Justice and Fairness for Peace

Building and maintaining peace across various levels requires engaging with ideas about justice and fairness. Drawing on Johan Galtung’s tripartite conceptualization of peace, the construct of justice/fairness plays a key role in ending cycles of direct violence, as well as undoing structural and cultural violence. These connections are rooted in individual and group psychologies reflecting how justice and fairness are understood and experienced. In turn, these cognitive lenses are given meaning through the ways we learn, are socialized, and actively build understandings as children and youth. In this chapter, we discuss justice and fairness as character strengths linked to peace by exploring the lessons and insights offered by moral development. We also specifically discuss school-based restorative justice as a framework that aligns with this developmental lens. Specifically, it can offer young people opportunities to engage in meaning making: actively building nuanced and prosocial bases for justice and fairness that feed into broader positive peace in communities and societies. The chapter ends with a summary of the intersections between character strengths, peace, justice, fairness, development, and education.