Unlikely Friends?

In recent years, restorative justice has surfaced as a new criminal justicepractice in diverse parts of the world. Often, it appears that these practices have emerged in complete isolation from one another. This prompts us to question what it is that has allowed restorative justice to become an acceptable way of dealing with criminal justice issues, or in Foucault’s terms, the ‘conditions of emergence ’ of restorative justice.This article explores one of numerous potential ‘conditions of emergence ’ of restorative justice — the discourses of the ‘therapeutic’, ‘recovery’, ‘self-help ’ and ‘New Age ’ movements. It aims to investigate the ways in which the taken-for-granted nature of these discourses have, in part, permitted restorative practices to become an approved way of ‘doing justice’. In recent decades and in the last 10 to 15 years in particular, the number of restora-tive justice initiatives adopted by governments and communities around the world has increased substantially. Although O’Malley (2000) cautions us not to confound the intellectual interest in various penal sanctions with their impact on the ‘ground level of justice’, it is clear that during the last quarter century there has been