A Green Turn in Transitional Justice: Ecocide as Social Death

Abstract

Movements for environmental justice ought to engage the powerful mechanisms of change deployed in a Transitional Justice context. There is reason for restraint, however, in calling upon radically disruptive procedures to immediately amend the basic structure of society. I propose a modest expansion of the purview of Transitional Justice to recognize a class of environmental harms severe enough to trigger transitional measures. This class of harms is ecocide as social death, which I define as deliberate, state-sponsored environmental destruction resulting in the annihilation of ways of life intimately connected to the natural world. The article then considers potential criticisms of this framework: its foundation in liberal political theory, its anthropocentrism, and its exclusion of global environmental harms. Despite being anthropocentric, the model offers a means of politically and legally representing the value of the natural world beyond its role as a stock of resources for human consumption. I defend an expressly liberal approach to Transitional Justice that emphasizes the core of the liberal social contract—respect for diversity.