The European Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime, the Council of Europe Recommendation CM/Rec(2018)8 concerning restorative justice in criminal matters, and the recently updated United Nations Handbook on Restorative Justice Programmes testify to the increasing policy recognition of restorative justice at the international level. And yet, despite the vast and burgeoning literature on restorative justice, limited research and critical analysis have 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 towards 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 elicits implications for the study of the relationships between restorative justice policy and practice and for future research on the institutionalization of this ‘new’ frontier of penality internationally.

上的权利，支持和犯罪受害者的保护的欧洲指令二十九分之二千零十二/欧盟制定的最低标准，欧洲委员会建议CM /录制（2018）8关于恢复性司法的刑事问题，以及最近更新的联合国手册上恢复性司法计划证明在国际上对恢复性司法的政策认识日益提高。然而，尽管关于恢复性司法的文献广泛而迅速发展，但对政策的研究和批判性分析却很少，而对国际政策和文书的研究甚至更少。结果，我们对恢复性司法在政策中的框架以及这种框架如何在实践中促进这一领域的发展知之甚少。为了弥补这一差距，本文力求通过“话语政策”分析方法来理解恢复性司法在国际政策中的构建方式及其可能的条件。