Discursive representations of restorative justice in international policies

The European Directive 2012/29/EU, the Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)8), and the recently launched updated United Nations Handbook (2020) testify to the increasing policy recognition of restorative justice at international level. And yet, despite the vast and burgeoning literature on restorative justice, limited research and critical analysis has been conducted on policies, and even less on international policies and instruments. As a result, we know little about how restorative justice is framed within policy and how such framings could contribute toward the development of this field in practice. Addressing this gap, this article seeks to understand the ways in which restorative justice is construed within international policies and their conditions of possibility, using a ‘policy-as-discourse’ analytical approach. The article also draws implications for the study of the relationships between restorative justice policy and practice and for future research on the institutionalisation of this ‘new’ frontier of penality, internationally