Pushing the theoretical boundaries of restorative justice: Non-sovereign justice in radical political and social theories

This chapter is an exercise in political and ethical imagination. It starts from the premise that the recent centralised institutionalisation of restorative justice has outstripped this field of its radical political-ethical potential. The process of incorporating restorative justice into legal frameworks, 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 sets out 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 vulnerabilities. It advances the thesis that non-sovereign values can help imaging and practicing challenges against institutionalised restorative justice and, more broadly, against exclusionary forms of justice. A range of practical implications can be drawn from this normative exercise.