Initially, it is important to recognise that the advocates of restorative justice do not all have precisely the same expectations in mind. In the last decades several definitions of restorative justice have been constructed by practitioners and theoreticians couched within several parameters. Definitions that are trying to captivate the basic concept of the ‘new wave’ mediation, often underlying not the Law as the basis for a decision imposed by a judge, but the Process itself. Today, it is an accepted altruism to claim that restorative justice is not a single academic theory of crime or justice. It is an ‘umbrella concept’, which covers beneath a variety of practices with no universally established definition. The same concept contains a number of elements that we need to unpack in order to decide which activities could be seen as truly restorative and which less (or not at all). As Shapland (2003) has commented, it is almost impossible to draw solid boundaries round what would or would not be seen as restorative justice. As it is mentioned above, the (re)discovery of the historical roots of restorative
justice might be able to provide credible answers to contemporary dilemmas concerning, its genesis and prospective development. Thus, bringing all those facts back into focus, the present article is devoted to restorative justice and it is divided into two subsections: the first sub-section provides a theoretical overview of the main concepts of restorative justice as they are conceived and applied today, sketching the contours of a restorative and transformative approach to having offenders reconciling with their victims, their families and finally with their communities. The second sub-section provides a historical overview of restorative justice. Starting from the non-state or acephalous societies and with an intermediate stop at the early-state ones, we are reaching the modern societies seeking for traces of restorative justice. In this sub-section it is also examined the ongoing contribution of restorative justice to conflict resolution looking for the presence of historical roots and signs in the restorative justice movement. Following this historical sequence, the accuracy of the early and contemporary signs of restorative justice is checked based on historical and anthropological facts in order to avoid overstatements or give false impressions.