Maroon justice in Suriname: pasts and presents worth fighting for

ABSTRACT Maroon societies are seriously understudied in the restorative justice (RJ) field, which is odd considering their age-old struggle against retributive justice systems. Precisely because the rise of Maroons can be understood as an attempt to ‘reappropriate conflict’ and bring back legal protection to formerly enslaved African-Americans who had been subjected to the crudest of laws under colonial regimes, we should not forget that history when considering how RJ can contribute to or replace criminal justice systems in the 21st century. In Suriname, a renewed interest in the Maroons has recently boosted the RJ movement. Against the background of a discussion between maximalists and abolitionists, we reactivate the ‘transferability debate’ by asking if and how maroon justice in the country’s interior can be brought to the city and help its criminal justice system to develop RJ. Our answer combines 20th century anthropologists’ work on maroon justice in Suriname with the first steps that we have taken in our own ethnography with ex-detained Maroon and Creole youth in Paramaribo and their receptiveness to hypothetical RJ measures.


Introduction
The literal translation of Frimangron is Free Man's land, which refers to a neighborhood in Paramaribo, Suriname. In the 18 th century, when Suriname was still known as Dutch Guiana, Frimangron emerged with plots of land being given to Blacks manumitted by the Dutch on the condition that they would join an army of 'black hunters' informally known as the Redi Musu, referring to their red caps (Fatah-Black, 2018). This army was called into existence to assist the faltering European regiments in capturing runaways, that is, enslaved Africans who had fled from the plantations to seek refuge in the rainforest where they formed maroon bands during the Dutch colonial period. 1 Such refuge was called marronage and from a European point of view it was considered 'the chronic plague of New World plantation societies' that needed to be answered with brutal punishments for recaptured runaways or their left-behind kin (Price, 1979, p. 2). Today, Suriname has the largest surviving maroon population, which is an indication of the terror that took place under Dutch rule.
We thought about this history when we were processing the empirical materials collected during focus group sessions with young ex-detainees from the neighborhood, in which we explored the receptiveness of young Maroon and Creole men to hypothetical restorative justice measures. 2 We did so because of the renewed interest in the legal cultures of Maroons and how these may help to upgrade Suriname's contemporary justice system in the direction of restorative justice (RJ henceforth). In fact, several innovations have already been taking place: the Attorney General has started to implement various restorative measures; victim restitution is on the rise; and alternative settlement of criminal cases has been introduced in the Criminal Code, enabling pedagogical measures for youth offenders in the form of education and employment (yet to be put to practice).
In many ways, we will argue below, maroon justice is indeed a form of RJ avant-lalettre. 3 One of the central tenets in the work of those who advocate a revival of maroon justice in present-day city life of Suriname is that contemporary RJ is strikingly similar to the justice systems that the Maroons developed after they had fought themselves free and started to sign peace treaties with the colonial government from the 1760s onwards, securing semi-autonomous territories in Suriname's rainforest (e.g. Claessen & Djokarto, 2020). Initiatives of various RJ advocates have coalesced around the so-called Twinningfaciliteit Herstelrecht Suriname/Nederland, a project financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which scholars from both Suriname and the Netherlands have united to take inspiration from the restorative qualities of maroon justice for the advancement of the formal justice systems in both countries (De Haas et al., 2019;Mual, 2021).
The Twinning facility adds to a growing number of initiatives designed to embed RJ in existing criminal justice systems. Such an embedding aligns with a 'maximalist' view, whose advocates refuse to think of restorative and retributive justice as oppositional (e.g. Ross & Muro, 2020;Salihu, 2020). They trust in a combination of the best of both worlds and generally answer positively to the question that De Haan (1990, p. 82) raised in the 'transferability debate', that is, if 'informal ways of conflict resolution and dispute settlement can be transferred from non-Western societies and established as alternatives to the criminal justice system in Western industrial societies?' In this transferability debate, maximalists are opposed by 'abolitionists' who reject carceral society and the criminal justice paradigm in a total sense and argue that transfer must mean replacement of criminal justice systems by RJ systems, rather than a fruitful combination of the two (e.g. Barmaki, 2022;Coyle & Schept, 2017). They argue that RJ practices such as sentencing circles, peacemaking processes, family or community conferencing, and restorative cautions are compromised the moment they are grounded in discursive formulations of justice intricately connected to a long history of marginalization, oppression, and exclusion (Hooker & Schiffer, 2019). Integrating RJ in retributive criminal justice systems inevitably leads to co-option.
A remarkable 30 years ago, De Haan himself already observed that nonpunitive experiments in response to crime were being co-opted by the formal justice system. Even more, he warned for an 'absorbent state' willing and able to usurp informal initiatives in order to access life spheres previously off-limits: 'By co-opting and sponsoring the informal justice experiments the justice system could get access to and penetrate into everyday life' (p.86). However, he resisted the sociological explanation that was generally given to account for this failure; that is, that informal and participatory ways of conflict resolution and dispute settlement are based on sociological foundations that simply do not exist in modern societies. While some argued that introducing such informal law-ways implied a regression to social control mechanisms typical for less differentiated societies, De Haan rejected such evolutionary thinking. He refused to accept the criminal justice system as an inevitable consequence of the evolution of society in general -a refusal that had become more general in the field of legal anthropology (cf. Roberts, 1979), a field he drew on to prove that reality had outpaced the closing transferability debate: Legal history and anthropology as well as the sociology of law have presented plenty of evidence showing that it is wrong just to assume that 'simple' forms of informal conflict resolution and dispute settlement are only typical for certain types of 'primitive' or 'simple' societies, while formal adjudication in courts belongs to modern industrialized society. This is obviously faulty as negotiation, mediation, reconciliation and the like are to be found in modern societies, just as court of law can be found in 'simple' ones. All societies are characterized by complex configurations of both institutional and informal arrangements for surveillance, litigation, discipline, punishment and control, all of which depend upon specific interrelations and conditions (De Haan, 1990, p. 96, all emphases ours).
De Haan found company in the work of Lowy (1973) and others who argued that 'moots' after African model (alternatively called 'palavers' and often taking place in the form of village gatherings to discuss and solve conflicts) could just as well function in 'modern' judicial systems. 'Yes, a moot will work as an alternative in our criminal justice system . . . The use of a moot implies that deviant behavior arises in the contexts of community social life and can best be treated within it' (Lowy, 1973, p. 208).
In this article, we contend on the basis of historical works on maroon justice in Suriname's interior that transferring the krutu (the Suriname-style moot) and maroon legal cultures more generally to the urban context of criminal justice is neither impossible nor easy. It is not impossible considering the dynamism of maroon societies. Maroons' living (legal) cultures have constantly adapted to new circumstances, as the freedom they fought for has never been a bed of roses. Throughout history, maroon justice has changed along with changing circumstances and in response to the various actors encountered, ranging from colonial troops and Redi Musu in the past to military strongmen and multinational companies more recently (Price, 2011). Such resiliency will certainly help it to survive an incorporation into the government's criminal justice system. Or . . . will it? All along, maroon justice developed in a way that starkly contrasted with white man's retributive systems. The 18th century guerrilla warfare waged by Maroons against white dominance was a struggle for a distinctively African way of life that had to contrast as much as possible with white plantation life. An important dimension of such a life concerned the ways people dealt with disputes, harms, conflicts, crimes, and wrongdoing more generally. And, of course, it was about gaining legal personality in the first place (Benton, 2002). Conceived of as objects, 'property', rather than active subjects with a legal consciousness, black people's fates were decided in all-white courts totally alien to them, or not in court at all. Maroon justice, in that sense, was all about winning the rights to deal with conflict in a sovereign way and to decide independently on matters of justice. Will years of antagonism between maroon and colonial justice stand in the way of rapprochement? Is it going to interfere with the latest attempts to put maroon justice's restorative features to use in the formal criminal justice system? Does resistance make (legal) cultures more vibrant than collaboration and incorporation? These are burning questions that defy easy answers.
What's more, maroon justice is not a stand-alone device that can simply be unplugged and connected elsewhere. As we maintain in the next section, a maroon ingenuity like the krutu is not a silo but deeply integrated with other institutions such as kinship, religion, and the social economy. Too superficial an idea of transfer may make us blind for the social embedding and internal complexity of such legal institutions, or so we will argue. Understanding the krutu, to speak with two of Suriname's first ethnographers, means comprehending a way of life and how the council meetings are embedded in it (Herskovits & Herskovits, 1934). This implies an acknowledgement of, for example, the kinship rules of mediation, the belief in supernatural powers, and the (presumption of) social equality upon which sanctions and penalties rest.
In section three, we briefly discuss the maximalist approach that is currently advised in Suriname (the Twinning facility) and question it on the basis of the critiques formulated in section two. Subsequently, we return to Frimangron, where we had conversations with ex-detained youth to see if direct stakeholders think that a transfer is likely to succeed. Section four offers a conclusion in which we bring home a key message of this article: Although Suriname features prominently in the field of maroon studies because the maroon population there had formed the 'most highly developed independent societies and cultures in the history of Afro-America' (Hyles, 2014, p. 83), not much is coherently written about the justice systems in these societies. The legal cultures of Maroons, rich in RJ as they are, have received very little attention in the RJ literature as a result. In this article, we make a first attempt to cluster the scattered knowledge that we have on maroon justice.

Maroon justice in Suriname: a brief history
When we speak of maroon justice, it is important to distinguish the internal organization of justice from the 'justice' that was brought upon the formerly enslaved by the colonial government and planter society. Much has been written about this extreme form of retribution in Suriname (e.g. Davis, 2011;Fatah-Black, 2019;King, 1979;Stedman, 1796;Van Gelder, 2018), which basically came down to class justice due to the conflation of plantation owners and court members. To quote Hyles (2014, p. 74): Money talked in Dutch Guiana-possession of it determined who enjoyed the right to speak in the government. Because Dutch Guiana was a full-fledged agricultural export colony until 1866, it was administered by the largest plantation owners united in a court of authority known as the Hof van Politie. As long as the plantation owners continued sending profits back to the home country, they were allowed legislative control through the Hof . . . 4 In an early account -John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative, of a five years' expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (Stedman, 1796) -the author spoke of 'this Blood Spilling Colony' that was Suriname and had his book decorated with horrific carvings, many of which were famously engraved by William Blake. These arresting visual images have been so powerful that they continue to impact our visualization of colonial Suriname to the present. The engravings of captured fugitives tortured for their attempts to flee (so-called petit marronage) or of the murderous expeditions against escaped communities in the bush (whose group formation was called grand marronage) sketch a history that ought to be never forgotten. It was a time in which the running away of an enslaved person was equivalent in Dutch colonial law to theft of one's own body and considered a capital offense (Bijnaar et al., 2018). Due to the lack of legal personality, an enslaved person was literally not in the possession of her or his body. 5 Harsh punishment was considered necessary by the Europeans, because running away posed an existential threat to a social order that was domineered by a far outnumbered white minority.
This 'property struggle' (Fatah-Black, 2018) gained new forms when more and more enslaved persons began to seek refuge outside the parameters of the plantations. As maroon bands grew, new political, family, religious, and legal institutions emerged with them. Because running away did not remain unanswered -the first Maroons were in a constant state of war with their former owners and the soldiers that backed them up -it was a permanent struggle for individual and collective survival in a hostile environment. Maroons had 'strong incentives for rapid nation-building', for which they 'drew on the immense riches of their African pasts' (Price, 2011, p. 12).
We have indications, however, that the justice systems that emerged did not show an instant radical break with plantation justice nor a smooth re-creation of African polities in the Americas. Some historians have given representations of marronage as 'part of a "restorationist project" intended to rekindle egalitarian impulses of a romanticized African past' (Benton, 2002, p. 62). But it is unlikely that there was an abrupt appearance or resurrection of some sort of natural restorative justice avant la lettre the moment people broke free. Living under the ubiquitous threat of invasion, for example, newcomers (or Lowéman) had to endure a probationary period of captivity, even of domestic slavery, until they were deemed trustworthy. Similarly, due to the fragile state of community, internal conflict was hardly tolerated in the beginning. Price writes, for example, that [i]nternal discussion of any sort could also pose a fatal threat to a small community at war. In the absence of developed institutions to maintain social control, early maroon communities allowed a great deal of power and authority to accrue to their leaders, and they learned to live with very harsh sanctions on internal dissension (1979, p. 18). And, citing Stedman's Narratives: In Surinam, the great maroon leader Boni maintained the strictest discipline amongst his troops: he was . . . absolutely despotic, and had [recently] executed two of his men . . . only upon suspicion of having hinted some few words in favour of the Europeans (ibid).
Moreover, different maroon fractions also occasionally warred among themselves -such as the Okanisi (or Ndyuka) and the Aluku (or Boni) Maroons (Thoden van Velzen & Hoogbergen, 2011) -and tension was often high between creole and African-born members (the so-called 'saltwater slaves'). Such creolization-while-in-a-state-of-war, to borrow from Price (2018), left ample room for retributive justice.
Things started to change when it began to dawn on the Europeans that the guerrilla tactics of their opponents were superior to their own practiced military protocols in the jungle. Besides, the raids that maroon soldiers held on the plantations to steal goods and recruit new members took a heavy toll on white plantation life. For the colonial government, the time had come to pacify the Maroons with peace treaties meant to end decades of bitter warfare. The Okanisi, for example, signed such a treaty with the Bakaa (the whites) in 1760; the Saamaka in 1762. Others, such as the Boni Maroons, the most fierce of them all, were not pacified for years. These peace treaties benefited the Europeans because they outlawed raids, which had to stop, and runaways, who had to be returned.
For the Maroons involved, these treaties established three inalienable principles, to cite Price and Price (2017, p. 5): 'freedom (from slavery), independence (from the colonial society -the right to govern their own society as they wished), and control over their own territory'. The enactment of these treaties led to legal pluralism, which, it must be noted, was far from unknown to both Europeans and Africans at the time. Both camps had long been familiar with plural political and legal orders (Benton, 2002). In practice, these treaties led to semi-autonomy for the Maroons, who gained jurisdictional power over most matters on their own soil except when it came to serious capital cases, which were brought to the attention of colonial courts.
Evidently, history is seldom as neat as treaties and contracts make us believe. Some maroon fractions had come to an agreement, others had not; agreements were violated, new conflicts broke out; some blamed the treaties for the perpetuated subordination of their group, others celebrated the successful resistance of reenslavement and claimed moral superiority over whites. For the purpose of the present article, however, it suffices to say that in the second part of the 18th century, Maroons gradually succeeded in managing their own affairs in relative peace. And with it, the delivery of justice and the answer to crime and deviance underwent transformation.

Reappropriating conflict
In one of the first ethnographic accounts of a maroon society in Suriname, Melville and Frances Herskovits (an American anthropologist couple) write somewhere halfway their book Rebel Destiny (Herskovits & Herskovits, 1934, p. 180) about a conversation they had with chief And'u of the Saamaka. Standing in the house of the Granman, the paramount chief, they are discussing various attributes. Especially the Bakra sani, or the 'white man's things', catch the attention: 'It is the coat of a chief. All chiefs wear these coats. At the G'aman's we wear the best we have.' We looked at his silver-topped wand of office. 'Do all chiefs carry these?' we asked.
'Not every chief has a stick like mine. And all chiefs do not have one of these.' He pointed to the crescent of silver which hung from a chain about his neck.
'It is beautiful.' 'Ya-hai. And it's old.' Embossed on the silver plaque were the arms of Holland, richly worked.
Embossed on the silver plaque were the arms of Holland, richly worked.
'After the time of running away, when the fighting was over between our ancestors and the whites, these were given to us, and the wands of office. But not all chiefs have their wands from the white man. Some have the ones we call 'free sticks.' A man who has a 'free stick' is not a chief for the white man, but we know that he is a chief.' He added that the whites had made an agreement with the escaped Negroes that if they would no longer raid the plantations and carry away slaves with them they would be considered free men in their bush, under the white man's government. Since that time the Bush Negro Granman and certain of the village chiefs had had official recognition, and as a token of this each of them had been given a uniform, a high hat, a crescent with the arms of Holland worked on it, a silver-headed staff, and an annual stipend.
'The chiefs who have "free sticks," the white man does not pay. ' We borrow this long excerpt for various reasons. First because it offers an on-theground confirmation of the stratified legal pluralism briefly mentioned above, shared with us by a chief who himself was encapsulated by the colonial government. Second, we include it due to the insight it gives in chief And'u's predicament. After all, he does not consider his own situation to be one of genuine freedom. Only those chiefs who do not receive an annual stipend from the 'white man's government' have truly 'free sticks'.
These two considerations coalesce into a third one. Reading Rebel Destiny aroused a feeling of empathy with Saamaka leadership in us, as well as long overdue anger about the ways in which processes of society-formation were frustrated by ongoing attempts by the colonial government to rule the rulers. Although we should not get lost in the creolization/retention debate, it is reasonable to think that such frustrations gave rise to forms of justice -and social organization more generally -that starkly contrasted with white men's retributive systems. In other words, the forms of maroon justice that we will describe below might be read as developments occurring in response to both former and ongoing domination of the (colonial) government and its continuous interference with maroon affairs, as suggested in the introduction.
To the formerly enslaved Africans, it was not only the dehumanizing retributive system that made plantation life even harder than it already was; it was also the sheer fact that conflict was per definition 'stolen' from them, to speak with Christie (1977). Whenever a quarrel would occur, a fight would break out, property would be confiscated, or even when capital offenses would take place, enslaved people were hardly ever considered parties to the conflict due to their lack of legal personality. Conceived of as objects ('property') rather than active subjects with a legal consciousness, their fates were decided in all-white courts totally alien to them. Being denied, for years in a row, the right to participate in 'what might have been one of the more important ritual encounters in life' (Christie, 1977, p. 3) -that is, a meaningful day in court that can actually make a difference -may explain why maroon justice can perhaps best be described as an exemplary case of bringing legal protection back to the people.
Then again, it is true that the descriptions that we will give below undeniably bear a resemblance to forms of participatory justice recorded on the African continent, such as the tribal moots of the Barotse, famously described by Gluckman (1955). Indeed, the first generations of Maroons drew on their diverse African heritages in building cultures . . . [They] could and did look to Africa for deep-level organizational principles, relating to cultural realms as diverse as naming their children on the one hand, or systems of justice on the other (Price, 1979, p. 28, our italics) This explains why scholars who have closely examined maroon life admit that it is often 'uncannily "African" in feeling, even if devoid of any directly transplanted system' (ibid).
We rest our case and leave the creolization/retention debate on justice systems for future archival research by siding with Mintz (Mintz & Price, 1976;Mintz, 2010). He persistently argued that the establishment of maroon culture -and African American culture more broadly -was neither a simple copy-pasting of African heritage nor a tabula rasa scenario, in the sense that culture-formation only started in the New World. The unknown, perhaps millions who crossed the Atlantic on slave ships did not become 'cultureless' through enslavement, shipment, and forced labor, no matter how disrupting and traumatic their experiences were. These ordeals did not 'wipe clean' their cultural memory. But neither did they leave it intact nor allow for an unproblematic re-embedding in the new context. Through hard-won struggles and adaptation to the heterogeneous situation in the Americas, (formerly) enslaved people remodelled their cultures and, in the process, remade themselves (Mintz & Price, 1976). Plenty of work still awaits historians to write the history of the (re)formation of legal cultures in maroon societies. Now, returning to Rebel Destiny, we encounter what has been widely regarded, in the past and present, as the keystone of maroon justice systems: the krutu, alternatively written in Suriname as kuutu, kutu, or kuútu (e.g. Green, 1977) or farther afield as kuta (Gluckman, 1955). In 1934, the Herskovitses wrote about krutu in their chapter The Council of the Elders as council meetings that served at once as court and parliament: The krutu not only saw to the making of law, but it was also the medium for levying penalties upon those who transgressed law. The same krutu that legislated could judge infractions of its legislation. In its hands was the power to enforce the decisions it had made against the offender (1934, p. 203).
While the absence of a separation of powers may sound to some as plantation justice, we must acknowledge crucial differences as well. Elaborating on the importance attached to the idea of open discussion and free will in a krutu, the Herskovitses, themselves frequently accused of 'retentionism', argued that Maroons insisted on being governed as free people and that such insistence was largely shaped by the experience under white man's slavery: '[T]he final word rested with the members of each subsidiary body, and not with its leaders ' (1934, p. 190). This mentality, and its institutionalization in the krutu, contrasts sharply with modern criminal justice in which the state is theoretically repositioned as the victim of crime (Mutsaers, 2019a), and even more so with the plantation justice the first Maroons had escaped from. The latter did not only steal conflict from Blacks; it also left them without rights and representatives. Such expropriation worked as an anti-role model in maroon societies, in which a conflict's primary stakeholders, their kin and community are assigned a central role.
Very much in the spirit of the times, a krutu was created to function as a highly generic apparatus. When the first maroon societies began to take shape, the Dutch Guianas were governed without much regard to distinctions between civil and criminal law (Fatah-Black, 2019;Kars, 2020). It was a time in which policing was a general modality of government instead of a task assigned to a specific organization charged with law enforcement and order maintenance (cf. Garriott, 2013 for a discussion of such 'policeas-governance'). The Raad van Politie in Dutch Guiana, for example, had wide-ranging powers going far beyond what we nowadays consider an appropriate function of policealthough today, of course, policing is once again proliferating into new domains and areas (Mutsaers, 2019b).
Similarly, krutu council meetings also lacked specialization and could be organized for a broad array of issues: for discussing the succession of a deceased chief, for the negotiation of a price, to assess a penalty against a recalcitrant village (member), or to deliberate on the arrival of two white anthropologists (Herskovits & Herskovits, 1934). Today, this wide application still prevails. Council meetings provide the arena for the resolution of various social problems in clan, lineage, village, or tribe. According to Price (2011) these may range from conflicts concerning marriage or child fosterage to land disputes, serious crimes, illness, and other misfortunes.
Depending on the scale of the issue at hand, a krutu could be of different orders. During their time among the Saamaka, the Herskovitses observed the so-called G'a Semble, which was a council of older men in the village that acted as an advisory body to the village captain, as well as the so-called Lanti Krutu; a general assembly involving all the men of the village, in which the final decision rested. Whenever important decisions had to be made, both krutu had to be organized. In addition, already very early in maroon history, assemblies have been recorded that transcended the village-level. For instance, in 1763 a Gaan Kuutu had taken place in which all the chiefs of the Okanisi participated in what Thoden van Velzen and Hoogbergen (2011) called a 'constituent assembly', which laid out the basic governmental structure of the tribe. Although variations exist across time and place, different scales still exist today (cf. Claessen & Djokarto, 2020).
Regardless of scale, various constants are in principle present in all krutu. First, there is the earlier mentioned inalienable principle of voice. All parties directly or indirectly involved in a conflict have a role to play in a krutu. Kasanya, the silent boat captain in Rebel Destiny, said for instance: Ai, men must have krutu . . . If a few men decide, then the others have anger in their hearts. That is not good. When the lanti [the people] meets, and all men talk, then those who came with anger cool their hearts. Talk is good (Herskovits & Herskovits, 1934, p. 197).
Talk and negotiation can last for hours, even days, before a decision is reached, which explains why some authors have alternatively called krutu 'palaver' (e.g. Köbben, 1967).
Second, a krutu is a mediated conversation. In the management of daily affairs and the settlement of disputes, whenever a village krutu takes place, a neutral third party is involved to mediate between the (alleged) offender and victim. Older ethnographies (Köbben, 1967) demonstrate how such mediation connects the krutu, as a legal device, to kinship and religion. In the Cottica villages of the Djuka, Köbben conversed with Maroons about the importance of exogamy, that is, the rule of marrying outside one's own lineage. Already in the 1960s, this rule was gradually ignored, leading to more and more intralineage marriages. In the past, such marriages would be punished by kunu (an avenging spirit), but they became progressively tolerated. 'Formerly the gods would have punished such persons, but nowadays people just do as they like and the gods are more easygoing', said one Djuka person (p. 331).
Anthropologists have documented many objections against endogamy, but one of them is well expressed by the son of a former Djuka village headman (or kabiten), who commented in an almost Lévi-Straussian mood: If everyone married inside the village, we wouldn't have any more affines (konlibi) coming to live in the village. And then who would mediate in conflicts? Suppose a Pata man quarrelled with another Pata man and there was no outsider to mediate between them. The mediator then would have to be a third Pata man. If he decides in favor of the first man against the second, what will people say? They won't say that the first one was really right, but they'll say that he has a preference for that first man! (Köbben, 1967, p. 21, all italics original).
Third, the krutu is an institution principally designed to restore peace and harmony, not to punish the law-breaker -although this is certainly a possible outcome. Less concerned with the culpability of the offender than with the harms suffered, guilty parties 'are usually required to pay for their misdeeds with material offerings to the lineage of the offended person' (Price, 2011, p. 9). Although the repertoire of sanctions is diverse -Claessen and Djokarto (2020) list a variety of possibilities, from reprimands, apologies, payments and community service to physical punishment (rammeling), temporary removal and permanent banishment from the community -a peaceful and restorative conflict resolution is preferred.

(Dis)embedding the krutu
In Suriname, the krutu has been popularized in the eponymous TV program on contemporary Surinamese television, which has taken it out of the maroon interior and into the multicultural city, where Maroons co-exist with Creole, Javanese, Dutch, Chinese, Hindu, and Indigenous people, as well as with a growing number of ethnic minorities (Léglise & Migge, 2021). In Krutu, young debaters confront each other and their moderator to discuss a wide variety of social issues, from ethnic voting to coming of age in a pandemic and from contraception to online dating. It makes for some very interesting television, but the program also shows how the krutu has drifted away from its cultural mainland. The televised version -and popular imagination -of the krutu may be symptomatic of a wider tendency to think of it as a stand-alone device that can easily be loosened from its original context and implemented elsewhere without giving much consideration to how it has been (historically) embedded.
We may once more turn to the Herskovitses to make our point: 'to understand what was implied in the term [krutu] . . . what the etiquette surrounding it was, and how it was integrated into the life of these people, it was necessary to range far and wide over this bush civilization ' (1934, p. 189). To the Herskovitses, understanding the krutu meant comprehending a way of life and how the council meetings were embedded in it. These meetings were given meaning, purpose and direction by the social environment in which they were integrated. Without that integration, they wouldn't make much sense.
To be clear, we are not propagating some sort of Herderian primordialism that believes in the binding powers of culture, understood as something quasi-natural or primordial (Mutsaers et al., 2014). In fact, the field of maroon studies is the very antithesis of such Herderian thinking, considering the attention it gives to cultural dynamism, (forced) movement, contact, and creolization. Neither are we advocating a kind of neo-structural functionalism claiming that a whole cannot function without its parts and vice versa. We agree with Vertovec (2011, p. 241) that such 'popular' or 'commonsense' structuralfunctionalism, which 'sees all cultural values and practices as inherently interlinked', is a root cause of harmful cultural politics that revolve around anxieties about cultural loss. Thinking about the krutu as some sort of synecdoche, a symbol that stands for an integrated set of cultural attributes and is in dire need of protection, is not something we wish to stimulate. Moreover, it would fly in the face of reality, that is, of the hard-won freedom of Maroons which they have always acquired through adaptation to the most difficult of circumstances. Their martial history covers the full range from fighting against the imposition of alien laws, all the way to embracing the Rule of Law -e.g. when Saamaka spokespersons successfully defended their lands before the Inter-American Courts of Human Rights to stop the mining and the logging -only to be disappointed by the government's refusal to abide by the court's decision (Price, 2011). The point is that, throughout history, Maroons' laws and legal behaviors have changed along with changing circumstances and the various actors encountered.
Acknowledging change and adaptability is something different, however, than the 'click-and-collect mentality' that may accompany maximalist approaches (more in section three). This mentality of culture shopping may very well harm the integrity of the krutu and cause its inflation. In other words, it may turn it into a relatively useless tool because it disconnects it from the broader social organization in which it has been anchored. In a way, such culture shopping reminds us of the processes described by John and Jean Comaroff in their Ethnicity, Inc. book (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2009). When certain ethnic features become commodified or otherwise instrumentalized, they may quickly gain exchange value at the expense of use value. More to the point: while introducing krutustyle measures into a criminal justice system may make a good impression, especially on revisionist RJ folks, such a transfer may actually erode and undermine the krutu, reducing its value.
To understand why, we are advised to turn to Price's original introduction to his Maroon Societies, from which we learn to think of the krutu as an entangled device. Price writes that the power and authority of early wartime leaders of the Saamaka gradually diffused into a number of developing institutions, of which kinship was the most central one: Reading the reports of missionaries living with the Saramaka in the late eighteenth century . . . I get the distinct impression that kinship networks, which had existed in only attenuated forms during the earliest years of the society, were playing a major organizational role and determining to a large extent the distribution of authority; legal institutions, including 'councils,' ordeals, and other standardized judicial mechanisms, were operating smoothly; a complex but integrated system of ritual and belief held an important place in social and political control; and the harsh sanctions that typified early maroon societies were at least beginning to give way to more subtle pressures against deviance-the moral force of the community as a group and the threat of supernatural sanctions (1979, p. 21, our italics) Unpacking this fragment makes us aware of the deeply socialized and connected nature of the krutu. Not only are they closely linked with other judicial mechanisms and legal institutions; they are also entwined with kinship, ritual and religious institutions and supported by what today would be called a 'preventive gaze' to lower their caseload. This communal pressure against deviance by a shared morality and belief in supernatural (punitive) powers works through kinship. Alternatively formulated: when ego makes a mistake, his or her family may not only be held accountable; it can also become the target of earthly sanctions or the powers of kunu (an avenging spirit) or wisi (evil magic or witchcraft). The threat of such diffuse or distributed punishment, in which kin members take the brunt of another person's missteps, keeps individuals in check by means of group pressure.
About the Djuka, for instance, Köbben (1967) wrote that 'the kunu does not necessarily punish the actual offender, but rather just any member of the lineage' (p.19) and that the ancestors are 'believed to be generally well disposed towards their descendants, but once their anger is roused by some improper action they can bring illness or death to a member of the lineage' [i.e. matrilinear kin], 'not necessarily always the person against whom their anger is directed' (p.18) (see Green, 1977 for a confirmation of this diffuse practice among the Matawai). This kinning of individuals into the deepest layers where choices of life and death are made, reminds of Sahlins (2011) description of kinship as 'mutuality of being', that is, of a connection between people who are intrinsic to one another's existence. It shows that kinship is foundational: it is basic 'in that almost all relations within the villagelegal, political, economic, and religious ones -are expressed in terms of kinship' (Köbben, 1967, p. 12).
Thus, 'guilty party' is a layered concept. Writing about a much more recent past than most ethnographers cited above, Pakosie and Polimé (2009) state that whenever an individual commits a crime that requires the attention of the highest tribal authorities, not the individual but the lo (clan) and its kabiten are first addressed by the granman (alternatively written as gaanman or gaamá) and the council of kabiten and basiya (assistant of the kabiten). From there, a trickledown effect occurs through the individual's lo, bee (matriline), mamapikin (matrisegment), and, finally, osu (sub-matrisegment). At the end of the chain, it is the osu that corrects the offending individual.
Despite all this talk about punishment and revenge, we must realize that we are looking at an integrated system of social control that is primarily designed to enhance the worldly and supernatural welfare of people through prevention. In practice, when prevention has failed and friction does occur, repair rather than reprisal is the first priority of the elders, who are obliged by their senior position to smother the flames or extinguish the fire. For example, when one party to a conflict is judged guilty, it is required to pay for its misdeeds with material offerings to the lineage of the offended party -a dispute resolution practice that continues into the present (Price, 2011). Alternatively, the guilty party can be instructed to take care of a public place for a certain period of time, to provide firewood for public events, or to craft a korjaal (canoe) for general usage (Pakosie & Polimé, 2009). Such community services are meant to enhance the common good.
Communal pressure, shared morality, mutuality of being, community service, public good. It is clear that both kunu and krutu encourage a strong sense of collective responsibility and that they work to defend morality and enforce social norms (Green, 1977, p. 111). One such norm, says Green about the Matawai, is equality. In a strongly egalitarian society like the Matawai's, amassing more wealth than other members was considered deviant behavior at the time of Green's research. More recently, Pakosie and Polimé (2009) asserted that individualization -and through it, social stratification -has brought changes in the last few decades, but not in a total sense. This may very well have to do with that 'thing' we alluded to in a previous part of this article and which Green (1977, p. 114) has formulated as follows: Maroons 'seem to have an unusually clear understanding of the value of an egalitarian society . . . because they have had the opportunity to observe stratified European society for over [two-and-a-half] centuries'. As we argued, they have always fought to protect their autonomy and guard it against encroachment by the central authorities; surely, cherishing the common good and community life can be understood as an important incentive for such protection.
Although widely appreciated as fundamental to the spirit of European law -i.e. if we follow Durkheim's theories about collective consciousness and the link between law and social solidarity (Mutsaers and van Nuenen, 2018) -the moral force of community does not sit well with modernist thinking about justice systems as necessarily applying to individual cases, without interference of public opinion or sentiment. Such interference, said Max Weber, would thwart the rational course of justice (Mutsaers, 2019b). This may help to explain why it has been hard to find meaningful ways of involving the community (or better: communities) in criminal justice systems, even where restorative interventions have been implemented (Rosenblatt, 2015).
The great question is, of course, what community involvement may mean after the 'transfer'? How might community be understood and operationalized in RJ programmes outside maroon jurisdiction, where kinship ties may not reach, a belief in common ancestors and spirits is not self-evident, and egalitarianism a joke (as anyone driving from Latour or Frimangron to Mon Plaisir will be able, nay, morally obliged to confirm)? Is it possible to unplug the krutu and connect it in a different social context, so to speak, or will this change it beyond recognition? We cannot live up to the expectation to fully answer this question in this article, but the next section will at least give us a sense of direction.

Maroon justice in Suriname: a future?
With groundbreaking pioneers in RJ scholarship such as Herman Bianchi, Willem de Haan, and Louk Hulseman serving as sources of inspiration, present-day Dutch criminologists and legal scholars in favor of RJ find themselves in good company. Their intellectual predecessors count as established -as evidenced by their works being considered essential readings in criminology (e.g. McLaughlin & Muncie, 2013) -and are widely read across the globe. In that sense, the Twinning faciliteit Herstelrecht Suriname/ Nederland does not only help to decolonize justice, to come to terms with the past and to restore relations with Suriname, which had cooled down considerably after Desi Bouterse got elected President but are now recovering under the Santokhi administration; it is also a way of paying tribute to some of the founding figures in the RJ movement. Let it be clear from the outset that such initiatives are close to our hearts and that our critical reading below is a sincere effort to make something good even better.
The Twinning project started in 2019 and received an extension from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs into 2022 to compensate for corona-related delays. The project departed from the idea that the traditional and central authorities in Suriname and the Netherlands can learn from comparative research on regular criminal justice (processes) on the one hand and informal and traditional conflict resolution on the other (such as, for example, the krutu in Suriname and restorative justice as manifested in the Netherlands) (De Haas et al., 2019, n.p., translated from the Dutch by the present authors).
Its goal is to gain insights in existing forms of informal conflict resolution among Suriname's maroon and native Amerindian communities (Claessen & Djokarto, 2020;Mual, 2021), by asking how centuries of 'traditional' justice have shaped the way victims, next of kin, suspects, offenders, and their family (networks) are positioned. These insights ought to lead to recommendations regarding sustainable RJ measures that should have a positive impact on both Surinamese and Dutch society.
Claessen and Djokarto (2020) make an impressive effort to build bridges between what they call 'traditional' and 'modern' forms of crime control. To our knowledge, theirs is the first attempt ever to do so and deserves credits for that sheer fact in itself. In the spirit of maximalist approaches to RJ, they ask what functional elements (werkzame bestanddelen) from maroon justice systems can be transferred to the criminal justice system as people know it in the city. This question is asked in light of several shortcomings they find in the latter: insufficient accommodation to victim needs, the difficulty of resolving conflicts due to the lack of contact between stakeholders, and the negative effect of punishment on the reduction of recidivism.
Several suggestions are done to build bridges, such as the implementation of restorative conferencing in various phases of the criminal justice process to achieve police dismissals of (less serious) cases or stakeholder deliberation about alternative sanctions, compensation or restorative work (e.g. community services). The authors state that modelling restorative conferences after the krutu can do justice to the communal character of Surinamese society. Very much in line with the positive descriptions mentioned earlier in our article, the krutu is praised for its inclusiveness, the distributive justice it may offer, and the healing effects of the emotional labor it encourages. (Dysfunctional elements are identified as well, such as applying physical pressure or divination to force a confession, which is not condoned in Euro-inspired legal systems of the 21st century in which nemo tenetur principles and the right to remain silent are held in high regard).
Admirable as these first steps towards 'mending bridges' are -with a nod to Ross and Muro's article -we argue that the road ahead should be followed with extra care. Various reasons have been given already, such as the risk of co-option or the deep entanglement of the legal devices such as the krutu, which may problematize a transfer. But instead of repeating the theoretical arguments, let us move to the empirical ones. These are based on a qualitative study carried out among ex-detained youth from Frimangron (one of Paramaribo's poorest neighborhoods), whom we spoke with in focus group sessions centred on the question how the Maroon and Creole youngsters involved think about hypothetical RJ measures. Our research question was as follows: How do Surinamese exdetained youth think about restorative justice measures such as an apology letter or a mediation as an addition to existing sanctions and what conditions should be met, according to them, for these measures to succeed?
Mindful of the sensitivity of discussing topics such as delinquency and poverty with young people (e.g. Martins et al., 2018;Mutsaers, 2023;Mutsaersand Meijeren 2023), we organized the sessions with great care and took several steps to bring participants at ease and allow for an open conversation. First, all conversations took place in Sranan Tongo, the commonest creole language in Suriname that serves as a lingua franca (widely used in addition to the official language, i.e. Dutch). This language was preferred by the youth themselves, because it is closest to their hearts (as well as to the street culture in which they are socialized) and enables them to talk on their own terms. Second, in addition to the second author of the present article, two facilitators were present to bridge the identity gap between researcher and participants. Coming from similar neighborhoods and ethnic backgrounds as the youth, they helped establishing a relaxed atmosphere that allowed for the exchange of rich narratives. Third, the conversations took place outside the constraining context of the criminal justice system. All participants were ex-detainees who had either been released from the halfway house Opa Doeli or from the youth detention centre Santo Boma. Three of the conversations took place in a youth centre and one in a school building. Finally, a jurist was taken on board to help explain RJ principles and practices in an accessible way. Her introduction explained the differences between criminal and restorative justice, shed light on the different paths towards restoration, and emphasized that regret and reconciliation can have a positive impact on the lives of both victims and offenders. Subsequently, three fictive criminal cases were presented to the youth: Case X was about theft from a vehicle with a laptop and money as the loot; Case Y concerned a robbery involving a bullet wound, illegal gun possession, and a large sum of money; and Case Z described manslaughter due to an escalating fight, with the victim dying on the spot and no looting involved. In each case, the 24 male youthdivided over four sessions and aged between 16 and 24 -were asked to tell if and why they considered RJ appropriate or not. This way, their own criminal records did not have to become a topic of discussion, although participants were free to elaborate on them as well.
In their very own juvenile way, the youth initially replied to Case X in a way that seemed to reveal a certain sense of selfishness. RJ requires a confession and that does not match their strategy of denying the crime as long as possible, it was said with a strong sense of self-presentation. When no additional evidence is gathered and acquittal comes in sight, why should one confess? In case of a conviction, RJ was deemed a mistake as well because it would not lead to sentence reduction, they argued. In case of imprisonment, even stronger opposition to RJ was expressed: 'Mi de strafu kba, da fu saide mi moes tak nanga a man?' ('I'm already detained, so why should I talk with him [the victim]?') and 'Ie ati no mag zwaki en alla case, noso yu no overleef' ('Your heart should not always be weak, because otherwise you won't survive [in prison]').
However, one statement in particular reminded us of what Sidney W. Mintz, that keen observer of the Caribbean, had said: 'Many of us have difficulty remembering to what extent our individual performances turned ultimately upon wider opportunities that actually have very little to do with individual character and virtues' (Mintz, 2010, p. 15). The statement in question was uttered in such a way that we doubted whether the speaker envisioned the hypothetical case under discussion or his own lawbreaking in the past. The young man said: 'Mi probleem moro bigi a momenti dati' ('My problem at that time was bigger [than the victims']).' Those words and the discourse that the youth built around them can have different meanings to different recipients.
To a historian interested in the history of the present, they can lead straight back to the origins of Caribbean inequality, to the slave ships and the smashing power of the whip. To a time in which such a way of thinking was often the only way of surviving and the social conditions forced people to develop a zero-sum mindset. Critical criminologists may be reminded of that old work by Richard Quinney, The Social Reality of Crime (1970), and emphasize the need of a social democratic criminology (Reiner, 2020) that understands that crime will continue to exist as long as inequality does. Interestingly, both trains of thought come together in the notion of decent and life-preserving labor, which is why it is unsurprising that the youth mentioned work as a prerequisite for genuine restoration: 'Wan baan de nodig fu herstel yu srefi' ('You need a job to restore yourself') and 'Wroko na a heer keerpunt' ('Work is pivotal'). However, a certificate of conduct is often required to get a job and these are only given to ex-detainees 3 years after their release, which effectively leaves them in a catch-22 situation.
The inconvenient truth is that if we truly wish to stimulate krutu-based restoration that takes the needs of young offenders seriously, the krutu (and their associated structures) need to be fully embraced. Not only as a social control mechanisms that correct and restore what has gone wrong but also their law-making power to keep wrongs from happening in the first place. Although the egalitarianism of maroon villages is unlikely to ever materialize in urban landscapes, redistributive laws and a criminalization of inequality instead of the poor would certainly not harm the majority of Paramaribo's residents. The natural riches of Suriname are astonishing but so are the (international) elites who succeed very well in plundering the country and appropriating its wealth (Price, 2011). With a Gini coefficient of almost 58 (Robinson, 2018), Suriname is unfortunately placed among the most unequal countries in the world. It is not so hard to imagine that marginalized youth consider this to be the greater injustice that needs to be set right, before mental space can be reserved for repairing individual relations.
Confronted with the more serious cases Y and Z, the youth gave divergent responses. Some answered rather indifferently that 'A no wroko want a man kirie kba', telling us that restorative justice measures would 'not work because the man is already dead'. Others, however, seemed to open up: 'If ie wan srib vrij' ('if you want to sleep well' [literally: 'if you want to sleep free']) or 'Fu krin yu ati' ('to relieve [literally: clean] your heart') were phrases that we heard. The most elaborate response came from one youth, who said that 'De meeste man sa du moord, e law in a kopi. De man no man verwerk in. Herselrecht kan yipie fu pur a schuld sa de tap yu ati', which translates into 'Most men who have committed a murder go crazy in prison. They cannot process it. Restorative justice can help to deal with that feeling of guilt that presses on your heart'. Talking is good, said another participant, because otherwise 'in a kopi te ye sribie, yu e sjie visions': 'if you go to sleep in prison, you may see visions'.
Such concerns about a clean consciousness and spiritual health tended to slide into worries about wisi (evil magic or witchcraft). In case they would be unknown to the victim, entering into a restorative talk would mean losing anonymity, which the youth considered a risk because that could mean becoming a target of black magic. One youth said for instance that 'mi o luk a situatie voorzichtig, want kande de man wan wisi of gi yu wan fongfong' ('I would look at the situation carefully, because the man may bewitch me or give me a beating'). This brings us to another consideration related to the question if maroon justice -in all its complexity and multidimensionality -can be successfully transferred beyond its original jurisdictional habitat. This consideration has to do with the social embedding of religion and (the legality) of supernatural power.
Already in 2009, Pakosie expressed his worry about the deterioration of religious authority in Suriname, which he sees as the main cause of the uncontrolled and idiosyncratic way people (are believed to) call upon unfriendly supernatural powers these days. Nowadays, wisi is increasingly deployed in a random fashion, making it an unpredictable, unstructured and therefore haphazard practice. This was very different in the early 1960s when Van Weteringen (1979, p. 370) studied wisi among the Djuka, who understood it as the 'ability to harm others by supernatural means': Witchcraft beliefs in Djuka are a social idiom in which many kinds of conflicts are fought out. In spite of certain common anthropological explanations of witchcraft that view it largely as a reflection of social tensions existing between the accuser and the accused, we have seen that many aspects of Djuka witchcraft can be understood only by stressing the group membership of the persons involved, the whole social field (1979, p. 386).
Conceived of as incidents in a complex social process -including but not limited to kinship affairs -wisi enactments were controlled by different social forces that steer towards shared norms and expectations. When these were broken by a wisi spell, the accuser would be brought before the village elders who would decide whether or not to take legal action. Now, one might argue that this was over 60 years ago and that things have changed in the meantime. They have, for sure. Great parts of the social idiom have disappeared with the advancement of modernity and associated processes of globalization and individualization (Van Stipriaan & Polimé, 2009). Wisi and the kinship rules and legal considerations involved are not what they used to be, but that does not mean that we can discard or ignore their social origins and pretend they do not matter. That would be like 'saying that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible, one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer', to borrow from Geertz (1973, p. 30).
In sum, what we mean to say is that favoring maximalist approaches and the incorporation of functional elements does not absolve us from asking why these elements worked in the first place. What caused their success, what made them function? We are not advocating going back to the old days of whole/part functionalism in which the functional integration of elements was considered quintessential to the survival of social systems -not in the least because in these days, the effects of colonialism on such social systems were completely ignored; something to which we are diametrically opposed, as we hope the present article has made crystal clear. But functionalist-like questions do help us to raise concerns that are also circulating in the RJ literature, for instance about social justice as a prerequisite for restorative justice or the compatibility of religious and secular RJ models, as mentioned earlier. We need to shift the attention to such concerns, particularly when thinking about the usefulness of older maroon structures for presentday applications of restorative justice.

Conclusions
We make a case for the incorporation of maroon studies in the academic field of restorative justice. Taking the pulse of the RJ literature by scanning handbooks and other collected works (e.g. Gavrielides, 2018;Johnstone & Van Ness, 2007;Lewis & Stauffer, 2021), one can easily conclude that maroon societies are seriously understudied in the RJ field. Not much has changed since Daly wrote in 2002 that RJ scholars tend to focus on the pasts of Indigenous peoples when looking for inspiration in pre-modern forms of justice (often with quite some myth-making involved). In a way this sounds reasonable, because sensu stricto, the 'Black Atlantic' (as understood by Gilroy, 1993) has never been pre-modern. Caribbean modernity started very early with the wedding of field and factory, which turned the plantations into agricultural factories of precious commodities. It is worthwhile to quote Mintz (2010) at some length to make the point that maroon societies -which everywhere emerged in response to slavery -were never 'traditional' in the way Indigenous communities once were, or said to be: I have argued elsewhere that the Caribbean sugar plantation had the effect of modernizing the people forced to work on it, and much of that modernity originated in the ways that slavery worked . . . By forcibly drawing together people from scores, possible even hundreds, of different cultures and languages, compelling them not only to labor ceaselessly on the plantations but also to craft for themselves new ways of life under terrible circumstances, the planter class imposed special conditions for daily living-indeed for survival itself-upon the African captives. The work regimen made the slaves into anonymous units of labor-alienated, expendable, interchangeable-as if they lacked individuality or any personal past. In the ways that the sugar plantations operated, these alienated laborers acquired an 'industrial' time consciousness (2010, pp. 10-11, emphasis original) . 6 It was in the Caribbean -and we consider the Guianas to be part of it, both historically, demographically and geographically (due to their remoteness) -that we saw the dark beginnings of globalization, with its violent history of slaughter, chains, human cargo, exploitation, slavery, and indenture, as well as the first-time massive contact of people from different corners of the world. Depending on which side of the color line one stood and whether or not one belonged to the 'aristocracy of the skin' (James, 1963), this beginning was sweet as sugar or bitter as coffee, to put it bluntly. As we have argued in this article, the heterogeneity of the African newcomers challenged them to build new institutions from reordered cultural content under the difficult conditions of ethnic disorganization and slavery. Those who stayed on the plantations had little leewayalthough we should not underestimate the power of hidden resistance (Scott, 1985(Scott, , 1990) -but those who ran away eventually succeeded in establishing new cultures of opposition, especially in Suriname.
It is precisely this opposition that makes maroon societies so significant for RJ scholars who are interested in combining retributive and restorative justice systems, or in replacing the former by the latter. From their very first days, Maroons have struggled to create their own legal institutions as well as a sense of themselves as a people . 7 This emergent dialectic of law and society, born out of struggle and discontent, can serve as a great source of inspiration for contemporary abolitionists or revisionists who share a discontent with contemporary criminal justice and its outdated punitive character. The early-modern struggles of Maroons against colonial systems of retributive justice ought to be part of the ongoing multiplex history of restorative justice, most certainly in the Americas.
We contribute to the ongoing history by connecting 20th century ethnographies of Maroons in Suriname to our ongoing RJ study with ex-detained youth in Paramaribo, with the maximalist Twinning facility serving as an important backdrop. Precisely because the rise of maroon justice in Suriname can be understood as an existential (and mostly successful) attempt to 'reappropriate conflict' and to bring back legal protection to a people appallingly subjected to the crudest of laws under the colonial regime. We should not forget that history when considering rapprochement in the 21st century. All the more so because that history shows a complex institutional configuration, making it very difficult to extract 'functional elements' of one's choice. Such extraction may very easily lead to abstraction, that is, to an application of such elements without regard to context.
With its unwavering attention to context, anthropology helps us understanding both the pasts and presents of maroon justice: the social embedding of the early 20th century krutu, as well as the present-day cry for work and social justice among Paramaribo's marginalized youth in conflict with the law; the integrated function of the wisi in the past, as well as the rogue and unpredictable spells in the individualized city that give uninitiated and mystified youth an eerie feeling; the reason why kin members took the brunt of a sanction in the maroon villages, as well as the difficulty of such diffusion in contemporary city-life. Shifting attention to the different contexts of restorative justice and how it develops over time may enable us to take a more nuanced position and move beyond a principled siding with either maximalist or abolitionist camps. For sure, these principles matter but so does an appreciation of the humans they concern as historical beings. Anthropologists know all too well what happens when Europeans deprive other people of their history (Wolf, 1982).
In the end, we repeat what we said before: a 'transfer' will be neither impossible nor easy. In the next few years, we will step back from a 'system approach' that asks how one system may incorporate the other or be replaced by it and turn our attention to the RJ practices that may already be found in the informal circuits of the city. In the tradition of legal anthropology, we transcend black letter law by asking what law-like social practices and rules are present in Paramaribo's city life that channel youngsters' behavior and help them solving their problems in a restorative, sustainable, and peaceful way. A priori demarcation is difficult because this is largely uncharted territory but based on our experience in the field of youth justice we will be on the lookout for a variety of phenomena: local codes of conduct, reciprocal relations, group pressure and reintegrative shaming, kinship rules, informal mediation, off-the-record victim compensation, community panels, unregistered public services, etc. We hope that such insights will ease a transfer that does justice to the needs of Maroons living in the present century.

Notes
Republic) . . . in 1502! The anonymous man is said to have escaped to the Indians in the mountainous interior soon after arriving on the island (Price, 1979).