Within the global North-South divide, there is little reason to assume that any interventions, development programmes or economic reforms can ever fully resolve the underlying causes of many victimological harms that affect the periphery or so-called ‘developing’ countries or regions of the world unless and until they lead to greater freedom, equality, inclusivity, dignity and access to justice. Within a critical decolonising framework, context, accountability, reparations and reconciliation would remain essential humanising components of restorative justice and variability across a range of historical, geo-political, cultural and social settings. To advance the intense humaneness of a universal personhood, a functional imperative would be to remain vigilant and critical of power relations and of the macro- and micro-links between interpersonal victimisation and victimisation in wider society. Localised workings of privilege and power and the hierarchies that inform these relationships remain connected on the colonial-postcolonial continuum to global patterns and consequences of structural subordination and institutional victimisation and require a broader engagement with access to justice, epistemic privilege and the narrow and restrictive aspirations of western law as procedural remedy.

Although it has been shown that participation in victim-offender mediation (VOM) can be associated with a lower risk of reoffending, it remains unclear how the VOM process may explain this relationship. Through a synthesis literature review, which included 53 articles, this article provides an overview of mechanisms in three phases of the VOM process that might contribute to a lower risk of reoffending. These are the preliminary phase (before the VOM encounter), the execution phase (VOM encounter) and the outcome phase (after VOM encounter). The findings of the review indicate that although a possible self-selection bias in the preliminary phase may (partly) account for the negative association with recidivism, multiple fundamental conditions and working mechanisms in the VOM process and encounter can help explain a psychological change within the offender and hence a lower recidivism risk. However, the review reveals remaining knowledge gaps regarding the contribution of VOM to reduced reoffending. To fill these gaps, we offer a number of recommendations for future research, such as examining how the fundamental conditions and working mechanisms of VOM interact with each other and produce a psychological change within the offender. This could help to find best practices that maximise the beneficial outcomes of VOM.

There is a plethora of literature conflating the terms Indigenous justice and restorative justice. This collaborative action research project examined the relationship between Indigenous justice and restorative justice in British Columbia (BC) and Saskatchewan (SK), Canada. This qualitative study employed a decolonising research method. As a result, the research was overseen by a community advisory committee, composed of justice stakeholders and knowledge keepers in BC and SK. Data were collected through 26 key-informant interviews (seventeen from BC and nine from SK) and 33 focus group discussions in eight communities in BC and SK. Our findings included the definitions of restorative justice and Indigenous justice and points of convergence and divergence. This study unearthed a wide range of distinctions between Indigenous justice and restorative justice. According to some participants, ‘there’s absolutely no similarities’ between restorative justice and Indigenous justice, whereas to others restorative justice and Indigenous justice are like the ‘difference between chocolate and vanilla ice cream’. This study demonstrates the importance of dialogue between justice stakeholders and Indigenous Elders, knowledge keepers and communities to reveal the unique and important distinctions between Indigenous justice and restorative justice. This study ends with a discussion on limitations and areas for future research.