ABSTRACT

Thinking about the growth of restorative justice initiatives over the past decades, one might easily neglect potentially vibrant paths not taken. Exploring prospects of a politically transformative future tied to a restorative past, this chapter returns to three unfulfilled promises in the movement’s past. First, it recalls how restorative justice called for ‘changing lenses’ and diverting people away from an exclusionary, disempowering, and increasingly vast criminal justice system. Secondly, it scrutinizes the critique that restorative justice has tended to deploy power relations paradoxically tied to the very criminal justice arenas that its moral claims abjured. Finally, it examines restorative justice as a critique of sovereign justice that silenced pre-modern and indigenous forms of conflict resolution. Working with key insights generated by these critiques, the chapter proposes that restorative justice could in future reclaim a fresh transformative moral and political role, namely, as a social movement in search of inclusive, non-criminalizing governance that renovates entryways to criminal justice systems. Its express aim might then be to reduce the number of people selected and admitted as ‘criminals’ to growing criminal justice arenas, and to renew the pursuit of wide-ranging ways to govern wrongdoing that augment, rather than disrupt, social bonds.