European countries face several kinds of unrest and threats due to juvenile delinquency, victimisations in high conflict or post conflict areas, terrorism, high crime rates, high recriminalisation rates, increasing costs of overcrowded prisons and decreasing local and national public participation in civil life. This conference focus on the development of an alternative to the general societal response to such unrests and threats; Restorative Justice (RJ) is a theory and a practice of conflict resolution within civil and public societal sectors, involving people in democratic processes for peace building. RJ is encouraged by the Council of Europe, EU, UN and lately by the World Bank, to be implemented at all parts of the criminal justice procedure in all European countries. Knowledge bases on a European level has been developed due to recent or ongoing European research and development experiences, with a focus on victim-offender mediation and conferencing, national recording systems, national legislation in relation to victim-offender mediation and conferencing, the relation between civil and criminal justice and restorative justice practices and agencies, training models and the experience of training legal professionals in the restorative justice area, new restorative justice models and applications, and theoretical concepts, approaches and frameworks on restorative justice, also concerning group violent conflicts and mass victimisation.

RJ is seen as a methodology for the development of peaceful, democratic civil society organisations and movements. Thus target areas for developing practices and research are marginalised youth gangs, minority groups of indigenous populations in general, groups suffering from lack of human rights and thus lack of handling life on their own cultural and social premises as well as incarcerated groups. Areas suffering from high levels of alcohol consumption, family violence and trafficking in human beings, contributing to intra- and intergroup conflicts and violence in general have been shown to improve thanks to RJ processes. RJ has been shown to be as or more effective than traditional methods of ccriminal justice for reducing harm and crime with respect to nearly every group of offender studied, and is also more satisfying and beneficial to victims.

Norway is the European country that has more than two decades of experience with a national, state funded municipally organised, Mediation and Reconciliation Service (NMS) (Konfliktrådet). Several methods in case handling are used such as victim-offender mediation, counselling and group conferencing; and prisons (inmates) and streets (violent gangs) are now introduced as new success fields for the NMS, shown to decrease violence and unrest. RJ as a dialogical and direct way of handling conflicts on the premises of the involved parties supposedly strengthens the parties and the local community and is shown to decrease re-offending. Researcher groups are now working to investigate methodologically the usefulness of RJ in peace building in general, such as The Working Party on Restorative Justice with the UN peace building commission. Thus the relativity of peace and war will be at stake with its alternative epistemologies; i.e. a moderate constructionist approach to human interaction in violent contexts. Challenging the methodology of registering such interactions as well as asking for gender, age and societal position perspectives are parts of this approach to peace and conflicts studies. We will emphasise and focus on peaceful efforts and events conducted by different groups of people: juveniles in particular – and on the answers, i.e. knowledges and practices, of professionals and the media in these areas.