Call For Abstracts - Environmental Justice, Harm and Repair:Reimagining transitional justice’s relation to the environment

The intersection of environment and Transitional Justice (TJ) has never been more urgent. Historically, Euro-Western legal frameworks have conceptualised nature as something external, a commodity or resource, governed through conservation and environmental laws shaped by (neo)colonial property relations. This paradigm often marginalises and/or renders illegitimate the voices of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and Global South(s) communities while ignoring the ecological, relational and intersectional harms central to many conflicts. Emerging scholarship challenges these frameworks, emphasising relational understandings of humans and the more-than-human world.

The historical moment we are living in is characterised by interlocking crises that reverberate across the Earth, including pandemics, the rise of anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes, genocidal and ecocidal violence, the enduring legacies of coloniality manifest in the politics of gender, protracted wars and armed conflicts, climate catastrophes, environmental degradation, and rapid loss of biodiversity.

Eschatological discourses alert us of this bleak context by pointing to the vast movements of living beings to seek refuge from ruin and death and highlight the need for a possible transition to liveable, decolonial, abolitionist, and pluriversal futures. Recent shifts in the field towards critical and feminist approaches to TJ scholars are increasingly acknowledging the potential of the arts in political and social transitions and moments of fundamental change and repair within Transitional Justice frameworks.

Situating ecological harm as central to discussions of Transitional Justice, the first day of this workshop discusses new frameworks that incorporate diverse epistemologies, disciplines and critical and decolonial approaches to Transitional Justice. It aims to disrupt anthropocentric and Eurocentric approaches, fostering inclusive conversations that consider ecosystems as vital to historic reparations, reconciliation, accountability, and sustainable peacebuilding in transitional justice. The first day will conclude with a documentary film(s) created by Indigenous artists and movements in the Global South that focus on the relationality of ecological justice and ecological harm beyond the prevailing anthropocentric formulation and possibilities of ecological repair.

The second day of the workshop explores the emerging nexus between Transitional Justice, the arts, gender, and the environment through an open feminist town hall format held in collaboration with external local institutions and arti(vi)sts. The town hall is focused on the role of arts in envisioning environmentally and historically just futures and gathers expertise from critical, queer, feminist, crip, decolonial and anti-racist approaches to transitional justice, environmental studies, and gender studies.

This call is supported by the CIVICA Student Engagement Fund, part of the project "Environmental Justice, Harm and Repair:Reimagining transitional justice’s relation to the environment ".