ABSTRACT
‘As long as we continue to use the term “community” in a loose and imprecise way, the restorative justice theoretical development cannot proceed in any coherent way’, McCold writes (1999: 26). This statement, which is representative of a large part of the restorative justice literature, presupposes two elements. First, that it would actually be possible to define ‘community’ concretely and precisely, and, second, that this definition would be crucial for developing a coherent theory of restorative justice. This chapter will challenge both presuppositions. I shall argue that the notion of ‘community’ is not useful for theory and even dangerous for poorly thought out systemic practice. Instead, restorative justice theorizing should unpack the social values from their ‘community container’, and find a way to combine these values with the principles of a democratic constitutional state. The notion of ‘dominion’, put forward by Braithwaite and Pettit (1990), is proposed as a possible key to find this way.
