Estelle Zinsstag

Dr Estelle Zinsstag (MSc, PhD, FHEA) is a lecturer in criminology at Edinburgh Napier University, a researcher at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and currently holds a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellowship (2024-2025). She is a research associate at the Centre for Criminology (University of Oxford) after having been its departmental lecturer in 2019-2020. She is also a senior researcher (since 2008 – currently associate) at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (KU Leuven, Belgium). There she coordinated and was PI on 2 European Commission grants, the 1st one an action grant on Conferencing and Restorative Justice (RJ) (for the European Forum for Restorative Justice/EFRJ) and the 2nd one a Daphne grant on sexual violence and the possibilities of RJ (for the Leuven Institute of Criminology at KU Leuven). 

She publishes mainly in the fields of sexual/gendered violence, restorative and transitional justice. She has published over 50 outputs, most notable among which are an edited collection with Dr Marie Keenan entitled Restorative responses to sexual violence: legal, social and therapeutic dimensions (Routledge/2017), an article with Profs Lode Walgrave and Tony Ward in the European Journal of Criminology entitled 'When restorative justice meets the Good Lives Model: contributing to a criminology of trust' and a book (co-authored with Dr Marie Keenan) entitled Sexual violence and restorative justice: addressing the justice gap  (Oxford University Press/ 2022/now open access). She also recently contributed to two  research projects funded by Scottish Government, one with Prof Joanna Shapland, Dr Jamie Buchan and Dr Steve Kirkwood on risk and mitigation in restorative justice (2022/report can be found here) and and evaluation of the development of a service delivering restorative justice in cases of sexual violence by the third sector organisation Thriving Survivors with Ms Clara Wisenfeld Paine (2023/avalaible soon). 

She is a founding member and co-chief editor of The International Journal of Restorative Justice and of the book series 'Studies in Restorative Justice' published by Brill (Brill/De Gruyter, The Netherlands). She is co-chair of both the 'Scottish Network of Restorative Justice Researchers' and the Working Group on Restorative Justice at the European Society of Criminology. She is a member of the European Forum for Restorative Justice gender-based violence working group and of the stakeholder group guiding Scottish Government on the development of RJ in Scotland.