Green Transitional Justice By RachelKillean and LaurenDempster, London: Routledge, 2025, 304 pp., £31.99

Abstract

For whom is justice delivered after mass violence when the forest is a victim, and the soil bears the scars of war? This question lies at the heart of Rachel Killean and Lauren Dempster's Green Transitional Justice. In the field of transitional justice, which primarily analyses human victims and state crimes,1 this book implores scholars to consider a radical but necessary widening of the lens to include ecological harm and non-human victims. The authors argue that by clinging to anthropocentric assumptions, transitional justice has been offering ‘incomplete justice’ (p. 221). They call for a paradigm shift: to reimagine transitional justice by framing nature as a victim of mass violence. This ambitious and timely book, appearing as the world increasingly faces environmental degradation due to armed violence,2 re-examines the purpose of transitional justice, especially in post-conflict societies. Killean and Dempster weave together socio-legal critique, decolonial and feminist approaches to justice, and insights from diverse case studies (from Colombia's jurisprudence recognizing the rights of nature to Uganda's overlooked environmental losses) to conceptualize a ‘greener’ approach to transitional justice. The result is an engaging work that expands the normative horizons of the field. One of the central arguments of the book is that current analytical approaches to transitional justice are rife with anthropocentric considerations and assumptions. Legal and institutional frameworks have historically treated nature as an object or passive background, relevant only insofar as human interests are affected. This entrenched human-centrism, the authors argue, creates a ‘false dichotomy between humans and the natural world’ (p. 108), precluding states from considering the full spectrum of harm caused by war and repression. The aftermath of conflicts often includes devastated forests, poisoned rivers, and disrupted ecosystems, yet these non-human losses rarely figure in post-war commission reports and trials. Killean and Dempster trace how existing categories of legal disciplines (human rights law, international criminal law, and state-centric mechanisms) have constrained the ability of legal frameworks to address environmental harm. The authors assert that Western legal frameworks, grounded in property rights and individualism, are often ‘insufficient for addressing collective, relational forms of harm’ experienced in conflict (p. 224). They underscore several legal limitations that enable such anthropocentric legalism. One is the current status of legal personality. Typically, only human individuals (or corporations) are recognized as persons before the law, which means that nature has no legal standing and is thus beyond the underlying justice mechanism. Another limitation that Killean and Dempster highlight is the prevalent focus of current legal frameworks on civil and political rights violations over socio-economic or environmental harms. Truth commissions and tribunals, especially in post-conflict societies, have concentrated on documenting killings, torture, and rape, but rarely the slower devastation of livelihoods and ecologies. Green Transitional Justice illustrates this narrow approach through several examples. In the Ivory Coast, land conflicts and environmental grievances that helped to fuel violence were overlooked in the peace process; in Liberia, the truth commission acknowledged corporate profiteering from exploiting the environment only in passing. Such cases exemplify a pattern where transitional justice stays ‘state-centred and state-driven’ (p. 221), making it difficult to extend to the transnational or corporate actors who often perpetrate environmental harm, especially in post-conflict societies. Killean and Dempster argue that a green transitional justice must look beyond the state, both in terms of the actors that it holds accountable and the scale of harm that it addresses. They explore, for instance, the concept of ‘state-initiated state corporate crime’,3 urging transitional justice to confront the role of the state–corporation nexus in environmental atrocities. Importantly, Killean and Dempster do not uncritically romanticize legal reform. They explicitly question whether creating a new crime of ecocide4 or granting a river personhood5 will meaningfully transform transitional justice. They conclude that such ecocentric legal reimagination only offer precedents for broader notions of victimhood but are not ultimate solutions. This restraint is well founded. Recent scholarship on environmental law suggests that these reforms can remain largely symbolic. For instance, Emma Lees and Ole Pedersen warn that many modern environmental laws risk being performative, ‘law “just for show”’, if they set ambitious targets that are legally binding in form but ultimately hard to enforce.6 Killean and Dempster demonstrate that legal frameworks that recognize the rights of nature cannot be reshaped and toned down unless there is a deeper shift in perspective, which the authors argue requires reimagining transitional justice through decolonial and feminist epistemologies. However, a deeper engagement with the performative aspects of environmental law (and underlying administrative framework), especially in the Global South, could have further supported their call for a green transitional justice. Killean and Dempster show that the exclusion of nature from justice, and specifically from legal frameworks, is not merely an oversight, but a symptom of whose knowledge counts in defining harm. They observe that, on the one hand, transitional justice has been dominated by ‘Global North (and particularly Eurocentric) perspectives’ (p. 221), leading to the entrenchment of individualistic and anthropocentric understandings of justice. On the other hand, many Indigenous and Global South communities consider land, water, and non-human life as kin or extensions of community, blurring the human/nature divide. The book argues that incorporating these epistemologies is essential to greening transitional justice. Doing so not only opens the door to recognizing nature as a subject of justice but also highlights otherwise ignored human harms, such as the cultural and spiritual loss that Indigenous peoples suffer when their environment is destroyed. Chapter 2, on knowledge production, lays the groundwork by critically examining how transitional justice ‘knows’ what it knows. Here, the authors draw on feminist epistemology to question claims of neutral or universal knowledge. They note that mainstream processes of truth finding prioritize certain voices – typically male, Western, and elite – while marginalizing others.7 This has concrete effects; forms of violence that women, Indigenous people, or the poor may prioritize (such as land dispossession or water pollution) have been dismissed as outside the existing narratives related to transitional justice. Feminist scholarship, as Killean and Dempster recount, demands a more reflexive approach that breaks down false binaries between nature and humans. In practice, this means treating testimonies about poisoned wells or sacred forests with the same legitimacy as testimony about massacres, rather than seeing the former as environmental issues for technocrats. The authors give the example of Colombia's truth processes, where engagement with Indigenous cosmologies has reshaped the meaning of territory in the peace process, recentring land as a living participant in the narrative of conflict.8 Such epistemic diversity can enrich transitional justice. Killean and Dempster demonstrate that when Indigenous women in Colombia or Guatemala speak of sexual violence and land grabbing in the same breath, they are articulating a holistic experience of harm that defies the siloed approach of conventional justice mechanisms.9 They articulate such insights to champion a transitional justice that is intersectional, attentive to how ecological harm intersects with gender, race, and colonial histories. The authors analyse current literature that criticizes transitional justice as a ‘colonizing’ field – one that exports Eurocentric legal models while ignoring Indigenous jurisprudence and cosmologies.10 They advocate greater legal pluralism, suggesting that post-conflict justice might sometimes be better served by Indigenous restorative practices than by Western-style trials. One of their concluding principles is that ‘a green transitional justice requires a decolonised justice’ (p. 223). This means not only involving Indigenous peoples in transitional processes but also fundamentally reconsidering what justice means in diverse cultural contexts. The book makes a convincing case that without decolonial and feminist interventions, transitional justice will remain anchored in the very epistemologies that produced anthropocentrism. In sum, Killean and Dempster show that broadening the subjects of justice (to include nature) goes hand in hand with broadening the sources of knowledge and authority in justice processes. This is a jurisprudential contribution of Green Transitional Justice, as it provokes readers to imagine a more pluralistic legal order where rivers might testify (through their guardians) or where community elders might sit alongside jurists, blending normative systems to achieve holistic repair. This call for epistemological diversity is timely, especially when courts around the world are increasingly relying on civic evidence (and diverse narratives) presented by Indigenous communities while deciding climate litigations.11 However, Elizabeth Fisher's recent work on climate litigation provides a useful warning.12 She notes that popular scholarly stories, such as the heroic account of a climate litigant forcing government action, are satisfying but can narrow our vision. Killean and Dempster similarly embrace powerful imagery – the forest as victim, the river as bearer of memory – and call for law to internalize Indigenous stories. These narrative moves are inspiring, but Fisher's work suggest caution; any story, however meaningful, risks being co-opted or simplified when filtered through formal institutions. The book itself acknowledges how conventional justice often relegates environmental testimony to a ‘technocratic’ category, but it could have highlighted more how a greener approach to transitional justice can help to prevent such fate (p. 41). In effect, are we in danger of epistemic extractivism,13 taking rich cosmological stories and reducing them to checkboxes for courts and commissions? The book hints at this concern and sets a future research agenda in this direction (I discuss how it establishes such an agenda later in the review). Perhaps the most far-reaching aspect of Green Transitional Justice is its structural critique: the argument that the prevailing paradigms of transitional justice are too narrow in terms of temporal parameters and in political vision to address the full range of violence. Killean and Dempster align with critical scholars who have long noted that transitional justice focuses on discrete events (such as massacres and dictatorships) and immediate victims, while neglecting the ‘structural inequalities and forms of “slow violence” that may precede and survive periods of conflict, atrocity, and repression (p. 27). They borrow Rob Nixon's term ‘slow violence’ to describe environmental harms that are incremental, invisible, and intergenerational, such as climate change, pollution, and the long-term health effects of war.14 These harms often do not fit the temporality of a conflict that transitional justice examines. As the authors observe, the implied temporal parameters of transitional justice prioritize episodic harm, implicitly assuming that violence has an official end point (a peace accord or a regime change) after which peace resumes. This mindset can create a ‘miracle of transition’ narrative, artificially separating a past of active violence from a present of peace.15 Killean and Dempster argue that many communities continue to suffer slow violence even after peace is announced. By overlooking the interconnectedness of human and ecological violence across time, transitional justice not only fails victims of slow harm but may abet further violence. The book illustrates how post-conflict economic development projects, labelled as peace projects, have led to land grabs and new ecological destruction.16 This insight segues into the book's critique of neoliberalism in transitional justice. Killean and Dempster contend that transitional justice has too often been complicit in advancing a neoliberal peace – one that emphasizes market reforms, privatization, and foreign investment as recipes for stability. Such an approach can ignore or even exacerbate environmental and social injustices. In practice, this has meant truth commissions recommending democratic institution building and rule of law alongside advice to encourage foreign investment or exploit natural resources for reconstruction – prescriptions that align with global neoliberal agendas. The book argues that transitional justice has become a vehicle for neoliberal capitalism, paving the way for multinational corporations to enter post-conflict spaces on favourable terms. This critique is not merely ideological; it highlights material consequences. For instance, in Sierra Leone and Liberia, the rush to attract mining and agribusiness after civil war often sidelined the land rights of local communities, leading to new grievances.17 Yet transitional justice mechanisms in those countries did little to question the inequitable economic order emerging from peace.18 By treating neoliberal outcomes as natural, Killean and Dempster assert, the field has failed to imagine alternative paths of transition – ones focused on redistribution, sustainability, or Indigenous models of development (such as Buen Vivir in the Andes or Ubuntu in Africa). Chapter 6, in this context, examines how capitalism and global power dynamics shape what justice looks like on the ground. The authors call for a far more transformative vision of justice – one that does not shy away from reforming existing economic structures. Here, they draw on the concept of transformative justice, aligning with scholars who argue that addressing root causes (such as poverty, land inequality, and racial hierarchies) must be part of post-conflict recovery. Readers may question if this vision suffers from the utopianism often found in critical legal theory.19 Is the call for reimagining transitional justice a tacit admission that the current legal order is incapable of delivery? Killean and Dempster bridge this gap between normative theory and socio-legal reality by acknowledging these challenges. They note critics who warn that spreading the concept of transitional justice too thin risks diluting its impact and legitimacy. The authors do not dismiss these concerns, but acknowledge the limits of what transitional justice can achieve, while arguing that a greater risk lies in failing to address this structural and ecological violence. Killean and Dempster succeed in demonstrating that the exclusion of environmental harm from transitional justice is neither natural nor inevitable, but the product of particular legal and epistemic choices. The thematic structure of the book – moving from anthropocentrism and legalism to epistemology, structural violence, and political economy – allows for a deep, cohesive analysis that is more than the sum of its parts. Readers may debate how far transitional justice can stretch before it ceases to be transitional justice. The authors concede the practical challenges of such expansive reimagining. State-centric institutions will resist change, powerful corporate interests will lobby against accountability, and international courts will face legitimacy challenges. The ‘principles for greener transitional justice’ (p. 223) laid out in the conclusion (decolonizing justice, treating transitional justice as a continuing process rather than a one-off mechanism, and rejecting neoliberal inevitability) are insightful but high level. Turning those principles into actionable measures will require further work, and in that sense this book sets a compelling future research agenda. Green Transitional Justice provides all of the reasons to reimagine transitional justice, insisting that notions of accountability, reparation, and healing must extend to nature itself. In doing so, it aligns with developments in international law (such as debates over ecocide) and resonates with grassroots demands for environmental justice in transitional societies. The relevance of this work is underscored every time a peace deal is signed that fails to address who will control land and resources the next day, or every time a truth commission hears testimony about poisoned rivers that it does not know how to classify. Killean and Dempster offer a framework for understanding these challenges not as externalities, but as central to justice. In this context, this book leaves readers with both hope and caution: hope that transitional justice can be ‘greener’, but caution that such justice requires a reimagining of our legal, economic, and epistemological structures.