ABSTRACT
This chapter is an exercise in political and ethical imagination. It starts from the premise that the recent institutionalisation of restorative justice has outstripped this discourse of its radical political-ethical potential. The state regulation of restorative justice, in fact, equates with the transformation of restorative justice into a mechanism of ‘sovereign’ justice which limits creativity, produces control and endorses hierarchical relationships. This chapter aims to re-envision, although in a preliminary way, restorative justice as an emancipatory (non-sovereign) response to transgressions of modes of conducts, embedded in wider social, political and economic injustices. It advances the thesis that non-sovereign values can help imaging and practising challenges against ‘mainstreamed’ versions of restorative justice and, more broadly, against exclusionary forms of justice. A range of practical implications can be drawn from this normative exercise.
