Material compensation is not what I have in mind with the formulation “conflicts as property”. It is the conflict itself that represents the most interesting property taken away, not the goods originally taken away from the victim, or given back to him. In our types of society, conflicts are more scarce than property. And they are immensely more valuable.

They are valuable in several ways. […] Highly industrialised societies face major problems in organising their members in ways such that a decent quota take part in any activity at all. […] Participation is such a scarcity that insiders create monopolies against outsiders, particularly with regard to work. In this perspective, it will easily be seen that conflicts represent a potential for activity, for participation. Modern criminal control systems represent one of the many cases of lost opportunities for involving citizens in tasks that are of immediate importance to them. Ours is a society of task-monopolists.

Nils Christie, “Conflicts as Property”