TITLE:
The Dialectic of Restorative vs. Retributive Justice against a Post-War Background: An Examination of Elma Shaw’s Redemption Road: The Quest for Peace and Justice in Liberia
AUTHORS:
Mamadou Abdou Babou Ngom
KEYWORDS:
Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, Post-War Reconciliation, Impunity, Liberian Civil War
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Literary Study,
Vol.14 No.4,
October
30,
2026
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this investigation project is to analyse the dynamics of retributive and restorative justice in post-war context, with Liberian novelist Elma Shaw’s Redemption Road serving as a stepping-stone. Countries coming out of conflict are oftentimes faced with how to mediate peace and reconciliation without cultivating impunity by letting perpetrators of wanton violence get off the hook of justice. Should precedence be given to restorative justice or distributive justice? This question splits post-war conflict actors down the middle, with some arguing that for real peace and reconciliation to take hold a line must be drawn under the past whilst others foreground punishment of wartime atrocities as a bulwark against impunity. Restorative justice advocates forgiveness and forgetting whereas distributive justice pushes for just deserts as a sure-fire way to achieve reconciliation and peace. In Redemption Road, Elma Shaw’s lead character Bendu Marie Lewis epitomizes the hard line and, accordingly, strives with every fibre of her being to get perpetrators of gruesome violence during the Liberian civil war to book. Her adamant rebuttal of the call for her to “forget, let it go”, or “let bygones be bygones” (9) says a mouthful. The murder of Commander Cobra towards the end of the narrative feels like poetic justice for Bendu who cheated death over her all-out drive against impunity. Methodology-wise, the paper taps into an approach predicated upon direct quotes from the novel under study, literary theory as well as perspectives from the social sciences, e.g., sociology, psychoanalysis, and political science.