A reflection on power, accountability, and the limits of punishment
As we try to make sense of recent immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis, including the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, the same questions surface again and again: What is happening in the United States? Why is this happening? And most importantly, how can the Trump administration be stopped from continuing this cycle of violence and harm?
Around the world, attempts to answer these questions tend to circle familiar ground. Public protest, media scrutiny, and legal proceedings become the default responses. What I find striking, however, is how rarely the conversation turns to root causes.
By root causes, I don’t mean better policy design or improved enforcement. I mean the psychological and cultural drivers that shape how, and why, power is exercised in the first place. Here we have a world leader elected for a second time who appears to experience that mandate as a carte blanche: to act without restraint, to test limits, and to override law whenever it proves inconvenient. Public outrage, rather than curbing this behaviour, often seems to intensify it. Condemnation becomes spectacle, and spectacle feeds a performance of omnipotence.
Without attempting to diagnose Donald Trump as an individual, this dynamic points to something well documented in psychology: the way unintegrated shame and insecurity can be defended against through domination, escalation, and displays of absolute control.
And so lawsuits, demonstrations, and sanctions, while important, are unlikely to interrupt this dynamic. They operate at the level of containment, not transformation. What would be required instead is something much rarer: genuine accountability.
And this is where restorative justice, or more broadly restorative practice, enters the picture. In restorative processes, the focus shifts from punishment to accountability. Those who have caused harm are asked to meet the people affected by their actions in a facilitated setting, where the impact of that harm can be named and heard. The person who caused the harm is then expected not only to acknowledge what they have done, but also to explain the circumstances and motivations behind their actions, and to take responsibility for the consequences.
When it works, restorative justice can be deeply moving and genuinely healing. It is not about assigning blame, but about restoring connection, understanding, and relationship where harm has fractured them. Those affected are given space to be heard and acknowledged, while accountability replaces defence or denial.
And this is what I would be very intrigued to see in the Minneapolis context: could anyone like Trump – or the federal immigration agents involved in the shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti – ever be brought to sit in a room with the relatives of those they killed, and could a genuinely vulnerable conversation ever be had?
I suspect this would be extraordinarily difficult. Law enforcement institutions are built around control, certainty, and the suppression of doubt. In situations of lethal harm, that structure often requires a high degree of defensiveness: narratives that justify actions taken, dehumanise those who were killed, and protect the moral coherence of the institution itself.
In a genuine restorative encounter, however, that armour cannot remain intact. Accountability requires the capacity to sit with uncertainty, to hear the impact of one’s actions without retreating into justification, and to tolerate shame without converting it into domination or denial. And for that, you need a certain degree of humility.
And so, unless a profound inner transformation were to take place, restorative justice would be unlikely to work in a case like Trump’s. But that raises a far more unsettling question: whether our political and legal systems are capable of accountability at all, and what it would take to build systems in which killings cannot simply be filed away as collateral damage.
What would it mean to create structures where even the most powerful figures are required to account for harm, and to come face to face with mothers, fathers, siblings, partners, and children whose lives have been irrevocably devastated?
Rwanda’s post-genocide justice and reconciliation process offers an instructive point of reference. During the 1994 genocide, up to one million people were killed and an estimated 250,000 women were raped, leaving the country deeply traumatised and its social fabric torn apart. In the aftermath, Rwanda faced an impossible reality: there were neither the resources nor the social conditions for a purely punitive justice system to process mass harm at that scale.
What followed was an ambitious attempt to combine formal justice with restorative and community-based processes, aimed not only at accountability but at making continued coexistence possible. While the process remains contested, particularly at the level of state power, the country nevertheless embedded acknowledgment of harm and collective responsibility into its post-genocide institutions.
Several things were made non-negotiable at the level of the state. Collective trauma was publicly acknowledged. The genocide was named clearly and unequivocally. Denial was not permitted to become the organising narrative. Confession and acknowledgment were required of hundreds of thousands of perpetrators, and the burden of repair was treated as a national responsibility rather than a matter of individual guilt alone.
Even if this process was imperfect, it did something that is so often absent in contemporary governance: it took responsibility. Injury was named. Accountability was pursued.
And this is where the United States lags behind. State violence is disputed, litigated, and often denied. Yet, without genuine accountability, restoration is impossible. And where leaders cannot tolerate culpability, systems will continue to produce damage.
Acknowledgement of this kind requires something that is conspicuously absent from much contemporary leadership: humility. The capacity to reflect, to tolerate shame, and to acknowledge injury without immediately reaching for defence or domination.
These qualities do not emerge by accident. They require self-awareness, and the ability to examine one’s own inner responses to power, threat, and fear – capacities that our political systems neither cultivate nor reward in those who lead them.
If we want to change systems structurally, accountability has to be built into leadership. Reflection needs to be more than encouraged – it has to be expected. Power has to be exposed to encounter rather than insulated from it.
We often speak as if these qualities were private matters of character. But real systemic change would require treating them as professional requirements. If the capacity for reflection, answerability, and encounter is not part of the job description, it will continue to be filtered out by the system itself.
This would also require treating these capacities as trainable and assessable. Structured training in reflective practice, trauma awareness, and relational skills – in short, restorative practice – would need to be taken as seriously as legal or economic expertise. Only then do meaningful, sustainable l systemic change and evolution become possible.
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You might also enjoy my recent article Breaking the Cycle: Why trauma healing is the most effective (and perhaps only) path to world peace