Environmental Restorative Justice in Transitional Settings

Abstract

This chapter considers the applicability of environmental restorative justice in transitional settings. Bringing critical transitional justice scholarship into dialogue with the emerging body of environmental restorative justice literature, it argues that environmental restorative justice offers a challenge to two of the transitional justice field’s limitations. First, an environmental restorative justice approach offers a challenge to transitional justice’s anthropocentrism, by creating space for the recognition and representation of other-than-human victims of conflict. Second, environmental restorative justice offers a challenge to the field’s neo-colonial tendencies, by facilitating the design of mechanisms that are more inclusive of Indigenous harms and understandings of justice. By entrenching an environmentally restorative ethos, the chapter argues that transitional justice may present one effective vehicle for rethinking relationships between diverse human communities and the natural world.