For practitioners who want their work grounded in current scholarship without the institutional access that academia takes for granted, the RJ4All e-library is one of the more genuinely useful free resources in our field. Run by the Restorative Justice for All International Institute under Theo Gavrielides, it now houses around 1,300 documents and continues to grow through donations, open-access harvesting, and contributor submissions.
What makes it worth knowing about — and worth bookmarking — comes down to four things.
Currency and breadth. A scan of recent entries shows publications dated through early 2026: studies on adolescent family violence risk-assessment tools, paramilitary-related coercive control in Northern Ireland, cultural attribution and sentencing leniency, the “pains of freedom” in Norwegian open prisons, marital sexual violence in Muslim-majority communities, digital communications evidence in rape trials. This is a library being actively curated, not a static archive. For practitioners, that matters: the field is moving, and the questions our victims, offenders, and referring institutions raise have changed substantially since most of us did our foundational reading.
A working definition of “restorative” that is generously wide. The collection deliberately reaches beyond restorative justice narrowly conceived into adjacent terrain — trauma and recovery, gendered violence, hate crime, peacebuilding, desistance, positive criminology, Indigenous justice frameworks, mental health, addiction, and human rights law. For RPI members whose practice already crosses these boundaries — particularly those working in correctional, schools, family violence, or community-healing contexts — this saves the time of stitching together literatures from a dozen different paywalled journals.
Grey literature you cannot easily find elsewhere. Government reports, NGO evaluations, briefings, manuals, and commissioned research from bodies like HM Inspectorate of Probation, the Youth Justice Board, the Home Office, the Council of Europe, the European Forum for Restorative Justice, and a long list of charities are catalogued alongside peer-reviewed work. This is the kind of material practitioners actually need when writing funding applications, building programme logic, or advocating to policy audiences — and it is normally scattered across dozens of organisational websites.
The names you would expect to find are findable. Howard Zehr, John Braithwaite, Kay Pranis, Mark Umbreit, Lawrence Sherman, Heather Strang, Lode Walgrave, Ivo Aertsen, Annalise Acorn, Estelle Zinsstag, Joanna Shapland, Kathleen Daly, Margarita Zernova, Brenda Morrison, and Gavrielides himself all appear in the author index, alongside many newer voices. Tag-based filtering (“Restorative justice theory and philosophy”, “Restorative justice evaluations”, “Forgiveness”, “Mediation”, “Victims and Victimology”, “Desistance”) makes it a credible starting point for literature reviews.
A starter shelf — fifteen resources worth opening first
A short, curated set drawn from what is currently surfaced on the library or available through its companion publishing arm. Use these as entry points; each one will lead to a dozen related items via the tag system:
- Gavrielides, T. (2024) — The RJ4All Restorative Justice Practice Framework: A Non-Statutory International Guide. A 10-step practical guide to safe, compliant RJ delivery (direct/indirect, online/in-person), explicitly positioned against the standardisation impulse. The closest thing the field has to a contemporary reference document for convenor practice.
- Gavrielides, T. (2020) — Restorative Justice Theory and Practice: Addressing the Discrepancy (2nd edition). The updated edition of the 2007 monograph, drawing on four international surveys with 300+ practitioners. Essential for anyone thinking systemically about why programmes drift from principles.
- Gavrielides, T. (2024) — Building Resilience & Supporting Mental Health in Bereaved Youth Through Sports (Footsteps Forward project / RJiNEAR model). A worked example of integrating RJ ethos with positive psychology in a youth violence and grief context — useful for RPI Queensland members thinking about Sycamore Tree adjacent youth work.
- Gavrielides, T. — work on violent radicalisation and extremism. Case studies across twelve European jurisdictions; relevant for anyone working at the intersection of RJ and PVE/CVE policy.
- Articles on “best practice” in RJ for domestic and family violence and sexual violence — including victim-survivor perspective studies from Australian programmes (rare empirical material in a contested area).
- Recent (2026) study on the pains of freedom in Norwegian open prisons. Identifies five constructive aspects — transparency, tolerance, trust, empowerment, engagement — that translate directly into facilitation practice across penal settings.
- Recent (2025) cross-cultural research on causal attribution, blame, and reintegration support. Compares independent vs interdependent cultural orientations; directly relevant to how we calibrate facilitation across diverse Australian communities.
- Buxton-Namisnyk et al. (2026) — administrative state violence and First Nations community-controlled DFV services in Australia. Critical reading for anyone working at the institutional/grassroots interface, and for the Australian context specifically.
- Northern Ireland research (2026) on paramilitary-related coercive control. Develops “conflict-related coercive control” as a framework — sharpens the lens for armed-actor and gang contexts.
- Egyptian women’s perspectives on marital sexual violence (2026). A model for how culturally-responsive framing reshapes consent and harm narratives — useful for cross-cultural RJ design.
- NSPCC Speak Out Stay Safe UK-wide evaluation (2026). Outcomes data on a manualised CAN-prevention programme for ages 6–11; a worked example of measuring sustained knowledge gains in primary-school cohorts.
- The full Internet Journal of Restorative Justice (IJRJ) back catalogue — RJ4All’s flagship peer-reviewed journal since 2012, indexed in Scopus and ERIH PLUS; the obvious first stop for serious literature reviews.
- The Youth Voice Journal archive — peer-reviewed material on youth participation, youth-led research, and youth justice; particularly relevant to the RJI Youth Summit cohort.
- The RJ4All eBook / Restorative Justice Series catalogue — independent monographs spanning hate crime, sexual offending, ecclesiology and RJ, and theoretical foundations. Many are available open-access or at low cost.
- The free #RJwebinar and #RJpodcast series with Theo Gavrielides — accessible audio/video introductions across themes from foundational definitions to schools, prisons, and community applications. Useful for practitioner CPD and for sharing with new volunteers or referring agencies.
Free registration is required to download. Quality is variable in the predictable way that any open repository is variable: peer-reviewed articles sit beside advocacy pieces and project outputs, and the library does not visually distinguish between them, so practitioners will need to apply their own judgement about source credibility. Some entries appear to be duplicated. The search and filtering interface is functional rather than elegant.
CPD certification is available through the companion RJ4All e-courses platform for those who want to formalise self-directed learning, and a Level 5 Diploma in Restorative Justice Practice (regulated by Ofqual) is in development.
Bottom line for RPI members. If you have ever wanted to test a hunch against the evidence, ground a programme proposal in something other than your own practitioner intuition, or simply read what is being written about the field outside your own jurisdiction, this library will repay the time. Treat it as a research desk you happen to share with thousands of other practitioners worldwide — and one of the few that does not ask you to pay tuition for the privilege.
Direct link: https://rj4all.org/rjlibrary/
