[jakeinspace]

Restorative justice makes a lot of sense to me in a society that has weak or no centralized power. Social hierarchy sure, but not an absolute monarch. Once you have a strong government with a monopoly on violence (police), then you can attempt to enforce retaliatory justice in a controlled and ideally neutral way, by the state. Without a monopoly on violence, then obviously just doling out mob retaliatory violence leads to anarchy.

I'm not sure that you can have a modern large society with millions of strangers that relies only on restorative justice. I think you need strong communal cohesion for that to work by itself, and even in a relatively culturally homogeneous society, I'm not sure that scales beyond the size of towns.