Restorative justice and Political Oder

Penal punishment is not merely a tool of (Western) state authority but a constitutive element in the theorisation of the modern state. The Leviathan’s sword, in fact, signifies both the capacity for external war and the sovereign’s internal dominion, exercised as institutionalised force against fellow subjects or citizens in the form of punishment. Without that dominion, there would not be any ‘modern state’. Against this backdrop, this chapter turns to restorative justice as a critical innovation in criminal justice theory and practice, exploring its political implications and framing it as a site of both significant risks and possibilities for rethinking how to address social conflict and harm. Restorative justice is fundamentally three things, empirically overlapping yet conceptually distinct (Maglione, 2021a): a range of alternatives to punishment grown at the margins of Western criminal justice systems from the 1970s, often building on local reparation-oriented justice traditions; a social movement slowly developed around the advocacy of those practices; and a set of principles (stakeholder participation, repairing harm, consensus-based decision making, informality) informing those practices and advanced by the social movement.