This paper explores the genealogy, theorisation, and practice of transformative justice in response to gender-based violence in Spain. Transformative justice is a community-based alternative to punitive systems, centering reparation, healing, and accountability while aiming to transform the structural conditions that create, perpetrate, and legitimise violence. While the vast majority of the academic literature on transformative justice comes from the United States and/or is Anglo-centric, it remains under-researched in Europe. My research is part of recent efforts to decentralise U.S. narratives from the genealogy of transformative justice and situates transformative justice within the Spanish socio-political landscape. Spain provides a valuable context for this study due to its long-standing and still very active social, political, and grassroots movements, including anarchist, feminist, autonomist, and anti-imprisonment movements. I draw on penal abolitionist and decolonial feminist theory and use feminist ethnography and oral history to explore how the experiences and practices of Spanish activists shape community responses to violence, influence contemporary grassroots movements, and contribute to the evolving transnational discourse on non-punitive justice. This paper will focus on findings from my fieldwork, centred on three key areas: 1) how activists’ experiences of transformative justice in response to gender-based violence have shaped the collective history of Spanish grassroots communities, 2) how these communities currently theorise and practice transformative justice, and 3) how these practices might advance transnational efforts to develop collective and non-punitive forms of justice.
