Justice Beyond Resolution: Intergenerational Listening and Dialogical Justice in Peacebuilding.

This article argues that justice-oriented practices in peacebuilding cannot be adequately understood as finite events aimed at closure, but must be evaluated as ongoing, relational, and intergenerational processes. Drawing on a Nilotic proverb and John Paul Lederach’s notion of the ‘moral imagination’, it advances intergenerational listening as an ethical practice through which peacebuilding remains answerable to inherited harm, silenced histories, and future obligations. The article critically examines dominant transitional and restorative justice frameworks, arguing how their temporal and structural narrowing – especially their privileging of testimony, confession, and symbolic repair within bounded timelines – risks domesticating trauma and reproducing inequality. In dialogue with Derrida’s concept of justice à venir, Levinas’s ethics of infinite responsibility, care ethics (Gilligan; Noddings), Iris Marion Young’s account of structural responsibility, and Indigenous relational epistemologies (including Māori whakapapa and Anishinaabe mino bimaadiziwin), the article develops a relational ethical framework centred on attentiveness, humility, vulnerability, reciprocity, continuity, materiality, and pluralism. Within this framework, dialogical justice is not proposed as a comprehensive theory of justice, but as a normative-ethical orientation for evaluating peacebuilding practices according to their capacity for sustained, accountable listening across time, including attentiveness to silence and absence, with brief implications for more-than-human relations. Methodologically, the article explores how this orientation can be operationalised through narrative inquiry, intergenerational testimony, and dialogical pedagogy, informed by the HURIER listening model. Two case studies – South Africa’s unfinished reconciliation, and linguistic harm and repair in Wales following the Welsh Not – illustrate both the promise and the fragility of intergenerational listening, including risks of co-option and potential retraumatisation in dialogical settings. The article concludes by suggesting that peacebuilding requires a shift from resolution to relationship: a democracy of listening across time which binds recognition to material transformation and sustains justice as always ‘to come’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]