Nils Christie Conflict As Property Summary

Nils Christie’s article Conflict as property discusses how conflicts have been stolen from the parties involved; victim and offender, by the state. Christie critiques state power and the formal criminal justice system, he believes that the state has too much power and it deprives its citizens of their capacity to resolve conflicts. The state is the barrier to achieving social harmony through restorative practices. Christie’s central argument about modern justice urges the need to eliminate the professionals, mainly lawyers, from the inner workings of conflict resolution in order to prevent the theft of conflicts. To support his claim, Christie presents examples of two non-westernized court systems which he calls “happenings” and “non-happenings” (Christie, 10) . In the “happenings” or Tanzanian court system, the outside forces, such as judges,

The conflict was not stolen from them by outside sources, such as the state, and they worked on the issue at hand together. This type of court system proves that are other ways of conducting trials outside of the westernized models we have become accustomed to that don’t allow “professional thievery” (Christie,11) . In the “non- happenings” or Scandinavian court, Christie states that the courts belong to the administrators of law (Christie, 11) , he maintains this point by adding that in the Supreme Court the directly involved parties often do not even attend their own court cases (Christie, 11) . Christie argues that when we allow the state to meddle with our personal conflicts they become property of lawyers (Christie, 11) . This professional thievery of conflict causes the people directly involved in the case, mainly the victim, to become a “double loser” (Christie, 11) where they are overrepresented and denied rights to full participation (Christie, 11) . In his opinion, lawyers are the biggest culprits of conflict thievery because they have been trained to prevent and solve conflicts which gives