Future Justice Prize

Peace builder John Braithwaite wins Future Justice Prize

25 Sep 2012

Distinguished Professor John Braithwaite has won the 2012 Future Justice Prize for his extraordinary efforts and internationally-renowned work in the fields of justice and peacebuilding.

The Future Justice Prize is awarded to Australian individuals or organisations who demonstrate leadership and initiative in the advancement of future justice, with a focus on the legacy that those living today leave behind for future generations.

Professor Braithwaite, from the Regulatory Institutions Network (RegNet) in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential scholars in the fields of sociology and criminology. In nominating Professor Braithwaite, fellow RegNet professor and ARC Laureate Fellow Hilary Charlesworth highlighted the immense contribution he has made to justice issues.

“Indeed, he is one of the most influential social scientists in the world from any discipline and has been described as a ‘new Durkheim’,” said Professor Charlesworth.

“Professor Braithwaite has made an extraordinary contribution to future justice through his interdisciplinary work on a wide range of issues of justice and punishment, including delinquency, white collar crime, republican theory, international business regulation, responsive governance and restorative justice. Most recently, he has been leading an ambitious multidisciplinary study on peacebuilding processes in 48 different countries, some of which have seen the worst level of violence since the 1990s.

“In 2001 he was the first scholar from the social sciences or humanities to be made an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, the highest Australian level of recognition of excellence in scholarship. 

“John Braithwaite’s contributions to future justice through social science research have been extraordinary in both their breadth and originality. They have directly shaped the practice of criminal justice, business regulation and international peacemaking.

“John is also recognised internationally as the leading academic scholar of restorative justice, and made a paradigm-shifting theoretical addition to criminology with his 1989 book, Crime, Shame and Reintegration, now regarded as one of the most important works in the discipline over the last 50 years.

“His restorative justice ideas are widely influential in peacebuilding and have been taken up by the European Union and the United Nations,” she said.

In addition to the 2012 Future Justice Prize, Professor Braithwaite has been awarded the Kalven Prize for Lifetime Research Contributions from the Law and Society Association (the first non-American to win this prize), the 2004 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order (with fellow RegNet professor Peter Drahos), the 2005 Prix Emile Durkheim of the International Society of Criminology for lifetime contributions to criminology, and the 2006 Stockholm Prize for Criminology. 

In 2008 Professor Braithwaite was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Leuven, noting that he is “an intellectual giant who belongs to the absolute world top, and continues to shape this very world top from day to day”.