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For the last three decades, community-oriented approaches have been considered to be progressive and adequate ways to address unemployment, poverty, social marginalization, as well as disorder and crime by a plethora of social scientists and practitioners in Europe and North America. During the last decade, respective programs have been institutionalized in Europe and elsewhere. Within a framework known as the 'activating welfare state,' or even 'the activating city' in Germany, nonprofits working in fields such as labor market (re)integration, social stabilization of 'disadvantaged' communities, or crime prevention adopt increasingly ambivalent roles. On the one hand, (local) administrations integrate them into new networks and forms of cooperative governance; on the other hand, they are forced to comply with the new policies regarding long-term unemployed and welfare recipients (Hartz laws) that combine state subsidies with a strict work commitment (workfare) and, thus, have to bear and procure exclusion processes for those unwilling or unable to conform with the new demands. In addition, nonprofits adopt the role of policing entities, thus creating programs that result in 'the poor policing the poor'. Against this background, the paper discusses the German federal program 'Socially Integrative City' and the Hartz laws as neocommunitarian approaches with regard to labor market (re)integration, security, and (dis)order executed by, among others, nonprofits at the local scale. Nonprofits today are part of a community-based system of mobilizing and motivating, tracing and tracking, securing and socially sorting - thus, being at risk (if not willing) to fail in seeking justice for the 'undesirables.' The paper gives empirical evidence from major German cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the main results of a European project on restorative justice (RJ) called Freedom Wings (FW) and presents a new model to promote RJ in Southern Europe, which was developed from FW findings. The principal mission of the FW project is to disseminate best practices of RJ within a transnational network and to promote community participation in conflict prevention and resolution, in order to support individual and social well-being. This paper presents the main findings of multiagency and professional focus groups exploring restorative approaches and community justice. Observation of experts’ social representation of RJ helped the authors to understand the operation of the justice systems in each country and the attitudes of senior officials towards implementing restorative practices in a way that actively involves the community.The analysis shows the necessity of a cultural change in order to switch from a form of RJ managed by the judicial system to one led by the community. The EU project enabled the research team to theorize a model for promoting a relational and restorative community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]