Restorative Practice as Everyday Democratic Resistance
Exploring how restorative practices foster solidarity, hope, and democratic resilience in our communities through everyday acts of care, dialogue, and repair.
A Multi-Case Study, Collaborative Research Project
Restorative Practices as Everyday Democratic Resistance is a two-year research project exploring how people, groups, and communities use practices of dialogue, care, and solidarity to protect democratic life in increasingly polarised and exclusionary contexts.
The project brings together research on restorative practices: approaches that respond to conflict and harm through dialogue, responsibility, repair, and relationship-building; with the concept of everyday democratic resistance: the often quiet, local actions through which people challenge exclusion, division, and harmful uses of power in their daily lives.
Across different countries and contexts, we are a group of scholars, restorative justice practitioners, mediators and artists studying initiatives that create spaces for meaningful dialogue, strengthen relationships across difference, and build communities’ capacity to address conflict and harm. By learning from these practices and the people behind them, the project aims to better understand how small-scale, relational forms of action can contribute to wider cultures of democratic resilience, inclusion, and solidarity.
Project Updates
Latest Blog Posts
Glossary
Autocratisation
The process through which democratic systems gradually become more authoritarian. It often involves the erosion of civil liberties, weakening of democratic institutions, restrictions on civic participation, and concentration of political power.
Democratic Backsliding
The gradual deterioration of democratic norms, institutions, and practices within a political system. It is characterised by declining civic freedoms, weakening social trust, attacks on independent institutions, and increasing authoritarian tendencies.
Polarization
A process through which social and political groups become increasingly divided, often viewing one another as adversaries rather than legitimate participants in democratic life. Polarization can weaken trust, dialogue, and democratic cooperation.
Everyday Resistance
Subtle, dispersed, and often informal acts through which individuals and communities challenge dominant power structures and sustain alternative values. Unlike overt protest, everyday resistance frequently operates through routine practices, relationships, and local actions.
Democratic Infrastructure
The spaces, practices, relationships, and social conditions that enable democratic participation and expression. Democratic infrastructures create opportunities for people to engage with one another, deliberate collectively, and exercise democratic agency.
Everyday Democratic Resistance
The enactment of democratic values through everyday practices that foster participation, dialogue, solidarity, care, and shared responsibility. Rather than directly confronting authoritarianism through protest or institutional reform, it strengthens democratic culture by sustaining the social and relational foundations upon which democracy depends.
Restorative Democracy
A concept describing deliberative democratic practices that incorporate restorative justice principles such as inclusive dialogue, relational repair, accountability, and democratic transformation. It is not a new democratic system but a framework for understanding democratic engagement as a process of repairing damaged relationships between citizens, institutions, and communities.
Democratic Resilience
The capacity of democratic communities, institutions, and social relationships to withstand, adapt to, and recover from challenges such as polarization, authoritarian pressures, exclusion, and declining trust.
Democratic Imagination
The capacity to imagine alternative social, political, and relational possibilities beyond existing structures and dominant narratives. Artistic and restorative practices can expand democratic imagination by encouraging critical reflection and collective creativity.