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This event celebrates the 50th anniversary of the CCR. The CCR was established in September 1975, with its inaugural lecture by Nils Christie on ‘Conflict as Property’ taking place in March 1976. The proposed anniversary event will not only commemorate this lecture but also celebrate that it took place at the ����TV as part of the establishment of the CCR. It is therefore an opportune moment to look back at the Centre’s history and the role played in it by the ‘Conflicts as Property’ lecture and to consider the CCR’s place on the national and international stage of criminological research for the last 50 years.

Taking place at 10am-6 pm on 3 June 2026, the title of the anniversary event is ‘Nils Christie’s ‘Conflicts as Property’: then and now’. It will include a discussion of the Centre’s 50 year history and some of the interdisciplinary implications and strands of criminological research driven by the ‘Conflicts as Property’ lecture.

In-person places are limited and available on a first come, first served basis. Online places are unlimited in number.

If you would like to attend either online or in-person, please sign up .

Programme 

10-10.30 - Registration and tea/coffee

10.30-10.45: Welcome - Professor Layla Skinns (Director of the CCR)

10.45-11.45:  Panel 1 -  Situating ‘Conflicts as property’ - Professor Antony Pemberton (KU Leuven, NSCR, Amsterdam) 

Discussant: Dr Luiz Dal Santo (����TV). 

Chair: Professor Layla Skinns (����TV)

11.45 -12.45pm: Panel 2 -  ‘Conflicts as property’ and participatory justice - Professor Albert Dzur (Bowling Green State University). 

Discussant: Professor Chris Bennett (����TV). 

Chair: Dr Luiz Dal Santo (����TV)

12.45pm - 1.30pm - Lunch

1.30-2.30pm: Panel 3 -  ‘Conflicts as property’ and restorative justice - Professor Joanna Shapland and Dr Diana Batchelor (����TV). 

Discussant: Professor Jonathan Doak (Nottingham Trent University). 

Chair: Professor Chris Bennett (����TV

2.30-3.30pm: Panel 4 - ‘Conflicts as property’ and abolitionism - Professor Alan Norrie (University of Warwick). 

Discussant: Dr SJ Cooper-Knock (����TV). 

Chair: Dr Luiz Dal Santo (����TV)

3.30-4pm - Tea/coffee break

4-5pm: Panel 5 - Roundtable on the history of the CCR - Video address by Professor Tony Bottoms (University of Cambridge), and in-person discussion with Professors Chris Bennett, Joanna Shapland and Layla Skinns (����TV) and Professor Paul Wiles. 

Chair: Professor Parveen Ali (����TV)

5-5.15pm Closing remarks  - Professor Layla Skinns (Director of the CCR)

5.15-6pm - Drinks reception

Titles, abstracts and speaker biographies

Session 1 Speaker: Professor Anthony Pemberton

Title: The right intuitions, the wrong execution? Situating Conflicts as Property then and now

Abstract

Conflicts as Property is rightly one of the most revered papers in criminology and can lay claim to having kickstarted the restorative justice movement. Yet in Words on Words (2013), Christie himself emerged as one of RJ's sharpest critics, diagnosing aspirations so vague they could make RJ a handmaiden for criminal justice rather than a critique of it.

This paper asks whether Christie's iconoclastic approach is partially at fault. It identifies four enduring intuitions — that crime is above all something that happens to those directly implicated; that our legal order's understanding of crime should not be taken as given; that the epistemic perspective of those affected is key to understanding victimization by crime; and that society obfuscates the realities of experiences of wrongdoing — and argues that each is accompanied by a corresponding error marring RJ to this day. Christie misunderstands the personal and the political as mutually exclusive rather than internally related; obscures the moral core of wrongdoing by renaming it "conflict"; confuses the epistemic nature of suffering wrongdoing with learning; and overlooks that the most effective obfuscation is denying that anything wrong has happened.

The paper argues that engagement with contemporaries of Christie — Arendt, Brownmiller, Shklar — could have countered these errors, while their contemporary heirs — Fricker, Oliver, Cavarero — offer resources RJ scholarship has yet to draw upon.

Biography

Prof. dr. Antony Pemberton is professor of criminology at the Leuven Institute of Criminology, KU Leuven, Belgium and Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has a background in political theory and criminal justice. His main research interests concern victimology, narrative criminology and restorative justice. In 2025 he was awarded a five-year NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) VICI grant for project WOVEN (A narrative world of victimization) to undertake a full scale examination of the role of narrative in the relationship of victims and justice processes.

Session 2 Speaker: Professor Albert W. Dzur

Title: “Critical constructivism, institutional innovation, and citizen capacity building: Nils Christie’s participatory justice”

Abstract

Nils Christie’s thinking about participatory forms of justice has had an outsized impact on the restorative justice movement, for reasons that have yet to be appreciated in democratic theory. This paper explores Christies’ highly grounded and agency-rich theory, with its careful attention to social situatedness and the ways words and stories can connect lived experiences, rather than forge patterns of status distinction. In shielding his subjects—those who lived simpler lives, the cast-offs, and the penalized—from harmful labels and patronizing analyses, he encouraged the creation of institutions more receptive to differences. Though always critical of institutions, Christie helped shape a national mediation network that could resist chronic tendencies that reified “crimes” and “criminals” and, instead, held potential for citizen capacity building and social reflection about harms and conflicts. Christie’s critical constructivism has something to offer our contemporary moment, marked by a striking degree of anti-institutionalism across the ideological spectrum. The challenge his work presents is to hew close to a critical awareness and suspicion of the ways institutions exclude, disempower, neglect, and ignore, while constructing new forms that protect, empower, care, and learn.

Biography

Albert W. Dzur is a democratic theorist interested in citizen participation and power-sharing in criminal justice, public administration, and education. Recent books include Democracy in Action: Collective Problem Solving in Citizens’ Governance Spaces, co-authored with Carolyn M. Hendriks (Oxford, 2025), and Democracy Inside: Participatory Innovation in Unlikely Places (Oxford, 2019).  His interviews with innovative professionals appear in Boston Review, The Good Society, International Journal of Restorative Justice, where he is an associate editor, and National Civic Review, where he is a contributing editor. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, and Democratic Theory. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at Bowling Green State University.

Session 3 Speakers: Professor Joanna Shapland and Dr Diana Batchelor

Title: Nils Christie and restorative justice – ‘Conflicts as property’ and its implications

Abstract

‘Conflicts as property’ was one of the foundation texts for restorative justice, with Nils Christie advocating that criminal justice was taking away conflicts from individuals and communities, rather than enabling them to deal with conflicts. As restorative justice has grown, Christie has though warned of dangers of over-professionalisation and co-option by criminal justice personnel and ideas, which limit creativity and standardise processes. The paper examines these claims, and how current criminal justice and restorative justice fit with people’s ideas of justice from recent research.  What are the advantages and dangers of a more professionalised justice?  Does it necessarily imply tensions between state power and individualised searches for solutions?  How can participants’ agency and wishes for justice fit with desires for procedural justice and limiting harmful outcomes?  These are complicated questions – and it is often much easier for states and criminal justice personnel to draw up top-down rules than to allow a more reparative and restorative justice process. The paper explores how we might strive towards fulfilling all these values

Biographies

Professor Joanna Shapland is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Law at the ����TV, UK.  She has researched in the fields of victimology, restorative justice and desistance, including directing the evaluation of restorative justice in three areas of England and, as an action research project, in three police forces.  She is Executive Editor of the International Review of Victimology and Chair of the Restorative Justice Forum (Scotland) and has previously advised the Ministry of Justice in England &Wales and the Scottish Government, as well as the Council of Europe.  

Dr Diana Batchelor is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in criminology at the ����TV, UK, with training in experimental and forensic psychology. Her current research explores victim-survivors’ understanding of the causes of crime, and how these attributions affect their visions of justice and their wellbeing. Diana has previously conducted longitudinal research with victim-survivors who choose to communicate with the offender as part of restorative justice processes. She has worked in criminal justice in the UK, South Africa, Lebanon and Indonesia, in roles ranging from frontline support work to evaluation, research, and policy development. Her practical experience inspires her to design academic research with real-world impact.

Session 4 Speaker: Professor Alan Norrie

Title: Nils Christie’s ‘Conflicts as property’ and its implications for abolitionism

Abstract

In ‘Conflicts as property’, the human experience of conflict and need for victims and perpetrators to engage directly with events conforms with abolitionist intuitions, though its practical proposals are not entirely abolitionist.

It is however not clear what abolitionism entails given its eclectic nature. Coyle and Scott suggest it is marked by a turn away from retributive concepts of accountability and a development of restorative approaches towards a transformative justice integrating accountability and restoration with broader accounts of social justice. Lacking here is a core theory of what underpins abolitionism and informs this journey.

Such a theory can be developed from a moral philosophy/ psychology based on addressing the violation of victims by perpetrators in communities (Norrie, Rethinking Criminal Justice, 2025). Starting from a ‘mature’ retributivism, this upholds the asymmetrical relation between victims and perpetrators but rejects punitive (‘vindictive’) responses to violation based on early reactive anger. Moral (‘vindicative’) condemnation should be linked to the need for individual and social (‘validative’) healing and change (the ‘three vs’). Accountability involves individuals and communities ‘finding’ and ‘taking’ responsibility for violative actions, and support for victims to grieve, mourn and address loss.

The theory provides a real utopian basis for moving beyond punishment but identifies models for action under modern social conditions. An outstanding example is the Barlinnie Special Unit (1973-1994), but an abolitionist approach is rooted in everyday human experience of dealing well with conflicts, as Christie saw. His essay is an early prototype for developing such models.

Biography

Alan Norrie is Professor of Law and former Head of Warwick Law School. He has held chairs at King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London. He is Fellow of the British Academy and present Chair of its Law section, and past President of the International Association for Critical Realism.

His present work stems from a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship resulting in Rethinking Criminal Justice: Punishment, Abolition and Moral Psychology (2026). He has published three editions of Crime, Reason and History (2014). Other books include Law and the Beautiful Soul (2005), Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice (2010) and Justice and the Slaughter Bench: Essays on Law's Broken Dialectic (2017). Law and the Beautiful Soul won the Hart/SLSA Book Prize. Dialectic and Difference won the Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize. 

Biographies for discussants and chairs

Professor Parveen Ali is Professor of Nursing and Gender Based Violence at the ����TV and Editor in Chief of the International Nursing Review. Her research focuses on domestic abuse, gender based violence, and inequalities in health, with a strong emphasis on improving professional responses and culturally competent care. She has an international profile and has published extensively in these fields, contributing to research, policy, practice, and education. Professor Ali works across disciplinary and sector boundaries to address complex issues affecting women, children, and marginalised communities. She is also actively involved in developing research capacity among nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals, and is committed to mentorship, leadership, and public engagement in support of meaningful social change. 

Professor Chris Bennett is a Professor in Philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the ����TV. He has written widely about philosophical issues in criminal justice, including The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, articles in journals such as Criminal Law and Philosophy, Legal Theory, the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice and Punishment and Society, as well as chapters in numerous edited collections. His interests range from foundational questions about retribution, to sentencing policy, to the value of public participation in criminal justice, to the nature of apology and forgiveness

Professor Anthony E. Bottoms was in 1968 appointed as the ����TV’s first Lecturer in Criminology; then later, in 1975, he became the first Director of the newly-created Centre for Criminological Studies. As Director, he offered the Vote of Thanks to Professor Nils Christie following his Foundation Lecture at the formal opening of the Centre. In 1984, AEB left Sheffield to become Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, but he returned to Sheffield from 2002-07 as a part-time Professorial Fellow, in order to conduct (with Joanna Shapland) the Sheffield Desistance Study. In 2009, Sheffield University honoured him by awarding him the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws – the same degree that it had granted to Nils Christie in 1976.

SJ Cooper-Knock (they/them) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and the School of Sociological Studies, Politics, and International Relations. Their work explores questions of statehood, solidarity, and justice in cities within South Africa and the UK. Their research covers a diverse range of topics, including everyday policing, magistrates' courts, energy, housing, and queer rights. 

Dr Luiz Dal Santo is a Lecturer in Criminology at the ����TV, where he also serves as Assistant Director of the Centre for Criminological Research. He holds a DPhil in Criminology from the University of Oxford and an MA in Critical Criminology from the Universities of Bologna and Padova.  His main research interests are the sociology of punishment and global criminology. He has published one monograph (A Punição no Brasil), edited a special issue (Punishment in Global Peripheries) and three books ( Southernising Criminology ; Punishment in Latin America; and Mapeando o Encarceramento no Brasil), and authored several articles on punishment, penal policy, prisons, police killings, racism and criminal justice, and Southern Criminology. Luiz is also co-founding organiser of the annual international conference Punishment in Global Peripheries, whose sixth edition will take place in Kazakhstan this year, following previous editions held online, in the UK, India, Argentina, and South Africa.

Professor Jonathan Doak is a leading scholar in criminal procedure, victims’ rights, and restorative justice. His research has significantly shaped understanding of victim participation, procedural fairness, and the treatment of vulnerable and intimidated witnesses in the legal process. His publications span monographs, including his recent monograph Cross-Examination on Trial (Doak et al, 2025) articles, and influential commentary on the need for a more inclusionary and trauma-informed approach to criminal procedure. Professor Doak also serves as National Chair of The Advocacy Gateway (TAG), supporting the development of advocacy standards and professional training. His work is defined by a sustained commitment to improving justice experiences for victims and vulnerable users of the criminal justice system.

Professor Layla Skinns is a Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and, since 2022, the Director of the Centre for Criminological Research, in the School of Law at the ����TV. She is also the Interim Academic Co-Lead of the N8 Policing Research Partnership (2025-26). Her research focuses on the use and misuse of police powers, particularly in police detention, in England and Wales and other Anglophone jurisdictions. For nearly 20 years, she has led large police custody research projects, including the ESRC-funded 'good' police custody study, which impacted on policy and practice, and led to a successful Impact Case Study for REF2021. She also conducts research on discriminatory forms of police misconduct.  She has published widely in the fields of policing and criminal justice, including a prize-winning article on the use of appreciative inquiry in police research in Policing and Society in 2021.

Professor Paul Wiles Whilst at Sheffield, he was Director of the (then) Centre for Criminological and Socio-Legal Studies and Dean of the (then) Faculty of Law.  1999-2010 Chief Scientific Advisor, Home Office and Chief Social Researcher to the Governments of the UK. Later held a number of public, private sector and charitable roles, relevantly including Analytic Advisor to the Sentencing Council, Trustee and Board Member of the National Centre for Social Research and the Scottish Centre of Social Research, UK Commissioner for the Retention and Use of Biometrics Material, President European Society of Criminology, Deputy Chair of HEFCE’s Research Excellence Framework Main Panel C, Chaired Review for Research Councils UK, of the Cross-Council New Challenges Research Programme and a Review of criminological research provision in Scotland for the Government of Scotland.