Romania: The Kris Procedures. A Brief Incursion in the Roma Community-Based Dispute Management Mechanism

Abstract

Indigenous conflict management practices have seen a revival of scholarly interest in the last decades. Even if bias against them still exist in the academic and practitioners' environments, they have slowly conquered ground as mediation and other ADR methods gained track as viable alternatives to the modern justice system of courts, judges and lawyers. In this paper we focus on discovering how Roma communities (probably one of the most misunderstood and stereotyped ethnic group in Europe) deal with conflict ranging from insult and theft all the way to kidnapping and murder. The Kris, as the traditional Roma court system is known, consists on a set of procedures that have strong similarities with both mediation and arbitration as known in the Western literature and practice, but with some notable particularities. The paper is based on interviews with krisinitori (peace judges in Romani language) and direct observation. It aims to unveil a system of practices based on rules and norms far away from the regular image of ``uncivilized{''} and ``lawless{''} the Roma hold in the mind of their European contemporaries.