RJ focuses on the victim as the core element in the process, whether it is an individual, group of people or indeed the community as a whole.  Victims are not left outside of the process feeling little control – it places them at the centre.  It seeks to heal the responses and implications of crime and wrong-doing by meeting the needs of victims, offenders and communities.

cultural memory is embodied in objectivations that store meaning in a concentrated manner; meanings to be shared. They can be texts (such as sacred texts), chronicles, or poetry. They can be monuments, such as buildings or statues, or any material signs or memorabilia erected as reminders. In addition, cultural memory is embodied in regularly repeated and repeatable practices: festivals, ceremonies, and rites. Finally, cultural memory--like individual memory--is linked to places.

Cultural memory constructs and maintains identity. As long as a group of people maintains and cultivates a common cultural memory, the group continues to exist. Yerushalmi (1982) shows that Jews consciously cultivated identity through remembrance. The frequency of the injunction "Zachor!" (Remember!) in the Jewish Bible is a case in point.

Crucial in understanding cultural memory as a phenomenon is the distinction between memory and history. This distinction was put forward by Pierre Nora, who pinpointed a niche in-between history and memory. Simply put, memories are the events that actually happened, while histories are subjective representations of what historians believe is crucial to remember. This dichotomy, it should be noted, emerged at a particular moment in history: it implies that there used to be a time when memories could exist as such — without being representational.

Either in visualized or abstracted form, one of the largest complications of memorializing our past is the inevitable fact that it is absent. Every memory we try to reproduce becomes – as Terdiman states – a 'present past'. It is this impractical desire for recalling what is gone forever that brings to surface a feeling of nostalgia, noticeable in many aspects of daily life but most specifically in cultural products.

German Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book "Das kulturelle Gedächtnis",

The Old Testament was created in periods of globalization, in the Persian and the Hellenistic-Roman period. The writings is a piece of memory work meant for creation of national or local identity and particularity in a global world, in the 1st millennium b.c.e. In a globalized world, counter-activity is always present, which focuses on the local, small tradition, the particular narrative, which creates its own way of coherence. The notion of "cultural memory" is used both in the humanities and in social science. Cultural memory appears as overwriting (palimpsests) and re-use of material artifacts, such as buildings, monuments, and texts, and of ritual practice. Memorization can be conscious or unconscious, incorporated in the body, and become visible material culture and monuments. The notion of landscape plays a crucial role in memory work, representing a special challenge in the project. People are never alone, but always relate to place, education, nation, family, religious and political groups, and so on. These collectives are the frames that direct people's comprehension of reality. This is the human context from which one also should look upon  memory and remembrance.