Revisiting the governing paradoxes of restorative justice: a comparative critical discourse analysis of the Ibero-American and Belgian declarations on juvenile restorative justice

ABSTRACT

Responding to a relative lack of critical research directed specifically to juvenile restorative justice, this article examines the discourse of the Ibero-American Restorative Juvenile Justice Declaration, unanimously approved during the XIX Ibero-American Countries Conference of Ministers of Justice (COMJIB) by Latin American countries, Portugal and Spain. The authors also look at the Leuven Declaration of Restorative Approach to Juvenile Crime conceived by the International Network for Research on Restorative Justice for Juveniles. To critically evaluate these declarations, we utilise the Fairclough, N. (1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press) tri-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis. Specifically, the authors investigate the representation of juvenile restorative justice and its concepts, employing the Systemic Functional Grammar transitivity system as a tool for the textual analysis. The authors draw on the Pavlich, G. (2005. The governing paradoxes of restorative justice. New York: Routledge-Cavendish) notion of governing paradoxes of restorative justice—what he calls an Imitor Paradox. The similarities and differences in discourse patterns of both declarations show that the critical discourse analysis of the Declarations sustain Pavlich’s claims (Pavlich, G. 2005. The governing paradoxes of restorative justice. New York: Routledge-Cavendish) that restorative representations are still framed around state criminal justice and its founding concepts. These results allow us to reflect more broadly on the field of restorative justice and its implications for related fields of knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical discourse analysis
• critiques of juvenile restorative justice
• systematic functional grammar transitivity system
• restorative representations

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor George Pavlich and Lori Thorlakson for their guidance and support on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Ramos describes human associated life as a life of isonomy. He defines isonomy as ‘a setting in which its members are peers. The polis, as conceived by Aristotle, was an isonomy, an association of equals constituted, for the sake of a good life’ (Ramos, 1981: 131). The following are the main characteristics of the setting of isonomy:

(1) Its essential goal is to allow the actualisation of its members free from superimposed prescriptions. (2) It’s largely self-gratifying in the sense that in it freely associated individuals accomplish activities that are rewarding in themselves. (3) Its activities are undertaken primarily as vocations, not as jobs. (4) Its decision and policy making system is all inclusive. (5) Its effectiveness requires that primary interpersonal relations prevail among its members. (Ramos, 1981: 131)

2 For further interest in Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, theory and methodology, please see Discourse and Social Change (1992); Critical Discourse Analysis (1995a); Media Discourse (1995b) and Discourse in Late Modernity (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999).

3 Nominalisation is a linguistic resource by which a social process may be framed as a noun. It is characteristic of technical discourses (Fairclough, 1992).