Dominic Barter is the creator of Restorative Circles. When I thought about how to introduce him, I wanted to say he is a teacher of dialogue. But he said, “I’m a student of dialogue.”
Gerald Häfner: Welcome, Dominic. What does it mean to be a student of dialogue?
Dominic Barter: Thank you, Gerald. It means I’m engaged in an adventure of exploration, questioning, and inquiry that has no end. I like Martin Buber’s definition of dialogue so much: a conversation between equals where the ending is unknown. It’s that unknown quality which I find so stimulating—the suggestion that there is always something emerging at the margins of our personal life, our relational life, and our social life that doesn’t yet have a name or a definition. That’s the new that I’m looking for and looking to engage with and learn from.
How did this become your life’s work?
DB: Not so much out of conscious choice but from observing the consequences of the absence of dialogue. Living in Rio de Janeiro, in a country like Brazil, which suffers from the normalization of war as daily life, we regularly see that the absence of dialogue is fatal. First, it kills understanding between people, then it kills the relationship between people. And if nothing is done, then it kills people. We also observe that in our inner life, in the way we stop listening to voices, desires, feelings, and dreams of our own, and in the way we treat other fellow human beings and other species. Without dialogue, the possibility of living together starts to shrink and disappear.
How did this begin for you?
DB: I was born in the north of England. When I was three years old, I told my Mom, “When I grow up, let’s travel around the world and tell people to stop fighting.” I was very intrigued by the agreements that made it possible for us to be together—I wanted to know them, question them, and co-create them. School was very frustrating for me because it didn’t allow me to do that, and I was expelled. At the end of my teenage years, I fell in love with a Brazilian. Then she went back to Rio. So, I landed in this beautiful and amazing city. The forest, the beach, everything is incredible. But there is also extraordinary division—Rio is a divided city. You have apartheid in a very fundamental way, baked into society, and terrible pain and distance between people. This was a huge shock and a challenge. If you’re going to live here, you need to engage with this; you can’t just be a tourist. So with no grounding and no understanding of what I was doing, I knew I needed to do something. A fundamental truth about research is that it begins with “I don’t know.”
I talked to people about what to do. They told me how dangerous it was to try. Then I read an interview with Gandhi where the journalist asked, “What is the opposite of non-violence?” Gandhi answered that the opposite of nonviolence is submission to fear. I was submitting to fear, and it put me in total contradiction with what I said I wanted to do with my life. Through the crisis of that realization, it occurred to me that distancing ourselves from conflict actually makes violence more likely. The further I go away from the other, the louder they have to speak and the more they shout, and eventually they’re going to have to violate me to call my attention to the fact that my choices impact them and their choices impact me. So I started to consider, as a hypothesis, that we put ourselves in danger when we back away from conflict, and we would be safer if we moved closer. My way of doing that was simply to take the bus to the end of the line and see the people whom I was not meeting.
Ich sprach mit Menschen darüber, etwas zu unternehmen. Sie sagten mir, das sei gefährlich. Dann las ich ein Interview mit Gandhi, in dem der Journalist ihn fragte, was das Gegenteil von Gewaltlosigkeit sei. Er antwortete, das Gegenteil von Gewaltlosigkeit sei die Unterwerfung unter die Angst. Also unterwarf ich mich der Angst. Das stand in völligem Widerspruch zu dem, was ich mit meinem Leben erreichen wollte. Schließlich kam mir durch diese Krise der Gedanke, dass es gerade diese Distanzierung von Konflikten ist, die Gewalt wahrscheinlicher macht. Je weiter ich mich von den anderen entferne, desto lauter müssen sie sprechen und desto mehr müssen sie schreien, und schließlich müssen sie mich verletzen, um mich darauf aufmerksam zu machen, dass meine Entscheidungen sie beeinflussen und ihre Entscheidungen mich beeinflussen. So begann ich zu begreifen, dass wir uns vielleicht, als Hypothese, tatsächlich in Gefahr begeben, wenn wir uns von Konflikten zurückziehen, und dass wir sicherer wären, wenn wir uns annähern würden. Meine Art, dies zu tun, bestand einfach darin, mit dem Bus bis zur Endstation zu fahren, mit dem Zug bis zur letzten Haltestelle zu fahren und jene Menschen zu sehen, denen ich sonst nicht begegnen würde.
I started walking into the favelas. But most people there are busy, getting on with their normal lives. So I started hanging out with a group of kids who were just sitting on the curb. They had time and curiosity. I began to see that there were certain elements that create a connection and certain elements that weaken that connection. One of the connecting elements was to celebrate together. Another was to admit when there is pain together and not back away from it. Questions arose, like “How do you stay connected to people when there is conflict?” And it was improvising solutions that led to the development of the first dialogical social system that I’ve been involved in: Restorative Circles.
How does Restorative Circles work?
DB: It’s an ongoing question for me. We go back to it every time, with every new group of people, whether it’s a formal justice system, a neighborhood, a school, a business, a trade union, a church, or a family. Every time we engage with a new community, we go back to that original question. What do you observe? What works well when conflict is happening? What is trying to emerge at the margins, the periphery of your social life, which will give you the clues? Then we try to strengthen that so that each restorative system develops uniquely based on the endogenous intelligence of those particular people. That’s the unique thing nonviolence does: it doesn’t give answers; it invites us to find them together. How do these people in the favelas survive so much adversity? They must know something really incredible. So rather than teach, we listen. We support, through our observation, the increasing self-awareness of these people in understanding what they already know, so that it gets stronger. There is no recipe or fixed methodology for a restorative system. It is a discovery of the innate understanding of those people about the subject that none of us talk about, but all of us know very well. All our agreements become outdated and need refreshing. We understand conflict as simply feedback, saying that within this system, your agreements need updating. A restorative system is nothing more than a way of doing that which is aligned with the group’s collective values.
What kind of conflicts do you work on in these circles?
DB: My colleagues and I have done projects based on derivations of this in over 50 countries—rural conflicts between nomadic people in the north of Senegal and villages, a family court in South Korea, high court judges in a European country, and conflict in a school in Brazil. It’s remarkable how uniquely each of these processes develops. And yet there are certain dynamics that are absolutely the same. People all over the world understand that even though a restorative practice happens within the field of communication, communication is a mystery. It’s about the meaning that words and language indicate, and to co-create meaning is a very delicate and perhaps always incomplete process. Is it still possible to make meaning together? Going into a restorative practice, all you can honestly say is: I don’t know what’s going to happen.
What could be the outcome?
DB: We discover good reasons why bad things happened. There can be a renewed sense of seeing the humanity of the other behind the pain. I remember one of the first Circles we did within the formal justice system in Brazil. After nine years of working in the favelas, the Ministry of Justice had knocked on our door saying, “We need this in the courts, in the prisons, in the police, in schools, and in social services.” So we tried to develop the same thing that worked on a community level within these institutions.
One of the first attempts was in a court case. We interviewed the young defendant afterwards, and he said, “The main change for me is that the monster has gone. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could still see that man entering the bar, pointing the gun at me, and his nervousness as he did so. The moment I gave him the money, he put the gun on the table to take it. For a second, I thought the monster was going to be me, because I could have taken the gun now and shot him.” This young man’s trauma was the monster of the other and the shadow of the potential monster in himself. At the Restorative Circle, he met the human being, not a monster anymore. What comes out of the process is an understanding of empathy, which is not based on feelings but on the liberation of creative action. The young man, who worked in the bar, said to the other, “I want you to come back three times over the next six months. Just come into the bar, order a drink, sit there, have your drink, and leave. That’s what I need to normalize your face.” We measure these actions to see if they’re effective in what we call the “post-Circle” that provided the healing and the change.
I’m thinking of a case where one student took another student’s pencil case at school, and the student who lost the pencil case initiated a restorative response. We were in the Circle, and the student said, “The pencil case was the last thing that my parents gave me before they died. It’s not a pencil case. It’s my relationship with them. What you took is my connection to them.” A list of laws gets us so far, but it can’t understand the meaning of the actions, only the actions themselves. This is the case with many of the conflicts that most hurt us.
Are there limitations of Restorative Circles, for example, in the legal situation?
DB: There’s definitely a tension between a restorative response and a legal response. That is another creative edge that we’re at. Many people are researching, thinking, writing, and experimenting with these edges. The mainstream restorative justice movement is trying to make peace with the legal process and use restorative justice as an adjunct to court processes, disciplinary processes, and accountability processes. So there is an area of work that is in harmony with the legal system, but always, on the edges of this, there are restorative responses that question the limits of legal processes themselves. And questioning how these are historically codified within a logic of colonialism, the idea of a king or a queen, or the state as a representative, which, in a hierarchical manner, determines what is acceptable or not. The challenge that restorative justice can respond to now is that a dialogical way of living with others seems to be much more realistic in this particular moment, with all the creative confusion of nationalities mixing together, all the ways in which our voices are becoming an amazing, diverse mix, and how we increasingly understand ourselves by finer and finer distinctions and new names. I think it calls on us to understand justice from a completely new perspective.
Are you saying it could eventually replace courts and jails?
DB: We don’t know how to answer that yet, but it’s definitely interesting enough to justify the research. In most places where I’ve worked, they are parallel systems. But increasingly we get pockets of social systems that already exist, like schools or health or the economy, where people are willing to risk a little bit more to see what would happen, to put aside the recourse to formal punishment and ask “Who am I called to be in relation to you?”—where they understand that dialogue isn’t simply an option anymore, but the foundation of our ability to co-create the world we want to live in.
Are preconditions needed for that?
DB: The willingness to go forward and try. I’m fascinated by people’s availability to test this. I remember a particularly traumatic case: the accidental death of a child during the theft of a car. We went to the family of the young man who was involved in stealing the car and sat down with them for the initial process of listening. And at the end, I asked the father, “Would you like to go ahead?” And he said, “I’d like to go sit down and look into the face of the mother whose child was killed because of the actions of my child. That’s the last thing I want to do, but I will go because my God wants me to go.” That was almost 20 years ago. I still don’t understand what he meant, but every time I tell it I get goosebumps because it obviously meant something profound: his ability to find a way to say something when the language and the culture doesn’t have another way yet.
If you have one side that has nearly no rights, no money, and no capacity, and on the other side, you have very powerful people or the law—how do you deal with that?
DB: It’s a balancing act. We recognize the importance and the huge contribution that the people who work in the formal justice system are making in an attempt to create the conditions for society to function. At the same time, using a mechanism that, for the most marginalized people, is in itself an act of violence and a tool of repression, especially in the context of Brazil, is clearly a colonial structure. So in some way, we are involved in another process of dialogue between social systems. How to free up the clarity that an organized social system offers, and yet invite it to recognize its own limitations and go beyond them? How to create a social system which can host a practice of dialogue, and how does the social system itself become dialogical? This is a political act, not just an act of listening and understanding and facilitation. When we become a clear social system, then suddenly the formal justice system wakes up, the Ministry of Justice knocks on the door, the church knocks, drug gangs knock—as if they can feel that someone has taken self-determination for their lives. It’s very unusual, a bit worrying for some of them, and exciting, but also disturbing and potentially dangerous. That gives the opportunity to learn from each other.
Part of the fundamental shift is to actually give up the desire to resolve conflicts and start to create spaces where conflict can speak, where we allow ourselves to pass through it. When conflict becomes painful or even violent, the expression of that intensity of feeling is an indication that something worthwhile is happening. We never fight with people who we don’t care about. And we never argue about subjects that are not important to us. If there is painful conflict, there is a meaningful relationship. Conflict is healthy feedback within a meaningful relationship that things need to be updated. It’s a blessing on some strange level. That’s not to diminish the terrible pain that people go through, the horrendous damage that we do to each other, the trauma, and the difficulty. It’s not just one individual’s experience; it’s a whole community’s calling to give the support necessary for transformation to occur to that person.
Why do we have so many growing conflicts? Why don’t we just sit together, talk with each other, listen deeply?
DB: Everywhere I go, I find people who already have these questions, but they also have a lot of uncertainty. A lot of people quite reasonably say, “You can’t listen to this person. They are a fascist or a communist. They’re a this, they’re a that. There’s no dialogue with these people. They are violent, dangerous.” And I can’t say “Oh, yes you can—here’s a technique,” because every technique of communication interferes with communication. Every methodological response makes it harder to really hear the human being. It becomes a shield. So where do I get the strength to be vulnerable in front of the other, to allow the risk that the other touches me and changes me in some way? It has to be a cultural shift. There are people everywhere, but they’re on the edge. They want to go, but they’re not quite sure if it’s safe. And as war comes back into our personal lives and the lives between countries, even in Europe, I think that focuses a lot of people’s attention. The absence of dialogue is fatal.
I developed a project in a prison in Italy. It became a restorative system among the prisoners themselves for their own conflicts. They were extraordinarily intelligent in their understanding of what they needed and how it would be structured. They developed the whole thing themselves. A system is healthy and sustainable when it is developed by the people who use it. One of the questions was how to create a space where everybody could speak, but they soon recognized that speech in itself is not enough. They needed a way of checking that the message is received in the spirit in which it was sent. So it’s actually a combination of speaking and listening. You can create a space where people who are normally silenced can speak. But if no one is listening to them, then no change will occur as a result. And they were very, very attentive to this. I was in Ukraine in the weeks before the Russian invasion. We saw exactly the same thing. Mediators and peacemakers were working on what was then the contact line. The ability to speak, to cry out your pain, is incredibly important, but it’s not enough. You need to have a meeting of understanding. This is part of our current challenge.
When we recognize a shared common need that keeps coming up, for example, hunger, we build a social system to take care of it. So we build a kitchen everywhere that human beings live together or work together over time. We question: Is it true that justice is a fundamental, shared human need? Is it true that a lot of the pain we experience is the absence of feeding this need for justice, because we don’t have conflict kitchens, so can we think creatively?
What is your hope? What do you want to be understood from your work, even without a fixed methodological approach?
I hope that we develop a culture that values those people who are willing to go right to the edges of what we know and to do the difficult and dangerous work of seeing if something of value can be taken care of and brought back into the center of what we know. It’s usually a minority in any tradition who are willing to go right back to the source of the questioning, not the conclusions, not the forms, but the original inquiry, the original state of discomfort and not knowing—they are the people who renovate. If someone is willing to do that, do we venerate, strengthen, and feed these people? Or are we simply going to take what they did, reduce it to a model, and sell it to others? That, for me, is absolutely crucial. How do we take care of the origins of this work? In my field of Restorative Circles, it means asking to what extent we remember the painful reality that this comes from the reality of slavery, of the favelas, and of the extraordinary violence that continues to occur in those places. To what extent are we feeding energy, resources, and recognition back to those people and places? Are we willing to celebrate those people who ask uncomfortable questions and remind us of our limitations? I hope we are.
More Restorative Circles
Graphics Ella Lapointe, 2025.
