REPAIRING A BROKEN COMMUNITY

This text shows how agonistic theory can be inserted to boost democratic procedures and restorative justice in divided communities. To do so, it questions what is the ultimate sense of community reparation in divided societies. Drawing from political studies, I argue that the answer is related to social legitimacy to redefine identities and power in a group of people. Yet, this answer is also related to recognizing agonism as a continuous experience of disagreement and conflict that is inherent to the community. In recognizing both traditional sources of legitimacy and agonism, a community can redefine inner and external conflict toward a new sense of belonging that is never fixed or finished. In that sense, more than enabling the reparation of actors and the construction of peace, agonist theory helps to interpret every act of reparation as foundational yet contingent. This vision entails a constant commitment with community pairs but also a commitment to defend and support a contested community that pre-exists as people but is still to be born as political. By this, the text can complement new bottom-up practices of justice that promote reparation and dialogue, introducing agonism to create thicker layers of human dignity but also of legitimacy in fragmented communities.

Summary

1. Introduction, 2. The Levels of Legitimacy, 2.1. Legitimacy from Above, 2.1.1. Traditional Authority, 2.1.2. Charismatic Leadership, 2.1.3. Rational Legality, 2.2. Legitimacy from Below, 2.2.1. Rational Deliberation, 2.2.2. Agonist Tension, 3. Conclusion, 4. References.

“Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.

Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:

Listen to the bells a world away.

Listen to the bell in the ruins

of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,

and the copper boiled in the foundry,

and the bell born in the foundry says:

I was born of bullets,

but now I sing of a world where bullets melt into bells...”

Martín Espada,

in memory of the Robb Elementary School Shooting

1. Introduction

Why do we need to create peace or repair the damage caused between people? In other words, what is the ultimate sense in developing and repairing a divided community? The plain answer can be ‘to allow human rights and dignity.’ Yet, how antagonist members can settle a dialogue and restart living in divided societies? Many answers to those questions have been formulated from democratic development theory and by practitioners of mediation and reparation (Gavrielides, 2007; Johnstone & Van Ness, 2013).

Many of them support a deliberative dialogue to reach a state of peace or punctuated stability. Through this, members of a divided community can coexist and reach an agreement despite their differences. In some cases, they are required to ‘tolerate’ the other, digesting a past of violence and antagonism towards a new coexistence (for instance, see the Rortian ironic liberal in Bacon, 2017).

However, in this text, I argue that the ultimate sense of reparation and community development is not attached to coexistence and a deliberative consensus. Rather, it is the continuous clashing of identities and perspectives that constitute the dynamic of politics bringing the possibility to foster reparation and embrace division.

Drawing from agonism theory, the adversarial division is understood as a productive conflict that entails many possibilities to reconstitute an ever-divided community full of controversies (imperfections). Rather than a polished consensus that subsumes clashing preferences for the sake of unity and cooperation, in divided societies, the perspective is ‘I will never understand where you come from’ instead of ‘I agree and understand your point’.

This is not a fatalist vision of community-building. After serious offense and crime, the opposition between members or groups of people is far from suiting the model of rational deliberation and universal agreement. Instead of seeking a political center to reach an agreement, it is the margins that deliver the perspectives of politics in a community.

There is no good community (prompt to agreement) and good justice (restorative justice) that need to be connected. Nor there is a bad community (full of offense and vengeance) that is to be corrected by a bad justice (punitive and mechanical). Rather, agonism theory sees community as a continuous development that is far from dichotomies and embodies its full potential to reach individual autonomy and social justice (Roger, 2021).

This vision consists of not separating the community from the overall context. Thus, previous notions of justice, authority, and power relations are also important to construct and repairing a community. For those reasons, it is necessary to explore the different levels of legitimacy to promote justice and reparation alongside agonism.

Thus, the text draws from political theory to explore the levels of social legitimacy (Part 2) and their different impacts on community-building. The first section in this part rethinks traditional authority, charismatic leadership, and rational legality as the main sources to produce legitimacy from above. Whereas, the second section in this part explains rational deliberation and agonist tension as the cornerstones to produce social legitimacy from below.

The discussion of the different levels of social legitimacy allows us to ‘compare’ and oversee limitations at each level. In that sense, this discussion avoids the simple exhibition of different sources of legitimacy. Rather, I argue that the ultimate orientation of social legitimacy is taking those different sources to enlarge and deepen the social legitimacy in bottom-up policies. Even social legitimacy is a contested concept, but I argue that ultimately it relates to constructing politics as agreement but also as disagreement in a community. In this vision, community building is not a passive recipient of top-down policies. It is the main source to redefine legitimacy from below but also from above. In that sense, there is room to integrate legitimacy from below in top-down institutions, redefining power and justice in divided societies.

The conclusion (Part 3) argues that is essential to recognize the conflict and tensions to develop a community attached to identity division and unbalanced power relations. Agonism indeed allows us to recognize the ever-going development and contingent community. However, it is also essential to use agonism to reconstitute politics. More than allowing the interchange of agonist division (as if a community were a social experiment), I argue that agonism needs to be conducted towards the moment of the political as argued by Schaap (2006). In these moments, agonist interchange does not suppress conflict but recalibrates the roles of the members and the very meaning of community, establishing an imperfect social interdependence and a new political path to each of them.

2. The Levels of Legitimacy

Legitimacy in a traditional concept (Dryzek, 2005; Buchanan, 2002) is the validation of government and rules. It is responsible for the acceptance of the social order and makes the governed follow the governors. It is like a glue stick that complements any kind of authority and allows the constitution of a community and even society. Without legitimacy, the top-down authority will lose its ground, and constructing a broad social project would be hard if not impossible. In this view, authority and government (including justice) have developed a set of mechanisms to enlarge its legitimacy by hard and soft means, going from punishment in the case of traditional justice, towards rational legality to restrain authority and entail proportionality and the respect of human rights.

However, if we consider the governed and the community as active agents, we need to accept that they also are creators of legitimacy. They are the source of sovereignty and can make their own decisions in different ways (via referenda, voting, deliberation, consensus, etc). In that sense, legitimacy can be fostered from below, in a bottom-up orientation that complements the mentioned top-down authority. Notwithstanding, when the community is the producer and consumer of legitimacy (i.e. taking their own decisions and enabling the political development of individuals), one cannot expect bottom-up legitimacy to be as unitarian and rational as top-down decisions. As a community is not a single actor and is permeated by division and passion, agreement and disagreement are to be explored to understand the best ways to produce legitimacy from below. In adopting this view, community practices can complement legitimacy from above and even challenge it.

Therefore, it is necessary to explore both levels of legitimacy to oversee their limitations and replenish their range and impacts. This part starts exploring the legitimacy stemming from above and finishes with the agonist tension to rethink the community and the orientation of politics. In criminology, this exploration can foster new actions that rethink the traditional authority and the punishment and imprisonment of offenders. Moreover, this text can complement new bottom-up practices as justice has expanded to new fields including reparation and dialogue to create thicker layers of human dignity but also of legitimacy in fragmented communities.

2.1. Legitimacy from Above

Since legitimacy is a means or channel to develop and repair a community (including those actions of restorative justice), it must be interpreted alongside power relations in a certain community, from local members to associations in states and regions. In that sense, a community's sense of justice and the role of institutional justice depends on how these are mobilized by key actors and constitute power. For instance, a community inserted in tradition and rigid mobility would tend to develop vertical schemes of justice and reparation. In that case, top-down policies that seek restorative practices would only amend social cohesion and complement an apparatus of enforcement and punishment. This reminds us that legitimacy can be emanated from top-down institutions and actors that calibrate justice and reparation by traditional policies. Therefore, is essential to revisit what Weber (in Matheson, 1987) called traditional authority, charismatic leadership, and rational legality to understand the legitimacy that stems from the institutional apparatus.

2.1.1. Traditional Authority

In Weber’s ideal typology used to explain social cohesion and the development of community (i.e. national states), authority is an important component to guide policies and implement regulations. Yet, authority is also crucial to give legitimacy and sense to the very outcomes of policies and justice. In that sense, the authority can be transposed with those decisions and core institutions that regulate a certain community or a series of communities in a territory.

The most traditional authority is equivalent to sovereignty from the state (or polis), in the example of the rule of a decision-maker and judge. Throughout history, a small group or person centralized authority expanding its government and property to define the fate of society. The community here is submitted as a patrimonial asset, in which government occurs when the ruler's household expands with the household administration giving rise to governmental offices (Beetham, 2018). All bureaucrats are dependents or favorites of the ruler, appointed by him. Their interactions with the ruler are based on the paternal authority and filial dependence.

As seen, legitimacy here is monolithic and inherited from generation to generation thanks to the desires of the sovereign. It is rare to discover any clear and stable hierarchy and form of legitimacy aside from the traditional authority. Responsibility is centripetal to officials appointed or approved by the ruler's administration, and any sense of community ultimately depends on this scheme of vertical legitimacy. Community is also based on routine, stability, and order. Even nowadays, with the advent of plural democracies in many countries, the traditional authority still attracts many followers in divided societies and polarized arenas. In a previous text (Yauri-Miranda, 2021), we have already explained why authority still exercises fascination even in non-authoritarian people and makes success in different political scenarios in this century.

Naturally, this form of legitimacy is very poor in modern plural societies, and history demonstrated that the path of justice and government is the path of devolving authority to the community in different ways. This is the case of decentralization, as some individuals gain more independence in the form of certain rights (for example, the right to inheritance and marriage without the consent of the rulers, to be judged by independent courts instead of officials of the royal household, etc.). Yet, even when the sharp and vertical authority is less visible, authority can be implicit and more effective through other means such as charism.

2.1.2. Charismatic Leadership

Authority and dominance are not the same. The latter can be exercised without a clear form of rule or sovereignty. For example, in interpersonal relations, in which different virtues are important to establish social ties and develop a sense of community, certain characteristics and personal skills are of crucial importance, especially in informal cultures and personal leadership (Tucker, 2017).

In that sense, a charismatic leader is able to reach other people and convince them to adopt a certain ritual, practice, ideology, or belief. Rather than passive followers, what charism means to the community is that authority is dynamic, flexible, and can be shared among the member of the community.

When politics is understood as a form to create identity, charism works as a stick glue that keeps different actors together. It enables the development of a group, the “we” against the “other”, in a process of commonality and belonging that is reflected by a leader or group. As charism allows identification and belonging, it also mobilizes a form of legitimacy. A shared legitimacy depends on the alignment to a cause or set of values.

Naturally, this type of legitimacy is ephemeral but has a deep penetration on grassroots movements and people that are excluded from traditional arenas. Yet, the charismatic leader is perhaps the most volatile source of authority as there is a belief that the leader concentrates authority and legitimacy on the same figure. Every political leader is a charismatic authority to a certain degree (Laclau, 2008). The deviations and typologies of this form of authority are not our goals. Yet, the excessive charismatic authority must be recognized as the failed attempt to build a connection between the governed and authority, as the single party or leader reflects the attempt to simplify the whole social contract in a single person or organization.

2.1.3. Rational Legality

Rational legality can be seen as the need to routinize and establish universal criteria to implement government and justice since the Industrial Revolution. Legality attains a criterion of reasonability to dictate the actions of the sovereign and allows one to check and balance the previous forms of authority. It is by institutional designs and rational law that the state, and any form of government, commit itself to expand but at the same time refrain from it (Van Manen, 2008).

Legitimacy in this sense comes from wisdom and validation. It is a product of the enlightenment, where traditional authority was defied by the secularized doctrine, and command was understood by convincement rather than divine right or pure dominion. Thus, it also entails validation, since the rule must be understood by all the people, and it must be assimilated by the whole social body (the community) to be enforced (Spencer, 1970).

Legitimacy, then, comes from the general belief in the formal correctness of the rules, and those who enact them are considered a legitimized authority. The institutional designs and norms allow ought to separate private life from the public, enabling a wall to restrain the traditional authority from above. However, the rational rule also entails a form of dominion inserted in the neutralization of social conflict and the sterilization of pure dominion by a set of formal procedures. These procedures have no clear origin and ending (they stem from the “general will” or “the people”), but have clear ways of implementation (codes, norms, law, etc.) to calibrate the social order.

In a post-structuralist view, even the rational and universal law is permeated by power relations, and by power struggle, in which some proclaim the validation of the norms and attain the coherence of the community. That is, this form of legitimacy is not free from cooptation, manipulation, rational flaw, and contingent struggle to redefine the norms every day. Thus, rather than foundational (definitive creation of legitimacy), rational law allows the continuous critique and foundation (ongoing cultivation of legitimacy) by the creation of new rules and by jurisprudence. Justice, in that sense, depends on the best ways to develop a legal apparatus to implement these rules upon a social body. Community, thus, is still assumed as a passive bottom-up agent that oversees the implementation of norms. To change this perspective, justice, as well as democracy theory, contribute to fostering bottom-up dimensions of legitimacy and community.

2.2. Legitimacy from Below

So far, the legitimacy or legitimation concept in this study relates to the ground on which authority needs to build its foundation. At the same time, legitimacy functions as a teleological horizon (point of destination), a continuous mark in the compass that should be addressed by authority decisions or goals in order to avoid the mechanic rule, an empty power, and the un-fulfillment of moral and ethical bases for a public decision. Legitimacy, therefore, is not enhanced automatically by tradition or charism. In that sense, legitimacy corresponds to the authorization, the concession of authority to conduct and act on behalf of the affected parts. In that sense, we explore how the community can boost legitimacy, exploring two key aspects of community practices in justice and politics: rational deliberation and steered conflict (agonism).

2.2.1. Rational Deliberation

If we consider restorative practice in justice, and in community building after serious offenses, as in the case of land loss and colonization, Muldoon (2005) suggests that political reconciliation should be grounded on reciprocity. This principle is associated with deliberative democracy and the Habermasian ideal of intersubjective communication between free and equal persons oriented toward consensus. Through it, different parts of a clash can reach an agreement or review their arguments for the sake of understanding or mutual reciprocity.

Some deliberative theorists like Habermas (1984) argue that the destination of deliberation is consensus. Only through the exposition of diverse ideas, and the defense of the best arguments rooted in rationalism, intersubjectivity, and openness, it is possible to solve tensions and reach a general will; the major legitimacy given by a plural community to a decision or any form of authority.

On the other hand, theorists like Dryzek (2005) argue that deliberation serves to reach a bigger community. That is, fragmented groups and partisans can deliberate to possibly be convinced about an issue, or to produce a bigger perspective that can lay the ground for a moral community based on a moral of openness and collective commitment. Thus, deliberation's ultimate product is not necessarily consensus but the possibility to produce a new and bigger sense of community that is never unified or harmonic, especially in divided and polarized societies. This vision avoids overlooking the margins and polarized quarrels sides that could be also introduced in the debate.

For example, in the latter sense, Gutmann and Thompson (2004) argue that a virtue of deliberative democracy is that it does not stake the possibility of reconciliation on citizens learning to love their political adversaries through a politics of remorse and forgiveness. Rather, citizens are required only to respect each other, that is, to recognize others as fellow citizens and be “willing to treat them as such as long as they demonstrate a willingness to reciprocate” (p. 37).

Yet, as Dryzek (2005) recognizes, “mutual acceptance of reasonableness is exactly what is lacking in divided societies” (p. 220). In stipulating a commitment to reciprocity as a precondition for deliberation, Gutmann and Thompson presuppose precisely what reconciliatory politics aims to bring about. Rather than universal consensus, it is the possibility of consensus that defines the importance of deliberation.

In restorative justice, some authors (McCold & Wachtel, 2012: Vaandering, 2010) have worked with deliberative circles to process offense, integrate offenders in the community, or reach an “agreement” (ask forgiveness, the promise of not repeating the offense, the re-establishment of social ties, etc.) in different scenarios. These practices are examples in which legitimacy is forged through deliberation (the clash between antagonist stories, or between offenders and victims) to reach a “possible” consensus that is yet to come. Legitimacy, then, is an output that could be enabled by the own community in a process of seeking justice.

However, those approaches are not free of problems. In scenarios of sharp antagonism, it is difficult to think that deep cleavages can be processed or that excluded voices can be listened in the deliberation. Since classic deliberation requires rational content and form to reach the other parts, not all actors are entitled to participate or to present their arguments in a deliberative process.

Besides, the universal consensus is a problem in post-dictatorial scenarios, or after a violent offense. That is, when huge power asymmetries and distant cognitive representations collide in the deliberation process, it is difficult to reach a common ground not only for discourse but also for the re-reestablishment of the community as supported by some deliberative theorists. Thus, the problem is not only processual but also teleological. What do we mean or what do we want to reach through a reconciliation process or restorative justice through deliberative practices? Agonism can help to answer those questions.

2.2.2. Agonist Tension

To offer an answer, agonist theory comes to suggest a second principle: contingent openness between rivals. Agonistic democracy theory is associated with the kind of ‘visceral engagement with difference’ through the interminable play of politics that is advocated by Connolly (2013).

Agonists are committed to Nietzsche’s ‘spiritualization of enmity’ through the democratic process, rather than the transcendence of conflict (Wenman, 2014: 40), perceiving contest as something to be celebrated. Wenman (2014: 28) identifies an ‘agonistic matrix’ comprising a commitment to radical pluralism (where diversity of values is constitutive, rather than requiring resolution); a belief in a ‘tragic’ view of the world (derived from Greek antiquity, where conflicts are intrinsic to the fabric of life, not something to be transcended); and a conviction that conflict can be productive.

That is, contestation is not only perceived by agonists as important to political identification, it is essential to the creation of identity. According to agonists, it is through collective contestation that citizens gain autonomy (Mouffe, 2013). In this view, a commitment to reciprocity cannot be a pre-condition for initiating a politics of reconciliation or else reconciliation would never get off the ground.

For what is at stake in the kinds of political conflict that reconciliation seeks to bring to a close is not simply a matter of conflicting personal preferences but conflicting identities that have been constituted through violent political conflict. Deliberation, hence, does not offer a definitive solution to past conflicts or violence. It enables an arena in which distant preferences can collide as much as interpersonal communication and the possibility of conversion is open.

Different from classical deliberation, agonism approaches contingent deliberation through contestation, contingency, and interdependence. Contestation allows the inclusion of diverse voices and allows to move politics from a harmonic center toward polarized sides of the quarrel that defy the democratic game (a serious issue after the rise of polarized parties, ultranationalist movements, the extreme right, and the revival of polarization from local to globalized arenas).

Contingency means that all agreements and consensus are provisional. Thus, rather than a universal agreement and permanent consensus, agonism highlights the provisional nature of democracy (a constant and dynamic tension) that is delicate (and, thus, should be enacted and preserved). Interdependence promotes the non-definitive characteristic of social actors, a non-fixed ontology of beings, that can always be updated. For those reasons, agonism is a continuous experiment, a constant settling of preferences rather than a settled and finished process (Hirsch, 2013; Lowndes and Paxton, 2018).

The agonist community is able to quarrel for the sake of a community that is yet to come, rather than being committed to reaching a permanent sense of identity and belonging. It enables the communication of distant points of view, and the contestation of consensus and democracy from within (rather than from outside and endangering democracy itself).

In restorative justice, agonism approaches have been used to collect the power of testimonies to retell history and create collective memories (in plural) (Murphy & Walsh, 2022). Through dialogue and confrontation, it has been valued as a means to reach restitution for victims and manage despair through the power of testimony (Chakravarti, 2013). Nevertheless, critiques of agonism express that this must be applied as a principle and not as a panacea.

It is difficult to promote the encounter between clashing members of a community, or between offenders and victims, after serious offenses and deep division, like after school shootings victims (see epilogue), sexual abuse, citizen insecurity, and even racial violence. What are the conditions that enable distant positions can interact rather than promote a new battle that would turn the colliding groups even more entrenched in their beliefs and more distant in their actions? Agonism without responsibility can endanger a reparation process and expose the victims to retelling their suffering or forcing them to ignore peace with their offenders for the sake of a new community. In violent transitions, these issues have been already considered critical to institutionalize agonism and create arenas for controlled conflict (Bull, Hansen, & Colom-González, 2021).

Yet, it is known that agonism principles are crucial to expand a notion of legitimacy that is always under construction from below. Since power is bargained and is present in a constant tension between the members of a community (or between distinct communities), the legitimacy’s range increases as far as diverse voices have the opportunity to express their visions and beliefs in a dialogic arena. Besides, only by contingent and interdependent political actors, we can expect to perfect the very base of democracy and so of every restorative practice.

Justice from below does not mean implementing mechanisms of citizen participation, nor simply contesting the traditional authority or the rational legality of previous justice practices. It consists of bringing dispersing views of justice, especially those excluded from traditional policies, and expanding the legitimacy of a community. It is by an ongoing ethos rooted in the “other” that we can construct decision-making based on common interdependence. A deeper sense of justice, then, is not a rigid set of norms that resist time, but an ephemeral exercise that enables a re-foundation of a community that is never finished, never solved, and always growing towards its members.

3. Conclusion

The agonistic moment of reconciliation needs to be affirmed since the existential encounter with a difference has the power to jolt us out of political complacency and to challenge received understandings. We expressed that agonism can be the highest point of a community in terms of legitimacy, as bottom-up practices have more deontological and substantive legitimacy points than top-down policies.

Yet, bottom-up practices, attached to restorative justice, still represent a few practices compared to top-down politics. This leads us to question whether traditional justice can be agonized. Even more, it makes us question whether agonism can be designed in institutions and fostered at different times to resist a contingent experiment within a community (Lowndes & Paxton, 2018).

As social effervescence and bottom-up practices are not lineal or continuous, agonism still needs to propose a teleological horizon, a situation in which the community can be settled beyond an ever-going project. Schaap (2006) supports that agonism can be complemented by the moment of the political, as expressed by Hannah Arendt.

For Arendt, the political moment happens when the political is remembered and recreated (in Honig, 2013). Against Schmitt’s realism that marks a clash between enemies, or between “us” and “them”, this moment is the precarious yet exceptional (contingent) transcendence of the conflict. But this transcendence is not taken towards a utopia or a distant horizon, it is taken to the own community that can be aware of their differences and composition.

Beyond the Rortian ironic liberal or the contemporary demand to tolerate the “other”, this strangeness is not to be only recognized but also re-interpreted. The strangeness and awkwardness allow participants to draw their energy from the aspiration towards a community that is ‘not yet’. A politics of agonism can be complemented with punctual moments of reconciliation. This does mean that conflict and clash cease to exist. Rather, conflict allows a base for the re-foundation of the community. It is a cathartic political moment in which, if we do not share the same view, at least this will enable us to produce new meanings for the community.

Yet, those moments of the political need to be introduced in agonism disputes to shrink oppression and increase an imperfect social interdependence (based on inclusion and salutary contestation). It is only by the continuous alteration between agonism and those moments for the political that we can imagine social change and deep democratization of justice and politics. As expressed by Christodoulidis (2000: 198), reconciliation is ‘not yet’; and this ‘not-yet’ is a risk brought into the present to become constitutive of the experience of the present. As such, it is to be celebrated. Because this ‘not yet’, this tending into the future, imports an awareness that keeps community both attuned to the aspiration of being-in-common and aware of its vulnerability; it thus taps the source of its being, to the extent that community must be conceived as dynamic, as always in the process of becoming.

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Text publicated as: “I will never understand you”: insights from agonist theory and social legitimacy for developing and repairing a community. June 2023, In book: REPENSAR LA JUSTICIA RESTAURATIVA DESDE LA DIVERSIDAD. Claves para su desarrollo práctica e investigación teórica y aplicada. Publisher: Tirant lo Blanch.