Peace bonds are a legal tool of governance dating back to 13th c. England. In Canada, a significant change in the application of peace bonds took place in the mid-1990s, shifting their purpose from governing minor disputes between individuals to allowing for persons who have not been charged with a crime to be governed as if they had. Given the legal test for a peace bond has always been the determination of ‘reasonable fear’, the advent of these ‘specialized’ peace bonds suggests that the object of reasonable fear has changed. Despite their lengthy history, peace bonds have limited coverage in academic literature, a weakness compounded by a predominant doctrinal approach based in a liberal framework. The central inquiry of this thesis moves beyond this predominant perspective of ‘peace bonds as crime prevention’ by developing a governmental criminology, which deepens our understanding of the role of specialized peace bond law in contemporary society. Specifically, governmental criminology takes a Foucaultian critical legal studies approach, which acknowledges legal pluralism and sets out the historical context required for analysis. Ultimately, by unearthing underlying social, economic, and political power relations it is possible to critique the accompanying modes of calculation of fear and risk, thus challenging the regimes of practices that make specialized peace bonds possible. Specialized peace bonds merely manage the consequences of a criminal justice system limited by social, political, and economic circumstances, in a broader biopolitical project of integrating risky populations.

Violence against women by their male intimate partners remains a serious problem in all parts of Canadian society. Both the Canadian state and Canadian feminist anti-violence activists have explored legal responses to ending intimate violence, including criminalisation, and restorative justice. To date these legal responses have not effectively reduced the rates of intimate violence in Canada. This dissertation explores state and community-based legal responses to intimate violence in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, Canada between 1999 and 2010, where both criminalisation and restorative justice were legislated responses to intimate violence. While restorative justice, in the form of Alternative Measures, was an available option in these cases, it was rarely applied. Criminalisation in the form of prosecution was also an option, but was applied in less than fifty percent of cases. Instead a peace bond, a form of criminally legislated restraining order, was often used. Research participants saw peace bonds as a flawed justice response to intimate violence, and described ways in which they felt peace bonds contributed to the revictimisation of survivors of intimate violence. Significantly, many research participants mislabeled peace bonds, attributing these negative characteristics to ‘restorative justice’. This dissertation draws on interviews with research participants, and existing empirical research on intimate violence, to outline some characteristics of a better justice response to intimate violence. That is; a hybrid justice response which includes models that are typically associated with both the restorative justice movement, and with the criminalisation of intimate violence. Regardless of what we call them, justice responses must take as their political and practical starting point the restoration of survivors of intimate violence, their families and their communities to full social, economic and political participation in Canadian society. To reinsert ‘justice’ into state and community responses to intimate violence, these practices need to be taken up, consciously, as a political tool. / Graduate

Peace bonds are a legal tool of governance dating back to 13th c. England. In Canada, a significant change in the application of peace bonds took place in the mid-1990s, shifting their purpose from governing minor disputes between individuals to allowing for persons who have not been charged with a crime to be governed as if they had. Given the legal test for a peace bond has always been the determination of ‘reasonable fear’, the advent of these ‘specialized’ peace bonds suggests that the object of reasonable fear has changed. Despite their lengthy history, peace bonds have limited coverage in academic literature, a weakness compounded by a predominant doctrinal approach based in a liberal framework. The central inquiry of this thesis moves beyond this predominant perspective of ‘peace bonds as crime prevention’ by developing a governmental criminology, which deepens our understanding of the role of specialized peace bond law in contemporary society. Specifically, governmental criminology takes a Foucaultian critical legal studies approach, which acknowledges legal pluralism and sets out the historical context required for analysis. Ultimately, by unearthing underlying social, economic, and political power relations it is possible to critique the accompanying modes of calculation of fear and risk, thus challenging the regimes of practices that make specialized peace bonds possible. Specialized peace bonds merely manage the consequences of a criminal justice system limited by social, political, and economic circumstances, in a broader biopolitical project of integrating risky populations.