ABSTRACT

This chapter is concerned with two principal issues. How do the concepts of risk and governance, and the new configurations of knowledge and practice centred on them, relate to the ongoing institutionalization of restorative justice? And closely linked with this, how should we look at the possible new configurations of restoration, justice and risk which might surface? In addressing these questions, I wish to make two fairly abstract points about risk that are critical to considering its relationship with restorative justice. First, while we use the term ‘risk’ to refer to a wide array of ways of estimating the future, it is useful – perhaps important – for us to differentiate within everyday usage between risk and uncertainty. Along with others in the field (e.g. Beck 1992; Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Ewald 1991; Reddy 1996) I regard ‘risk’ as referring to probabilistic and usually statistical predictions. Usually, but not always, these predictions relate to possible harms that are to be avoided or mitigated. ‘Uncertainty’, on the other hand, refers to ways of estimating the future through various nonstatistical techniques, primarily experience based. These would include a wide range of practices from professional judgment through rules of thumb to plain hunches. Those familiar with the literature on the ‘risk society’ promoted by Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1994) will be familiar with this distinction, although as will later be

seen I do not share Beck’s implied view that uncertainty is an inferior governmental technology (cf. Wynne 1996). My second point is that if risk is the probabilistic assessment of future harms, it is a very abstract technology and thus is capable of multiple and very divergent realizations in institutional or governmental forms. Even within such a narrow field as insurance, François Ewald (1991) has made clear that the way in which risk is deployed varies enormously, for the technique of statistical prediction and risk pooling is only one element of quite complex and distinct formations such as life insurance, marine insurance and social insurances. One of my central arguments, developed from these points, is that it is very difficult to assign any single political or moral evaluation to risk as such, and that we must always be quite specific about the particular configuration of risk to which we are referring when thinking about – and evaluating – possible convergences of risk and restorative justice.