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Abstract

This interdisciplinary article makes three important contributions to discussions about transitional justice and storytelling. First, it problematises the anthropocentric character of transitional justice and the concomitant narrow focus on human-centred stories. It underscores the need for more inclusive and multispecies ways of thinking about storytelling – as a deeply relational process – and what it looks and sounds like in transitional justice contexts. Second, the article focuses not just on storytelling but also on listening, which has received little attention within transitional justice research. It reflects on the significance of soundscape ecology and argues that learning to listen to and with our soundscapes is one way of ensuring that more-than-human worlds, ‘voices’ and experiences do not remain peripheral to transitional justice. Third, the article contributes to a larger decolonising imperative. By conceptualising storytelling and listening as inherently relational practices, it de-centres liberal individualism and gives prominence to Indigenous cosmologies.

Keywords

Indigenous scholarship listening posthumanism soundscape ecology storytelling transitional justice

At a time that is increasingly being thought about as the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, we need multiple stories, diverse efforts to experiment and explore, to thicken and enliven, the many forms of life that are slipping away (Van Dooren, 2022: 96).

Introduction

In 2003, in a space between two buildings in Istanbul, the Colombian artist and sculptor Doris Salcedo created a deeply memorable and curious art installation. A huge pile of chairs, 1500 of them, stacked higgledy-piggledy on top of each other, some of them upright, others on their side or upside down. Chairs of different shapes, sizes and hues of brown. Salcedo's aim, she made clear, was not to tell a particular story, but rather to make a ‘topography of war’ that addressed common experiences and captured the deep imbrication of war and everyday life (Art21, 2010). Attached to every single chair, however, was a unique story. Where had the chair come from? What was its history? Whose lives had it been part of? Had they been ‘turned upside down too?’ (Hessel, 2022). In other words, the chairs could be viewed as a structural collection of stories, many of which were perhaps never told or heard. In this respect, the fact that Salcedo called the installation ‘Untitled’ seems entirely apt.

Stories and storytelling are also an important part of transitional justice. Broadly referring to ‘the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society's attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses’ (UN Security Council, 2004: para. 8), transitional justice is more fundamentally about upturned lives and the stories of those lives. In this regard, there are interesting parallels with Salcedo's art installation, which could be interpreted as a metaphor for transitional justice. Yet, in contrast to the many silent stories within Salcedo's work, transitional justice theory and practice strongly accentuate storytelling and the critical importance of giving victims a voice. The website of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), for example, which completed its mandate at the end of 2017, has a special section entitled ‘Voice of the Victims’. Featuring the testimonies of 23 victim-witnesses, it emphasises that ‘The Tribunal's courtrooms have heard hundreds of victims tell what are often painful and tragic stories about what they saw and experienced’ (ICTY, n.d.).

It is imperative, however, to acknowledge and make explicit some of the many issues and challenges associated with storytelling in transitional justice contexts. This interdisciplinary article makes three important and original contributions in this regard, both building on and bringing something new to existing critical discussions about transitional justice, storytelling and voice. First, it problematises the narrow anthropocentrism of only focusing on and giving attention to human stories and voices. Haraway (2008: 244) remarks that ‘If we appreciate the foolishness of human exceptionalism, then we know that becoming is always becoming with’ (emphasis in the original). Building on this argument, this article maintains that storytelling – as a deeply relational and ‘lively’ process (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 91) – is always storytelling with, reflective of multiple entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds (Haraway, 2016: 97; Rose et al., 2012: 3). These entanglements and their significance, which remain substantially under-explored within transitional justice,¹ draw attention to the need for more inclusive and multispecies ways of thinking about storytelling – and what it looks and sounds like – in transitional justice contexts.

Second, the article focuses not just on storytelling but also, relatedly, on listening. It is striking that in contrast to the many discussions within transitional justice scholarship about storytelling and giving (human) victims a voice, the concept of listening has received far less attention. Pertinent in this regard is Stauffer's work, which powerfully illuminates the injustice of human beings not being heard – including in transitional justice contexts – and the resultant condition of ‘ethical loneliness’. As Stauffer (2018: 1) defines it, ethical loneliness is ‘the experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard’. Yet what about more-than-human worlds not being heard and listened to? Emphasising the need for expanded forms of listening in transitional justice processes, this article specifically reflects on the significance and utility of soundscape ecology, which broadly refers to the multiple sounds emanating from a particular landscape and the unique acoustical patterns that they create in time and space (Pijanowski et al., 2011: 204). While scholarship on soundscape ecology is ‘currently booming’ (Gasc et al., 2017: 216) in fields such as conservation ecology, sound studies and urban studies, this research is the first to discuss the concept in relation to transitional justice. It underlines that societies experiencing or emerging from large-scale violence and upheaval themselves constitute complex soundscapes, the acoustical patterns of which tell a story (or, rather, multiple stories). It is crucial, therefore, to learn to listen to and with these soundscapes. This is a necessary part of the ‘recognition of ecological interrelatedness’ (Black Elk, 2016: 3) and, thus, of helping to ensure that more-than-human worlds, ‘voices’ and experiences do not remain peripheral to transitional justice. In developing these arguments, the article also highlights the important scope that exists within the field of transitional justice for cross-disciplinary dialogue and knowledge exchanges between the social and natural sciences.

Third, the article contributes to a larger decolonising imperative. Transitional justice processes purport to deal with the legacies of large-scale abuses of human rights, but they typically do so without addressing deeper structural forms of violence that foster and enable these abuses. Settler colonialism is one example of structural violence, and some scholars underscore the vital importance of decolonising transitional justice (see, e.g. Nagy, 2022; Yusuf, 2018). Of particular note is Lykes and Murphy's (2023: 4) argument that ‘Decolonization may challenge us to disinvest in current norms wherein the human rights holder is primarily or exclusively an autonomous individual or a group of multiple individuals’. This article's approach to storytelling and listening can be read as an example / expression of decolonisation thus framed. Fundamentally, by accentuating storytelling and listening as deeply relational practices, this research de-centres Western liberalism – in which transitional justice has its roots – and gives prominence to Indigenous cosmologies. In the words of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Simpson (2016: 22), ‘Relationships within Indigenous thought are paramount’.

The Role of Storytelling in Transitional Justice

The wider context and significance of storytelling

Following the end of World War II, Allied Powers agreed to create a war crimes tribunal to try the senior members of the Nazi regime. On 1 October 1946, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg delivered its judgements against 22 defendants,² 12 of whom it sentenced to death. According to Teitel (2006: 1617), ‘it is Nuremberg's legacy that continues to guide our thinking about transitional and post-conflict justice’. It is essential to underline, however, that victims and their stories played a very minimal role in the IMT's proceedings. As Karstedt (2010: 13) points out, the Tribunal had little regard to who these individuals ‘had been, where they had lived and were living now (if still alive), and in which ways they had been victimized’.

In contrast, victims are much more visible in contemporary transitional justice processes. Examples include the televised proceedings of victims giving evidence to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (Evans, 2016); the long and determined struggle for justice and redress fought by Indigenous survivors of Canada's Indian Residential School system (Nagy, 2013); and the activism of victims’ organisations in Colombia (Gomez, 2022). There is also a widespread consensus that victims have a central role to play in transitional justice processes, and the significance of their stories is frequently stressed.

A common argument is that storytelling has therapeutic aspects, giving victims the opportunity to share some of their pain with others (Sveaass and Lavik, 2000: 49), to regain a sense of self-worth (Simpson, 2007: 95) and to have their experiences validated (Anderson, 2019: 33). Moon (2006: 258) points out in this regard that South Africa's TRC framed storytelling as ‘fundamental to catharsis, healing, and reconciliation on an individual and a national level’. Relatedly, storytelling – which Porter (2016: 48) discusses as ‘a demonstration of narrative agency’ – is frequently associated with victim empowerment. It can facilitate processes of meaning-making (Hamber, 2016: 11) and help victims to reframe and take control of their experiences (Henry, 2009: 129). According to Phelps (2006: 55), storytelling additionally enables victims to regain power over language. This is important because violence and pain can actively destroy language (Scarry, 1985a: 4); and some crimes may have profound silencing effects due to the shame and stigma associated with them.³

Relatedly, through the act of speaking out, victims demand to be heard (Walling, 2018: 389), using their voices and memories to challenge denial, political acts of ‘forgetting’ and what Scarry (1985b: 1) calls ‘disowning of the injury’. They may also challenge their own social marginalisation / stigmatisation. Baines and Stewart (2011: 259), for example, focus on an Acholi woman in northern Uganda who experienced forced marriage – an example of conflict-related sexual violence – and explore her storytelling as ‘an effort to produce and reproduce herself within her local sociocultural world’.

Storytelling concerns, critiques and challenges

The potential benefits of storytelling notwithstanding, there are many problems and challenges associated with the concept and its translation into practice. In criminal trials, for example, the strict question-answer format substantially disrupts and constrains victims’ storytelling. As Doak (2011: 272) argues, ‘The adversarial format of proceedings serves to stifle the potential for victims to give accounts in a free narrative form’. According to him, it is the prosecutors and defence lawyers who are the true storytellers in criminal trials, not the victims who come to testify (Doak, 2011: 272). There are related concerns that because criminal trials are inherently defendant-centred processes, victims’ stories are simply the means to a larger end (McEvoy and McConnachie, 2013: 495; Walling, 2018: 397).

There are also important sonic aspects of the legal process – often overlooked – that can further shape and limit storytelling. Parker's fascinating research, for example, has unpacked the many ways that sound was relevant to the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which completed its mandate at the end of 2015. Framing the Tribunal as a complex ‘justice soundscape’ (Parker, 2011: 964), he emphasises that its courtrooms were acoustically ‘its most carefully regulated spaces’ (Parker, 2011: 971); and he discusses the sonic significance of the gavel in investing exclusive control over these spaces in the judges (Parker, 2011: 978). In research focused on the International Criminal Court, Bens (2022: 39) reflects on sound as ‘a crucial part of the affective dynamics within a courtroom’ and an important factor in helping to create what he terms ‘transitional justice atmospheres’ (Bens, 2020). For her part, Flower, in her work on Swedish courts, remarks on a striking ‘near-silence’ that exists in courthouses. ‘The silence of a criminal trial’, she argues, ‘is the silence of a funeral. It is a sacred silence’ (Flower, 2021: 164). The larger point to be drawn from these various examples is that the sonic and auditory dimensions of the criminal trial process can potentially have a significant impact on victims and witnesses in the sense of what they can say, wish to say and feel comfortable to say.

Turning to TRCs, although they are often regarded as more victim-centred processes, this does not mean that they offer a completely free and unrestricted storytelling space. Far from it. Factors such as the large numbers of victims and commissions’ finite mandates necessarily create certain limitations. Discussing the Canadian TRC (2008–2015), for example, Brady (2013: 135) notes that one speaker, Mary Shecapio Blacksmith, commented: ‘But since I have only ten minutes, I’ll just make my story shorter than I usually do’. Brady also flags up the cultural tensions that existed between the type of storytelling that suited the Commission – whose materials provided advice to speakers about content and how to organise their thoughts (Brady, 2013: 133) – and Indigenous storytelling traditions. These traditions involve analogy, repetition and ‘play with temporality and detour, rather than recounting exact details in a linear fashion’ (Brady, 2013: 135; see also Geia et al., 2013: 15). Further illustrating how the Canadian TRC effectively marginalised these traditions, Indigenous scholars Corntassel et al. (2009: 149) note that in interviews conducted by T’lakwadzi in 2009 with seven male residential school survivors, all of the men stressed that ‘there was no room within the current TRC process for a community perspective to be really heard’.

Discussing the South African TRC (1995–2002), Hearty, for his part, maintains that due to the political context in which the Commission was operating and the prevailing post-apartheid discourse of a diverse yet united nation, some victims were given more attention than others. The Commission, he argues, prioritised the voices of ‘a certain kind of victim – that is, “the forgiving victim”’ (Hearty, 2018: 896). Relatedly, Colvin's work explores some of the frustrations that members of the Khulumani Support Group – a national organisation established in 1995 by victims and survivors of apartheid – experienced with the TRC. He notes that ‘Khulumani members felt that they were being put on stage and asked to perform traumatic but ultimately redeeming stories of suffering and recovery for the benefit of a closely watching nation and world’ (Colvin, 2004: 83; see also Madlingozi, 2010: 212). This further makes salient how storytelling in transitional justice settings can serve larger political objectives (see also Corntassel et al., 2009: 145; Ross, 2003: 326), which reinforces concerns about the commodification or appropriation of individuals’ stories (Hackett and Rolston, 2009: 365; Madlingozi, 2010: 211).

Colvin (2004) also makes salient the limitations of what he calls ‘traumatic storytelling’,⁴ and this highlights a larger issue not unique to the South African TRC. Specifically, storytelling in transitional justice processes overwhelmingly consists of individuals speaking about what was done to them and the harms and hurt that they experienced. As Godoy (2018: 373) argues, ‘victims are afforded a rather narrow bandwidth of activity in which what defines them is not …the potential or potency of their activities and ideals but more simply the violence visited upon them’. Reflecting specifically on the Truth Commission for El Salvador (1992–1993), she notes the lack of narrative space for those who took part in the process to speak about their involvement in revolutionary social movements and armed struggle against state violence (Godoy, 2018: 375).

In a similar vein, Crosby and Lykes offer a critical analysis of truth-telling processes in Guatemala. They explore, through their work with Mayan women who participated in the Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala,⁵ how the strong focus on and interest in these women's experiences of sexual violence meant that their stories of struggle and endurance were completely marginalised (Crosby and Lykes, 2011: 476). They also stress that the women's resistance to repeatedly telling stories of sexual violence partly stemmed from the fact that these stories did ‘not reflect the whole of the women's lives’ (Crosby and Lykes, 2011: 476). Crosby and Lykes’ work makes clear, thus, the critical imperative of ensuring that complex and multi-layered experiences are not reductively collapsed into stories of only one type of violence (see also Ross, 2003: 335; Stauffer, 2018: 82–83).

Thinking beyond human-centred storytelling

Informal transitional justice processes are often associated with more diverse and unrestricted forms of storytelling (Baines and Stewart, 2011; Bryson, 2016). They also illustrate various interplays between transitional justice and art. Jmal and Ladisch (2022), for example, discuss a podcast on the Arab Spring produced by a group of young activists in Tunisia. They frame the podcast as an example of ‘artivism’ (Jmal and Ladisch, 2022: 127) and explore how it weaves together multiple perspectives, accounts and everyday experiences. Ultimately, they underscore the importance of a ‘voices-centred approach’ to transitional justice that challenges existing systems of power, engages entire communities and creates space for many different voices – including frequently marginalised voices – to be heard (Jmal and Ladisch, 2022: 132). In their own work, Herremans and Destrooper focus on informal truth practices in Syria; these include documentary films like For Sama (released in 2019) and plays such as X-Adra and Y-Saydnaya (written by the Syrian playwright Ramzi Choukair). The authors unpack how these informal truth practices can ‘presence’ previously neglected stories and truths, and, in so doing, ‘surface unheard voices and perspectives’ (Herremans and Destrooper, 2023: 527).

Informal transitional justice processes, in other words, can potentially foster expanded and more inclusive types of storytelling. What is significant for the purposes of this article, however, is that these processes remain very much human-centred. Indeed, common to all of the arguments and critiques discussed in this section is their underlying anthropocentrism; they focus entirely on human storytelling. This is consistent with the fact that the field of transitional justice – which, to reiterate an earlier point, has its ‘normative seeds’ in the ‘garden of liberal theory’ (Mutua, 2015: 3) – is concerned with addressing violations of individual human rights (see, however, Huneeus and Rueda Sáiz, 2021). The liberal idea of the autonomous individual, however, does not sit easily with more relational perspectives that foreground interconnectedness, interdependency and multispecies encounters. As Gilbert et al. (2012: 336) argue, ‘We are all lichens’. These relational perspectives, moreover, draw attention to the need to question the narrowness and hubris of centring harms done only to humans, with the consequence that we neglect the transversal movement of harms across interwoven human and more-than-human worlds (Alaimo, 2008: 238; Ariza-Buitrago and Gómez-Betancur, 2023: 74–75; Peters and de Hemptinne, 2022: 1286).

Part of this process of questioning – which is also a novel way of addressing the narrative compression of victims’ stories that some of the authors discussed in this section have highlighted – entails re-thinking the concept and practice of storytelling within transitional justice. As Van Dooren et al. (2016: 23) insist, ‘Only-human stories will not serve anyone in a period shaped by escalating and mutually reinforcing processes of biosocial destruction’. The next section of this article draws on different bodies of literature, including Indigenous scholarship, to underline the importance of thinking relationally about storytelling, which it links to larger processes of decolonising transitional justice.

Relational Approaches to Storytelling

Thinking with Indigenous scholarship

It is beyond the scope of this research to offer a comprehensive analysis of Indigenous scholarship that does justice to the latter's depths and many layers. One of the article's larger aims, however, is to demonstrate how this scholarship can enrich the field of transitional justice, not least with respect to storytelling and how it is framed. Relationality and interconnectedness are common themes within the work of many Indigenous writers (see, e.g. Barlo et al., 2021; Iseke-Barnes, 2003; Simpson, 2016; Todd, 2014).⁶ Reo (2019: 66), an Anishinaabe scholar, emphasises relational accountability and the idea that ‘people are dependent on and related to everything and everyone around them, including air, water, rocks, plants, animals, and so-called “supernatural” beings’. By extension, knowledge is also relational; it develops through ‘dense webs of connections’ between human and more-than-human words (Reo, 2019: 69; see also Kimmerer, 2013: 18; Parter and Wilson, 2021: 1085). This co-constitution of knowledge accentuates, in turn, the agency of more-than-human worlds (Todd, in Kanngieser and Todd, 2020: 389; Watts, 2013: 21). Reflecting on this agency, Barlo, an Aboriginal scholar from the Yuin Nation in New South Wales, explains that ‘For Aboriginal Australia, and for me personally, it is about seeing Country⁷ as a living teaching breathing being, that has stuff for us, in return for what we bring to it’ (in Hughes and Barlo, 2021: 356). Wright et al. (2012), moreover, acknowledge Country as an active partner in the research process and thus as a co-author of their work.

Viewed from these Indigenous perspectives, storytelling is a deeply relational process. It cannot be otherwise because human beings do not tell stories in isolation. As Wright et al. (2012: 56) make clear, storytelling involves co-creation and co-construction. Corntassel et al.'s (2009) research also illuminates relational dimensions of storytelling, and in particular the nexus between storytelling and land. Underlining that ‘Indigenous storytelling is connected to our homelands’ (Corntassel et al., 2009: 137), they further point out that these storytelling-land relationships – which the previously mentioned Canadian TRC process overlooked – ‘form the foundation for effective resistance to contemporary colonialism’ (Corntassel et al., 2009: 149). In a similar vein, Nxumalo et al. (2022: 101) argue that through storytelling and the enactment of relationships with more-than-human worlds, Indigenous people reaffirm their connectedness to their land – which colonialism sought to sever and destroy – and challenge hierarchical and extractivist culture / nature relations.

To further expand on this theme of resistance, a crucial point is that Indigenous storytelling destabilises meta-narratives that reflect and perpetuate the alignment of liberalism and settler colonialism (Byrd, 2011: xxvi). In particular, it challenges ‘both the orientation to futurity and the liberal telos that are common to settler colonialism and transitional justice’ (Park, 2020: 262). An important part of decolonising the field of transitional justice, therefore, is to take seriously Indigenous onto-epistemologies and their significance for how we think about storytelling.

This article does so directly. In addition to engaging with the work of Indigenous scholars, it draws on other bodies of literature that are highly relevant – yet similarly overlooked within the field of transitional justice – to how we conceptualise storytelling. They include posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013a) and new materialism (Barad, 2007). Métis scholar Todd (2016: 7) reminds us, however, that these Euro-Western academic discourses parallel and appropriate Indigenous thinking – and that failure to appreciate this entrenches deeper processes of marginalisation (see also TallBear, 2017: 197). This article makes visible some of these shared themes and resonances (while also acknowledging important tensions and frictions)⁸ by utilising different literatures and knowledges, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, that collectively open up ‘new expanded possibilities of relationality’ (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020: 108).

Thinking with posthumanism and other relational ontologies

The remainder of this section focuses mainly on posthumanism but weaves into the discussion – consistent with the fact that posthumanism does not have clearly defined boundaries – other intersecting bodies of scholarship. While different posthumanist schools of thought exist (Crellin and Harris, 2021: 469), what they broadly challenge are human / nature dualisms and onto-epistemologies that artificially separate humans ‘from the worlds they co-inhabit with proliferating forms of life’ (Margulies and Bersaglio 2018: 104). In other words, we do not exist outside of the larger assemblages and materialities with which our lives (and bodies) are synergistically intertwined (Crellin and Harris, 2021: 473; Fox and Alldred, 2015: 401; Mai, 2020: 115).⁹ Boehi beautifully illustrates the concept of assemblage in her research on Adderley Street flower sellers in Cape Town, South Africa. It is the vendors (mainly women) who arrange the flowers, drawing on their knowledge, experience and imagination. Yet, according to Boehi, the plants themselves also play an active part in the process. For example, factors including their colour, size and lifespan shape what the vendors do with them and how they arrange them. Insisting on the agency of both the vendors and the plants, thus, she maintains that flower arranging is also ‘shaped by an agency which is neither fully located with the human or vegetal participants but with the human-vegetal assemblage that emerges in the process of flower arranging’ (Boehi, 2022: 157).

It is important to note that there are ‘hardline’ posthumanists who embrace an anti-humanist stance, as Braidotti discusses (2013b: 3). However, it is reductionist and misleading to conceptualise posthumanism as quintessentially anti-human. It is not. The ‘post’ in posthumanism broadly signals ‘a way to (re)think the human in relationships with nonhumans and more-than-humans and to build upon and move beyond anthropo- (human centered) and logocentric (language centered) ways of be(com)ing, doing, and knowing’ (Kuby, 2019: 128). Viewed in this way, what posthumanism disrupts and unseats is the idea of human exceptionalism – and what it means to be human (Rose et al., 2012: 2). The crucial point is that if everything is interconnected through ‘webs of interspecies dependence’ (Tsing, 2012: 144) and intra-acting (Barad, 2003: 814), agency is necessarily relational and not exclusive to Homo sapiens. In the words of new materialist scholar Bennett (2010: xvii), ‘The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman working group’. By extension, if we acknowledge the agency of more-than-human worlds – including fish (Todd, 2014), oceans (Lehman, 2013) and forests (Kohn, 2013) – we cannot privilege only human perspectives, voices and needs.

The ideas discussed in this section thus have wider implications for how we think about storytelling in transitional justice processes. Fundamentally, when we proceed from the basic starting point that everything is interwoven and interconnected, this necessarily extends to stories. As Haraway (2019: 565) argues, ‘Stories nest like Russian dolls inside ever more stories and ramify like fungal webs throwing out ever more sticky threads’. Storytelling, in other words, is an intrinsically relational and multispecies process. It always involves storytelling with the ‘multiply storied worlds’ (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 85) that we are part of. It also requires acknowledging more-than-human storytelling. The next two sections further develop these arguments.

Storytelling With

When Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) first saw her, he mistook her for a doe. It was only once she had climbed the bank from the river that he realised his error. The animal that he was looking at was a wolf. Several grown pups enthusiastically joined her, wagging their tails. He was working for the US Forest Service at the time and admitted: ‘In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second, we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy’ (Leopold, 1968: 130). The adult wolf lay fatally wounded. When he reached her, Leopold (1968: 140) watched ‘a fierce green fire dying in her eyes’. This proved to be a deeply profound moment that led him to entirely rethink his views.

‘Thinking like a mountain’, Leopold's most famous essay – written in 1944 and first published one year after his death – can be read as a powerful example of storytelling with, as an expression of multispecies storytelling. Quintessentially, he tells a story with the dying wolf and with the living mountain that suffered the wider long-term consequences of human interference. Leopold had assumed that no wolves would mean ‘hunters’ paradise’ (while overlooking the ecological implications of uncontrolled deer grazing). ‘But after seeing the green fire die’, he wrote, ‘I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view’ (Leopold, 1968: 130).¹⁰ ‘Thinking like a mountain’ means thinking ecologically – and thus holistically – and appreciating that everything has its own place and role within complex ecosystems, and ultimately both the wolf and the mountain helped Leopold to do this. He became a renowned ecologist and conservationist, and he was the first to advocate – in the same year that he wrote ‘Thinking like a mountain’ – for the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park (McIntrye, 2019: 62).¹¹

That Leopold's views about wolves changed through his encounter with the dying wolf and his storytelling with her highlights a larger point – namely, that storytelling, as a multispecies process, has important ethical dimensions. As Van Dooren and Rose (2016: 80) have argued, ‘Telling stories has consequences, one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn into new connections and, with them, new accountabilities and obligations’ (see also Parter and Wilson, 2021: 1085). In her own work, Haraway (2012: 212) underlines the significance of what she terms ‘response-abilities’ and points out that ‘Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise’.

McEwan discusses these ideas in her work on multispecies storytelling with plants and specifically with protea, a species of South African flowering plants that are part of the threatened fynbos biome in the Western Cape. Drawing on Ryan's (2017) concept of phytography – a co-authorship between humans and plants that involves collaboration, dialogue and communication between the two, and openness on the part of human authors to what plants are communicating to us – McEwan (2023: 1117) reflects on what we might learn from listening to protea. While plants play an important role as teachers in many Indigenous cosmologies (see, e.g. Kimmerer, 2013: 213), many of us do not know how to listen to them. For McEwan (2023: 1128), the crucial role of phytography is that it ‘embraces botanical lives, requires heterogenizing and an empathic regard for individual plants as subjects with particular lifeworld experiences’. For her, listening to and storytelling with plants is about engaging ethically with them, which can radically reshape environmental politics. In short, plants ‘might gather us, encourage us to embrace more-than-human worlds, and to dwell with them to better comprehend the unfolding ecological crisis’ (McEwan, 2023: 1131; see also Tsymbalyuk, 2023).

McGiffin's work is also highly pertinent to this discussion. It focuses on the close relationships between rural amaXhosa people in South Africa's Eastern Cape and cattle, and it explores how these relationships manifest in a poetic form known as izibongo. Practiced by respected oral poets known as iimbongi, izibongo – according to McGiffin (2022: 81) – is ‘very clearly a multispecies poetics of place that names not only human inhabitants of a landscape but also their ever-present forbears, the wild plants and animals that they share the landscape with, and the animal companions that share their homesteads’. Izibongo thus involves both storytelling with and making poetry with more-than-human worlds; and in this way, it reinforces webs of kinship, companionship and care (McGiffin, 2022: 93).

How are these ideas – all of which strongly echo and resonate with the Indigenous concept of relational accountability (Louis, 2007: 133) – relevant to transitional justice? This article maintains that they are highly pertinent in several interconnected ways. Its first section discussed how the therapeutic dimensions of storytelling are often emphasised in transitional justice scholarship. Doak (2011: 371), for example, notes that when victims testify in the context of criminal proceedings or a TRC, feelings of shame and humiliation that they might have been grappling with – due to the abuses and traumas they suffered – can be positively transformed into a sense of dignity and empowerment. Yet, he also stresses that not all victims experience these transformations (Doak, 2011: 371). In their research in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which 855 citizens completed a questionnaire, Parmentier et al. (2009: 39) found that 68 per cent of respondents answered that it was important for people to tell others about their experiences during the Bosnian war. In contrast, when respondents were asked whether they themselves would feel better by talking to people about their experiences, only 35 per cent answered in the affirmative. According to the authors, ‘This may mean that although the individuals find it important, the actual idea of sharing these experiences may bring along fears of re-victimisation, of reviving one's painful past’ (Parmentier et al., 2009: 39).

This example illustrates that the relationship between storytelling, healing and transformation can be tenuous in practice. There is, however, substantial potential for strengthening it. This would require a major paradigm shift, in which storytelling in transitional justice processes is reconceptualised as storytelling with, and those telling their stories are given the space, freedom and encouragement to talk not just about their own experiences but also, inter alia, about the environments they inhabit (changes in vegetation, fewer or different bird sounds, reduced soil quality), how they interact with and extend acts of care to these more-than-human worlds and how these worlds interact with and extend care to them (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 89). Such a shift could help the storyteller – in the words of Métis scholar Iseke (2013: 573) – to ‘begin the transformative process of understanding oneself in relation’. This would be especially significant in cases where victims feel alone, isolated or ostracised.

It would also contribute to expanding how we think about harm, in the sense that storytelling with more-than-human worlds can offer much deeper and richer insights into the legacies of war and armed conflict (Peters and de Hemptinne, 2022: 1286). Illustrative of this, in 2021 the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP) in Colombia recognised territory as a victim of the country's more than five decades of internal armed conflict. This is a contextually specific example, reflecting the persistent efforts of Indigenous and Black communities to ensure that legal structures like the JEP incorporate and acknowledge their own worldviews and relationships with their territory (Huneeus and Rueda Sáiz, 2021: 215). What it accentuates, however, are ‘linked humans and nonhumans, enfolded in each other's storied outcomes’ (Haraway, 2018: 104–105) – and the harms that form part of these outcomes (Huneeus and Rueda Sáiz, 2021: 223). The more, therefore, that these linkages are explored and made prominent within transitional justice contexts through creative approaches to storytelling that embrace its relational and multispecies dimensions, the more that storytelling can potentially become a genuinely transformative process that includes more-than-human worlds and acknowledges their agency as co-storytellers.¹²

It is significant to note in the context of this discussion that several countries have accorded rights to nature, with Ecuador becoming the first country to do so in 2008 (followed by Bolivia in 2010). According to Article 71 of the Ecuadorian Constitution, ‘Nature, Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes’ (Berros, 2021: 195). To take another example, in 2014 Aotearoa New Zealand adopted the Te Uwerera Act, which recognises the Te Uwerera forest (the ancestral territory of the Tūhoe Iwi people) as a legal person with its own rights (Kauffman, 2020: 578). These are extremely important developments¹³ that attest to the gradual expansion of the legal subject; and this article is underlining the scope for a similar expansion of the subject within transitional justice theory and practice qua storytelling. In short, a de-centred approach to storytelling that does not assign pre-determined importance to particular stories – and storytellers – over others is conducive to fostering ‘a kaleidoscopic plurality of perspectives’ (Laszlo, 2022: 129) which provide a basis, in turn, for imagining and building ‘multispecies futures’ (Stifjell, 2022: 97).

More-Than-Human Storytelling

We are surrounded by and exist within complex and multi-layered soundscapes consisting of three principal acoustic sources – the geophony (non-biological natural sounds such as wind and rain), the biophony (biological sounds such as birdsong and mating calls) and the anthropophony (or anthrophony) (human-generated sounds) (Krause, 2016: 2–3). The anthropophony / anthrophony frequently disrupts and disturbs the biophony; and indeed, the more noise we make, the more we exert our power over more-than-human worlds (García Ruiz and South, 2019: 128). In so doing, we overlook the fact that these richly textured soundscapes constitute ‘vast and humming fields of multispecies storytelling’ (Bencke and Bruhn, 2022: 10).

More-than-human storytellers provide crucial insights into their worlds (and the healthiness of those worlds) via sound (Krause, 2013: 94). Through their song, for example, birds tell stories, inter alia, about place and the presence of other birds or predators (Despret, 2022: 30). Coyote sounds and vocalisations, and their temporal dimensions and dynamics, tell larger stories about ‘what life in the city entails for nonhuman residents’ (Van Patter, 2023: 925). Altered or muted sounds, or silences, can communicate stories of harm done to more-than-human worlds, as well as stories of resilience and recovery (Gottesman et al., 2021).

Sounds also complement other more-than-human forms of storytelling. Govindrajan (2018: 20) emphasises that animals produce ‘meaningful narratives’ about place via actions. As an illustration of this, wolves living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine have been able to survive, thrive and develop resistance to radiation (Gillespie, 2024), thereby complexifying storied framings of this environment as ‘either a “wasteland” or an “apocalyptic Eden”’ (Turnbull, 2020: 24). In her exquisite work Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist and scholar Kimmerer (2013: 128) argues that ‘Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do’. In a chapter of the book entitled ‘The three sisters’, she maintains that ‘Together these plants—corn, beans, and squash—feed the people, feed the land, and feed our imaginations, telling us how we might live’ (Kimmerer, 2013: 129). Melting and retreating glaciers tell their own stories, including of multiple and entangled losses (Morehouse and Cigliano, 2021: 914).

The storytelling of more-than-human worlds illustrates, in turn, their active role in shaping how we understand and experience place (Turner and Morrison, 2021). Bird sounds are just one example. Familiar sounds can be comforting and reassuring, helping to anchor our sense of place. In contrast, encountering bird sounds to which we are not accustomed (for example, if we move to a new area or country) can be deeply unsettling and disrupt our sense of place and belonging (Whitehouse, 2015: 66). While it is not within the scope of this article to examine the wealth of scholarship (particularly in the field of geography) on place-making, it is notable that the concept is largely absent from transitional justice scholarship. This is significant because transitional justice processes necessarily have important place-based dimensions in the sense that they are addressing large-scale abuses and violations committed in physical places, such as camps, school buildings, neighbourhoods, villages, churches and towns. The pivotal point is that thinking about places as relationally constituted, made and storied by human and more-than-human actors and ‘entangled and circulating patterns of intra-action’ (Van Dooren and Rose, 2016: 1), further makes salient the narrowness of storytelling practices within transitional justice processes and their privileging of human-centred stories.

It also raises important questions about where stories begin – and end. Such questions have not been explicitly explored within extant transitional justice scholarship. They are implicit, however, in criticisms that transitional justice processes focus on ‘exceptional’ events and neglect deeper structural and colonial forms of violence (see, e.g. Balint et al., 2014; Hoddy and Gready, 2020). This article's reconceptualisation of transitional justice storytelling brings new layers to these arguments, by drawing attention not just to interwoven forms of violence but to violence extending across human and more-than-human worlds. To cite Neimanis (2017: 8), ‘Just like bodies of water, stories are rarely autochthonous; they usually begin in many places at once’.

This section and the previous one have developed the argument that storytelling is a relational and multispecies process, and they have spotlighted and unpacked the crucial concepts of storytelling with and more-than-human storytelling. The final section reflects on how to translate these ideas into transitional justice practice, specifically emphasising the significance of sound and listening. It should be noted in this context that there are some insightful studies analysing sonic – and other sensory – dimensions of the legal process (see, e.g. Bens, 2020, 2022; Flower, 2021), including a Law and the Senses series of edited volumes (see, e.g. Nirta et al., 2023; Pavoni et al., 2018). There remains a need, however, as Parker (2018: 206) has argued, to cultivate a greater ‘sensitivity to questions of sound and listening across legal thought and practice’. This need is especially acute in relation to transitional justice. Fundamentally, a critical part of developing and expanding the field in ways that acknowledge the significance of more-than-human worlds, their storytelling and agency is learning how to listen to them.

Listening to More-Than-Human Worlds

The importance of listening

According to Bradshaw (2010: 410), ‘When people stopped listening to the animals, they became blind to the human-caused environmental damage that has brought the entire planet to near collapse’. These powerful words make clear the pivotal importance of listening – and not only to animals but to more-than-human worlds more broadly. Indeed, listening is a recurring theme in the various bodies of literature on which this article draws. Scholars frequently stress that the more we listen to these more-than-human worlds and their stories, the more we will learn about them – and what is happening to them (Bekoff, 2006: 80; Whitehouse, 2015: 70). Flint (2022: 537) remarks in this regard that listening and attuning to more-than-human sounds are acts that fundamentally shape our responsibility to places and spaces.

Listening is also integral to many Indigenous cultures. Métis scholar Graveline (2000: 364), for example, argues that ‘To Listen Respectfully to Others provides another lens to view our own Reality’; and Michi Saagiig Nishnaageb academic Simpson (2021: 6) emphasises that in storytelling, as ‘a practice of contracting and releasing sound across scales’ – individual, collective and systemic – ‘the culture of listening’ is ultimately what is most important. In their own work, Ungunmerr-Baumann et al. (2022: 96) discuss the Aboriginal concept of Dadirri, which they explain as ‘the art of being present, being still, connecting with yourself and the environment in such a profound way that it creates space for deep relationships’. Dadirri therefore encourages deep forms of listening which foster new and co-created knowledges and understandings (Ungunmerr-Baumann et al., 2022: 100). This further highlights an important dialectic between listening and learning. For Aboriginal scholar Barlo, listening – and deep, contemplative listening – is a quintessential part of existing in relationship with Country, learning from and with Country and cultivating ‘respectful, reciprocal, and accountable relationships with Country’ (in Hughes and Barlo, 2021: 361).

In contrast, transitional justice scholars have given very little attention to the concept of listening (and to sound more broadly). This gap – which Sotelo Castro's (2020: 221) work makes salient – is especially striking given that the related concept of storytelling has received considerable attention. Whenever discussions do extend to listening, moreover, the accent is squarely on listening to human victims.¹⁴ Porter (2016: 46–47), for example, reflects on the importance of ‘listening to the gendered dimension to stories told during transitional justice processes in order to respond with empathetic compassion’; and Crosby and Lykes (2011: 476) question ‘how to listen to the voices women have, rather than “giving voice,” despite unequal relations of power’. In their work on arts-based transitional justice, Levesque et al. (2023) explore the concept of embodied witnessing and its relationship with listening, care and storytelling. They argue that embodied witnessing involves cultivating ‘a sensuous perception of our own bodies’ (Levesque et al., 2023: 46), which can better prepare us for listening to and caring for other people's stories (Levesque et al., 2023: 47).

Particularly pertinent to this article is Castillejo-Cuéllar's work. A former commissioner of Colombia's Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition, Castillejo-Cuéllar (2023: 764) discusses truth commissions as ‘listening devices that administer voices and silences’ (emphasis in the original) and notes that the Colombian Commission's report – which he describes as a ‘body-centred report’ – made some forms of violence audible while others were left inaudible (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2023: 770). The latter effectively ‘fell beyond the range of listening’ (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2023: 770). While Castillejo-Cuéllar's article is not specifically about violence done to more-than-human worlds or the silencing of more-than-human stories, it illuminates the unevenness of listening in transitional justice processes and implicitly raises important questions about how we listen – and what we listen to.

In everyday life, many of us have lost the art of communicating with and listening to more-than-human worlds and soundscapes. Krause (2013: 137), for example, points out that ‘Early humans would have had an intimate relationship with their soundscapes; they would have learned to “read” the biophony for essential information’. This intimate relationship continues to exist in some cultures. More generally, however, connectedness to the biophony and knowing how to ‘read’ it have become much less important, and relationships between human and more-than-human worlds are too often defined by exploitation, extractivism and disregard rather than respect, reciprocity and care. Listening to more-than-human worlds, however, is a quintessential part of storytelling with them and acknowledging their storytelling agency, and this article maintains that there is an important yet entirely unexplored role for soundscape ecology in fostering new and expanded forms of listening in transitional justice contexts.

The untapped potential of soundscape ecology

Pijanowski et al. (2011: 204) define soundscape ecology as ‘all sounds, those of biophony, geophony, and anthrophony, emanating from a given landscape to create unique acoustical patterns across a variety of spatial and temporal scales’. These sounds are significant because while transitional justice processes are concerned with the legacies of large-scale human rights abuses, they neglect broader legacies of violence which can manifest in altered and disrupted soundscapes. In other words, incorporating soundscape ecology into transitional justice is one important way of drawing attention to how large-scale violence and social upheaval affect more-than-human worlds (just as ecology scholarship has examined how disturbances such as logging and fire affect these worlds; see, e.g. Rappaport et al., 2022).

Art has a key role to play in this regard. This article began by discussing Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's chairs installation, as a metaphor for thinking about transitional justice. More broadly, there is growing interest in and use of arts-based approaches to transitional justice (see, e.g. Herremans and Destrooper, 2023; Shefik, 2018), and the concept of soundscape ecology could be practically translated into transitional justice through art. My current research, for example, is exploring some of the environmental consequences of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and their significance for how we think about and approach transitional justice. Research participants – who include botanists and biologists – have been asked to make two short recordings using their mobile phones,¹⁵ to capture some of the ways that their soundscapes have changed as a consequence of the war and some of the latter's impacts on more-than-human worlds. In one of the recordings, the dominant sound is the stridulation of crickets. The second recording, made two hours later in the same location, demonstrates how quickly a soundscape can radically change; punctuating the haunting sound of an air raid siren are the barks and whines of the interviewee's dog. In another set of recordings, the first one is the persistent sound of a bobak marmot in the Ukrainian eastern steppe, an ecosystem that has suffered extensive harm due to Russia's full-scale invasion. The interviewee shared this recording – which he made before the war – to accentuate the loss of a soundscape that he loved and his hope to one day hear again the sounds of the steppe. In his second recording, from the present, a cat miaows pitifully as the sound of an air raid siren rises and falls in the background and a funeral song plays.

Powerful soundscape recordings such as these could be creatively incorporated into dance, drama and music. The website of Stop Ecocide International (n.d.), for example, discusses an artistic choral project called Choirs for Ecocide Law and notes that the project's main purpose is ‘to spread awareness about the need to make large-scale environmental destruction (ecocide) an international crime’. Significantly, interweaving soundscape ecology into art and performance would resonate with larger developments aimed at making transitional justice processes more inclusive, particularly of young people (Parrin et al., 2022). Soundscape recordings could also add important acoustic elements to memorials and transitional justice museums, to encourage listening and to thereby generate new discussion, debate and reflection.

Storytelling can of course take many different artistic and creative forms. The use of social or concerned photography – a branch of documentary photography – in criminology is just one example (Van de Voorde, 2017). Another is the depiction of the rule of law in Australian colonial history in the form of a set of drawings known as Governor Davey's Proclamation to the Aborigines 1816 (Manderson, 2011). To be clear, therefore, this article is not seeking to minimise the importance of other types of storytelling. What it is aiming to encourage is greater reflection on and attention to sound and listening in transitional justice contexts. First, the article has consistently accentuated the thematic of relationality; and as LaBelle (2021: 210) argues, ‘sound and listening, hearing and voicing…participate in facilitating a deeply expanded perspective on relational bonds’. Second, and highly relevant to the larger imperative of decolonising transitional justice, listening is, to reiterate, an important part of Indigenous people's relations with more-than-human worlds. Kimmerer (2013: 48) shares that she could spend ‘a whole day listening. And a whole night’, further asserting that ‘Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop’ (Kimmerer, 2013: 300). Finally, the significance that this article attaches to soundscape ecology highlights that important scope exists for widening the field of transitional justice to include, inter alia, ecologists, ethologists, biologists, botanists and their knowledge. As Van Dooren et al. (2016: 11) underscore, ‘Immersing oneself in multispecies worlds often necessitates forming collaborative teams to bring together complimentary skills and expertise’.

Conclusion

Although the field of transitional justice continues to grow and expand, it remains overwhelmingly human-centred and rooted in liberal ideology. This strong anthropocentrism, moreover, has gone largely unchallenged. Herein lies the significance of this interdisciplinary article. It has focused specifically on storytelling to accentuate crucial interconnections and imbrications between human and more-than-human worlds that remain largely neglected and overlooked within transitional justice scholarship and practice. In particular, it has argued and sought to demonstrate that storytelling is never an only-human process; it involves storytelling with and, relatedly, acknowledgement of the storytelling agency of more-than-human worlds. While transitional justice scholarship has primarily focused on whether and how human victims and witnesses might benefit from telling their stories, and on some of the practical issues that storytelling presents, a more elemental point is that ‘In order to accommodate…different kinds of stories, we need to come up with new ways of telling them—with and for whom’ (Bencke and Bruhn, 2022: 10).

This research has further argued that storytelling with and acknowledging other-than-human storytellers are processes that critically require us to listen to more-than-human worlds – and to know how to listen to them. In doing so, it has illuminated an important role for soundscape ecology and suggested some potential ways of incorporating it into transitional justice processes. These reflections on soundscape ecology – a concept that has never previously been discussed in relation to transitional justice – make prominent ‘how a thoroughly symbiotic perspective opens important areas of research’ (Gilbert et al., 2012: 327).

It is also necessary to underscore that this article is significant in the larger context of continuing and growing calls to decolonise transitional justice. It has sought to advance this agenda by drawing on a wide range of literature grounded in deeply relational onto-epistemologies, some of it written by Indigenous scholars and some of it expressing ideas that strongly resonate with Indigenous beliefs and cosmologies. In this way, it has aimed to demonstrate, to cite Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar TallBear (2017: 193), that ‘Indigenous thinkers have important contributions to make to conversations in which human societies rethink the range of nonhuman beings with whom we see ourselves in intimate relation’. And it has made clear that these conversations have a critical place in transitional justice theory and practice. Ultimately, transitional justice is not just about learning from the past in order to build and create a better future in the sense of ‘never again’. It is also about learning – through interconnected processes of storytelling and listening – ‘what it means to be just one actor in an entangled world rather than the dominant being in a human-oriented hierarchy’ (Fenske and Norkunas, 2017: 107).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The soundscape recordings from the Russia-Ukraine war are part of a research project (2024-2025) funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RF-2024-137). The author received no other financial support for the research, or for the authorship and publication of the article.

ORCID iD

Janine Natalya Clark

Notes

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Storytelling and Listening in Transitional Justice Processes: Addressing the Marginalisation of More-than-Human Worlds

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The Role of Storytelling in Transitional Justice

The wider context and significance of storytelling

Storytelling concerns, critiques and challenges

Thinking beyond human-centred storytelling

Relational Approaches to Storytelling

Thinking with Indigenous scholarship

Thinking with posthumanism and other relational ontologies

Storytelling With

More-Than-Human Storytelling

Listening to More-Than-Human Worlds

The importance of listening

The untapped potential of soundscape ecology

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References