it emphasizes dialogue, listening, the assumption of responsibility, recognition of lived experiences, and the rebuilding of relationships, thereby enabling affected groups and societies to confront and reflect upon the consequences of conflict. In situations of conflict and war, societies are particularly prone to developing binary narratives that divide actors into opposing camps. By creating spaces for dialogue, RJ may provide an opportunity to move beyond such dichotomous narratives and return attention to the interpersonal and relational dimensions that precede, underlie, and are transformed by war and conflict, thereby facilitating a deeper understanding of the suffering and relational harms produced by conflict.
Building on the foregoing analysis, this article argues that social restoration should constitute an important dimension of understanding peace in the Taiwan Strait. Social restoration should not be equated with political reconciliation, nor does it require the two sides to reach consensus on questions of national status, political systems, or historical interpretation. Rather, it focuses on addressing and repairing the interpersonal, intergroup, and broader social harms generated by prolonged political division. Its core components include the reinterpretation of historical memories, the recognition and attentive listening to experiences of collective victimization, the pluralization of truth and historical narratives, the cultivation of mutual understanding, and the rebuilding of social trust. When societies develop the capacity to acknowledge differences, endure conflict, sustain dialogue, and transform adversarial relationships, they are better positioned to develop more resilient social structures. Finally, this article proposes a theoretical linkage among RJ, social restoration, peacebuilding, and Transitional Justice (TJ). RJ can be mobilized at the micro level of interpersonal and social relationships even before political conflicts have been resolved, or indeed before they escalate into full-scale armed conflict. Through dialogue, attentive listening, recognition of lived experiences, and relationship rebuilding, RJ may contribute to the accumulation of social trust and the relational foundations necessary for peacebuilding. Should significant political transformation occur in the future, these restorative processes could further connect with transitional justice mechanisms, including truth-telling and truth-seeking, accountability, official apologies, reparations, institutional reform, and social reconciliation. This perspective is consistent with contemporary scholarship on transitional justice, which emphasizes the importance of connecting micro-level experiences of conflict and harm with broader processes of societal transformation. Accordingly, this article argues that peace in the Taiwan Strait should not be understood solely as the “negative” peace of avoiding war. Rather, it should be further developed toward a form of “restorative peace” grounded in dialogue, the critical engagement with historical memories, the understanding of collective experiences of victimization, relationship restoration, and social resilience. From this perspective, RJ may serve as an important theoretical intermediary linking the individual, social, and political levels, while providing a conceptual pathway from interpersonal and relational repair toward broader processes of peacebuilding and, potentially, future Transitional Justice.
Keywords: Restorative Justice (RJ), Transitional Justice (TJ), social restoration, peacebuilding, dialogue.
