A representação dos atores sociais em um manual de iniciação em justiça restaurativa: a emergência de um novo paradigma

Abstract

As a new paradigm, restorative justice underlies a culture of peace, offering alternative means for a conflict resolution which can be applied not only on the legal field, but also on the fields of community, education and family. Taking this into account, in this study we sought to answer the following question: in the Brazilian context, how are the social actors represented linguistically in a didactic manual meant for the formation of social agents able to coordinate restorative justice practices? The main purpose of this work is to analyze the forms of representation of the social actors expressed in a manual of restorative justice. Thus, we based our corpus study on the manual Initiation in Restorative Justice: subsidies of restorative practices for conflict transformation (2006), which was used in the design activities of the Gaucho Project Justice for the 21st Century. Through the theories of discourse genres, we selected for the linguistic analysis the statements from the manual that belong to a guideline aimed to help the implementation of Restorative Procedures. Based on Bakhtinian assumptions, we analyzed the linguistic forms inserted in a specific socio-historical context. We conducted a socio-historical analysis of the most immediate and wider context which involve the production of the manual, and analyzed the forms of representation of the social actors based on the categories developed by van Leeuwen (1997). In this study, we verified that the linguistic choices produced in a certain context reflect a dialogic tension between distinctive realities. The analysis showed that the representations of the social actors indicate a reality constructed according to the ideals of the restorative paradigm. However, certain representations move away from these ideals. From our point of view, the language reveals that restorative justice during this initial stage of implementation has been promoting dialogue with other world visions as an attempt to establish itself as a paradigm.