Transitional justice and memory-building: Acknowledging the importance of more-than-human worlds

Abstract

Transitional justice research on memory has neglected other-than-human memory. This interdisciplinary article – part of a research project examining the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war and their significance for transitional justice – is a response to this gap. It maintains that expanded thinking about memory in transitional justice contexts, as a novel expression of what Ingold terms ‘splitting’, is a crucial part of addressing the marginalisation of more-than-human worlds. Its approach is twofold. First, the article discusses some of the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war directly in other-than-human memory terms, with a specific focus on the destruction of forests. Second, it reflects on potential ways of giving expression to other-than-human memories in transitional justice contexts and including more-than-human worlds in memory-building practices. Emphasising the importance of developing what Gündoğan İbrişim calls ‘response-able memory’, it argues that memory-building is ultimately a sympoietic process of making memories and remembering with more-than-human worlds.

The Anthropocene allows for no separation or clean lines; all is entangled, everything is cocomposed (Smith, 2021: 258).

Introduction

In a recent article, Ingold (2024: 9) underscores that ‘You don’t tell things apart by superimposing a conceptual grid on the data of experience. You do it by entering into the processes of their formation and by separating them from the inside, along the grain’. To further explain this, he makes a distinction between splitting and cutting. If we cut a log, he argues, we break it up into pieces that we can count once we have finished. If we take an axe to the log, however, we are entering into the grain and following a line in the timber from when the tree was growing in the ground. In other words, ‘With cutting, you divide from the outside; with splitting you differentiate from the inside’ (Ingold, 2024: 9).

The distinction between cutting and splitting is highly relevant to transitional justice. This is a field that remains strongly human-centred – a reflection of its rootedness in liberal ideology (Mutua, 2015: 3) and of ‘the structuring influence’ of legal frameworks (Killean and Newton, 2025) that manifest ‘persistent ontological hierarchies’ (Celermajer and O’Brien, 2021: 136). Anthropocentric approaches to transitional justice are effectively based on cutting and ‘dividing from the outside’ in a way that accentuates and reinforces human/nature binaries. Splitting, in contrast, is about differentiating from the inside and acknowledging the interconnections and entanglements between different lifeworlds.

This interdisciplinary article is not the first to discuss and challenge the field’s marginalisation of more-than-human worlds (see, for example, Ariza-Buitrago and Gómez-Betancur, 2023; Clark, 2023a; Killean and Dempster, 2025; Szoke, 2025). What is novel is how it does so. Celermajer and O’Brien (2021: 126) have examined, with a specific focus on soil, how transitional justice ‘might be put to work to think through how to build a bridge between the unjust reality of human relations with the more-than-human and new forms of relationship that would support the flourishing of humans and the more-than-human’. While this article also has a core relational thematic, it develops it through a particular focus on memory. More concretely, it puts memory ‘to work’ as a potential and unexplored way of addressing the neglect of more-than-human worlds in transitional justice. In so doing, it argues that expanded thinking about memory in transitional justice contexts can make salient ‘the imbricated histories and pasts of human and nonhuman species’ (Kennedy, 2018: 506) – and therefore help to operationalise the ‘splitting’ that Ingold discusses.

Memory is a significant theme within transitional justice (see, for example, Barahona de Brito, 2010; Hepworth, 2023; Kent, 2011; Manning, 2017). Indeed, the former United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence, Fabián Salvioli, has described memory processes as constituting ‘the fifth pillar of transitional justice’ ¹ and ‘a vital tool for enabling societies to emerge from the cycle of hatred and conflict’ (UN General Assembly, 2020: para. 21). Existing discussions, however, primarily focus on the politics of memory (Barahona de Brito et al., 2001; Visoka, 2016) and the complexities of what is remembered – and how (Brown, 2012; Tamayo Gomez, 2022). While these are pivotal issues, it is essential to ‘thicken’ how the field of transitional justice conceptualises and approaches memory and memory-building.

Craps (2018: 500) has identified ‘a new, fourth phase in memory studies’. Prompted, he explains, by ‘our growing consciousness of the Anthropocene that takes the gradual scalar expansion characterising the previous phases ² to a whole new level’, this new phase explicitly questions and moves away from ‘the humanist assumptions’ that underpinned the previous phases (Craps, 2018: 500). The Anthropocene, in short, challenges us to think about memory in new ways that explicitly acknowledge the interconnectedness and entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds. ³ As Haraway (2016: 69) beautifully summarises, ‘The practice of the arts of memory enfold all terran critters’. These ‘terran critters’ and more-than-human worlds more widely are largely absent from discussions about memory and transitional justice. So too, by extension, is attention to and acknowledgement of other-than-human memory. Putting transitional justice into deeper conversation with memory studies, this article – one of the outputs of a research project examining the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war and their significance for how we think about transitional justice (see, for example, Clark, 2025a) – makes an important contribution to addressing these gaps.

First, the article explores other-than-human memory by directly framing some of the Russia–Ukraine war’s environmental consequences in memory terms – an approach that also brings something new to existing literature on the war (see, for example, Tsymbalyuk, 2025; Yutilova et al., 2025). Scholars in various disciplines have discussed, inter alia, soil memory (also known as pedomemory) (Janzen, 2016) and the memory of lakes (Smith, 2021). Given the huge impacts that the ongoing war is having on Ukraine’s forests (Peter and Hunder, 2024), this article focuses on tree memories.

Second, and relatedly, the article reflects on potential ways of giving expression to other-than-human memories in transitional justice contexts and including more-than-human worlds in memory-building practices. Significant in this regard is the idea of memorial trees (Cloke and Jones, 2004). As scholars writing on the topic have emphasised, however, the practical translation of this concept sometimes involves attempts to control and manage ‘nature’ for human ends (see, for example, Heath-Kelly, 2018). This research therefore underlines the importance of engaging in memorialisation with trees in ways that give expression to what Gündoğan İbrişim (2024: 96) calls ‘response-able memory’, a type of memory that ‘facilitates a transformation in our comprehension of the interconnectedness of memory, agency, and care’. As a further example of response-able memory and, relatedly, of ‘splitting’ – as Ingold defines it – the article also discusses the importance of listening to more-than-human worlds. Ultimately, it seeks to demonstrate that memory-building is a sympoietic process – sympoiesis meaning ‘making-with’ (Haraway, 2016: 58) – of making memories and remembering with more-than-human worlds.

Methodology and article structure

The article draws on original empirical data. As part of my aforementioned research on the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war, I interviewed 33 people in Ukraine – 30 via Zoom and three via email. The respondents consisted primarily of scientists (among whom were botanists, a marine biologist and two herpetologists), Ukrainians without specific environmental expertise (including an English teacher and a former soldier) and two lawyers. This mixed sample was useful for unpacking the war’s environmental consequences, and for thinking about how they might translate into transitional justice, from a variety of different angles. Interviews were recorded, with the participants’ informed consent, and they typically lasted between one hour and one-and-a-half hours. I conducted the majority of the interviews in English and used an interpreter in a small number of cases. After carefully checking and editing the Zoom-generated transcripts, I uploaded them into NVivo and coded them, developing and refining the codebook as I worked.

The research methodology also had an important and novel acoustic component. In the context of a previous research project focused on resilience, I became interested in the relationship between resilience and sound (Clark, 2023b) – and in the concepts of soundscape ecology and acoustic ecology (see, for example, Pijanowski et al., 2011; Westerkamp, 2002). I was also struck by the fact that these concepts remain neglected in studies of war and armed conflict, and indeed in transitional justice scholarship. In this new research project on the Russia–Ukraine war, I was keen to address these gaps by exploring what sound might reveal about some of the war’s environmental impacts – and how such acoustic data might be used in transitional justice. I asked interviewees to make two recordings of their local soundscapes using their mobile phones. They uploaded the recordings onto a secure website developed by the host institution (the University of Birmingham), and I asked them some questions about their recordings during the interviews – including why they made those particular recordings and how they felt when they listened back to them. ⁴

I had some initial concerns about this very experimental part of the methodology (for a more detailed overview, see Clark, 2025b), including whether the recordings would even be useful. Certainly, one of the challenges was that because interviewees were based in cities (including Kyiv, Lviv and Dnipro) far from front line areas, ⁵ they were often quite limited in terms of the types of sounds – air raid sirens, Shahed drones, street noise – that they could record. Several of them, however, made very powerful recordings of animals, especially dogs, reacting to the acoustic intrusions of the war, and some of the scientists who took part in the research shared recordings made during periods of fieldwork. The marine biologist, for example, recorded the sound of the Black Sea while doing research on Dzharylhach Island in 2021. In so doing, she emphasised that due to the war, the sound of the sea has changed for marine mammals, and she spoke at length about the death of cetaceans (including dolphins) linked, inter alia, to naval sonar and explosions in the Black Sea (see also Węgrzyn et al., 2023). Ultimately, the soundscape recordings turned out to be one of the most fascinating parts of the project, and I have developed them into an online exhibition (available in both English and Ukrainian) that offers some unique insights into human and animal experiences of the Russia–Ukraine war. ⁶

The article’s first section presents an overview of some of the main discussions about memory within transitional justice scholarship. In so doing, it underlines the field’s neglect of other-than-human memory, while also acknowledging some important exceptions in this regard. The second section shifts the focus to the Russia–Ukraine war. Accentuating the war’s impacts on Ukrainian forests, it reflects on the implications of these harms in other-than-human memory terms. The final section addresses the issue of how to include more-than-human worlds in memory-building practices. The ideas that it puts forward are necessarily exploratory, but they can help to create ‘spaces of receptivity in which curious questions lead to deeper conversations’ (Celermajer and O’Brien, 2021: 146).

Memory Dynamics in Transitional Justice Contexts

Competing and contested memories

A central premise of transitional justice is that periods of past violence and massive human rights violations cannot be simply swept under the proverbial carpet. Rather, they must be addressed and dealt with, which is essential, in turn, for establishing the truth – a key transitional justice goal (International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), n.d.). The ever-growing field of transitional justice has therefore both contributed to and is itself part of ‘the emergence of a veritable memory industry’ (Torpey, 2006: 21). At the same time, memory is a highly sensitive issue in societies – which often remain divided and polarised – transitioning from conflict and upheaval to ‘peace’ (Jelin, 2007: 140).

Competing memories chafe and collide (Milton, 2015: 364), underpinned in this regard by larger power dynamics (Byrne et al., 2024: 213); and states, as ‘entrepreneurs of [official] memory’ (Torpey, 2006: 19), often play the decisive role in determining which memories ultimately prevail and which are marginalised or silenced. As one illustration, Kent examines how East Timor’s political leadership promoted a version of the past that elevates and glorifies the memory of the Armed Forces for the National Liberation of East Timor (FALINTIL). This metanarrative pushes to the margins other, less convenient memories, such as those relating to acts of violence committed by East Timorese political parties (Kent, 2011: 440). To take another example, Rolston (2020: 322) discusses how in the context of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the state – as a bulwark against republican insurgency – was ‘more likely to acknowledge the stories of victims from state forces or “innocent” victims, and least likely to acknowledge those of republican victims’ (see also Brown, 2012: 456). Druliolle (2015), for his part, illuminates the unevenness with which Spain, in its tardy process of addressing the legacies of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975), has dealt with different victims’ memories. Pointing out that there are ‘hierarchies of victims’ at work, he notes that the state prioritised terrorist victims of the Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), which disbanded in 2018, while neglecting Franco’s victims (Druliolle, 2015: 317–318).

All of these examples support Barahona de Brito’s (2010: 361) view of transitional justice as ‘a component of the politics of memory’ – and, thus, ‘a first step in what are always ongoing memory cycles’. This contributes, in turn, to problematising the association of transitional justice with ‘closure’, which Weinstein (2011: 5–6) has described as a ‘questionable’, ‘debatable’ and ‘murky’ concept. The above examples additionally illustrate the larger point that memory and forgetting – and more specifically what Ricoeur (2003: 452) has termed ‘commanded forgetting’ – are often co-constitutive rather than mutually exclusive (Miller, 2021: 866).

It is also important to underline, however, that official efforts to forge a politically expedient collective memory (Halbwachs, 1992) are frequently challenged and contested ‘from below’ (Brown, 2012; Kent, 2011; Riaño Alcalá and Uribe, 2016). ⁷ Tamayo Gomez’s (2022) work, for example, discusses the March of Light (Marcha de la Luz) in Colombia, a weekly collective memory practice in eastern Antioquia organised by victims/survivors of the country’s armed conflict and families of the dead and missing. Through their continuing calls for truth, justice and reparations, he argues, and their efforts to restore the good name of victims erroneously accused of belonging to armed groups, the march organisers and participants are ‘building a plurality of memories in the public sphere’ and, in so doing, ‘contesting the power relations around the construction of collective remembrance’ (Tamayo Gomez, 2022: 384–385). Focused on Peru, Falcón’s (2018) research explores three art projects that challenge state-led memories of the past and give expression to the experiences and struggles of an excluded ‘counterpublic’. Intersectional in their approach and exposing deep structural violences, these projects contribute ‘to a far more complicated reality than can be contained in a narrow narrative about the internal conflict and its causes as temporally limited to . . . two decades’ (Falcón, 2018: 27). These examples from Colombia and Peru, respectively, illustrate how the contestation of ‘official’ memory can foster memoryscapes that reflect and retain some of the diversity and ‘thickness’ of different memories (Riaño Alcalá, 2015: 287).

What is largely missing from extant transitional justice scholarship on memory is attention to and acknowledgement of other-than-human memory – a gap that is consistent with the field’s anthropocentricity. There are, however, some notable examples of transitional justice research that engages more creatively with memory and thereby demonstrates how expanded ways of thinking about the concept can contribute to pluralising the field.

Thinking beyond human memories

In her fascinating recent research focused on Timor-Leste, Kent (2024) conceptualises the dead as ‘memory workers’. They possess a form of agency, she argues, by affecting the living and potentially unsettling larger political agendas that treat the dead as mere passive symbols. In her words, ‘It is in their entangled spectral-material presence – as spirits and as bones – that the dead act upon the living, prompting emotional reactions and actions, and sometimes disrupting the commemorative narratives and practices that underpin elite-led nation-and-state-building’ (Kent, 2024: 501). Her work effectively makes clear, thus, that there are important other-than-human actors involved in the politics of memory, and that ‘bottom-up’ approaches to transitional justice ⁸ should extend beyond the realm of the living. ‘What is called for’, she underlines, ‘is an account of memory-work that recognises agency as ‘distributed’ among the human and the more-than-human, emerging through forms of relational interaction’ (Kent, 2024: 511).

Milton and Raynaud’s work centres on Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), created in 2008 to deal with the legacies of the country’s notorious Indian residential school system, and it discusses the gift-giving – linked to healing and reconciliation – that was an integral part of the TRC process. Depositing gifts in a Bentwood box, ⁹ survivors, perpetrators and bystanders would explain to the audience the significance of these objects, which frequently included quilts, books, moccasins and paintings. As the authors note, ‘The gifting took on a sacred, ritualistic quality and the objects themselves came to hold symbolic meaning, charged with a kind of agency that had the power to affect viewers. Each gift had a story’ (Milton and Raynaud, 2019: 528). The TRC can be conceptualised, thus, as a complex assemblage wherein human and more-than-human stories and memories intertwined and agentively shaped the process.

Many of the gifts that the TRC received are now displayed in the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). ¹⁰ Moreover, the curatorial choices made by NCTR staff – such as incorporating tactile and sensory experiences into the exhibit – show respect to Indigenous protocols and honour the agency of the objects, including as mnemonic devices (Milton and Raynaud, 2019: 538). For example, a red crumbling brick, a common material used in the construction of the residential schools, and the experience of holding it might facilitate memory and ‘remind others of familiar institutions’ (Milton and Raynaud, 2019: 539). That some of the gifts are not publicly displayed in the NCTR is also an acknowledgement of other-than-human agency. ¹¹

In a very different context, Mannergren-Selimovic (2022) focuses on objects in the War Childhood Museum and the exhibition ‘Sarajevo under Siege’ at the History Museum in Bosnia-Herzegovina. While three decades have passed since the Bosnian war (1992–1995) ended, ethnonationalist elites continue to disseminate conflicting narratives of the past that entrench division and mistrust. Moreover, transitional justice processes, and in particular the trials that took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, have often contributed to hardening these ethnic cleavages (see, for example, Clark, 2014). What Mannergren-Selimovic (2022: 221) seeks to emphasise, however, is that the aforementioned museums and the everyday objects within them ‘counteract and present an alternative to remembrance practices that tend to increasingly marginalize inclusivity and plurality in the memoryscape’. In this way, they potentiate an alternative ‘mnemonic imagination’ – necessary for genuine peace – that allows different memories of everyday life during the war to co-exist and complement each other (Mannergren-Selimovic, 2022: 226).

Representing a departure from more conventional discussions about memory and transitional justice, examples such as these illustrate – even if they are not explicitly framed as such – some of the potential ways of integrating and translating into the field the aforementioned ‘fourth wave of memory studies’ noted by Craps (2018: 500). In a nod towards new materialism (see, for example, Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010), they particularly illuminate the neglected significance of matter in transitional justice contexts, as an agency that is ‘immanently vibrant and in constant shifting relations with the human factor in the production of ideas about the past’ (Zirra, 2017: 461). The larger point to underscore is that exploring and acknowledging the importance of other-than-human memories – as ‘ecologies of memory’ (Micieli-Voutsinas and Cavicchi, 2019) – is a fundamental part of rethinking transitional justice as ‘a site of knotted agencies and encounters’ (Oppermann and Iovino, 2017: 7). The next section unpacks these ideas further through a specific focus on the Russia–Ukraine war.

Other-Than-Human Memories and the Russia–Ukraine War

Interviewees in Ukraine spoke about the myriad ways that the war has affected more-than-human worlds. Examples include the death and loss of countless numbers of animals (Tsymbalyuk, 2025), the destruction of habitats (Marushchak, 2024), the pollution of rivers (Gleick et al., 2023) and the contamination of soil (Solokha et al., 2024). Many of the interviewees commented on the impact that the war is having on forests. Shelling-induced fires are a major cause of damaged and destroyed forests in Ukraine (Matsala et al., 2024). A recent report by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre finds that in 2024, ‘The mapped total of 965,360 ha from 8753 fires was equivalent to the entire burnt area mapped across the whole of Europe, Middle East and North Africa in 2023’ (San-Miguel-Ayanz et al., 2025: 4). The impossibility/challenges of silviculture treatment and fire management – due to active hostilities and the contamination of forested areas with landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) – are some of the additional factors that exacerbate fire risks (Matsala et al., 2025).

The most significant forest losses have occurred in areas of active combat and near the front line, including in Kherson region in southern Ukraine and in Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine (Cazzolla Gatti et al., 2025). Milakovsky et al. (2025), for example, note that in Luhansk region, most of the remaining pine forests that survived climate-induced fires in 2020 ¹² ‘were lost in 2023–2024 after Russian occupation’. One of the botanists whom I interviewed spoke about the destruction of forests in the Sviati Hori (Holy Mountains) National Park in Donetsk region (see Peter and Hunder, 2024), including extremely rare pine forests on chalk outcrops. She underlined that ‘These habitats are protected under Resolution 4 of the Berne Convention [Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats]. Many are found in Sviati Hori National Park, and Russian forces have destroyed them’ (interview, 4 September 2024).

In addition to fires and the accumulation of flammable materials, there are other ways that the war directly impacts forests. An interviewee based in the Ukrainian Research Institute of Forestry and Forest Melioration explained, for example, that the movement and positioning of heavy military equipment, such as tanks, can cause soil compaction and reduce the biodiversity of animals, plants and fungi. She also highlighted physical damage to individual trees due to shelling. The resultant tree wounds, in turn, can become ‘pathways for pathogen penetration, development of rot and mortality and colonisation by xylophagous [wood-eating] insects’ (interview, 8 July 2025).

It is important to make clear that the interview guide that I developed did not include any questions about memory as this was not the focus of the research. As I analysed the data, however, thoughts about memory gradually found their way in, persistently brushing against me like the branches of a tree. In a fascinating article titled ‘Conifers and commemoration’, Gough (1996) cites the soldier-turned-author R.G. Talbot Kelly. Reflecting on his experiences during the First World War, Talbot Kelly wrote: ‘I never lost this tree sense: to me half the war is a memory of trees. . . Beneath their branches I found the best and the worst of war’ (in Gough, 1996: 75). That trees were so entangled with his recollections highlights that they can have an important generative and co-constitutive function with respect to memory, as agents ‘with the capacity to act and act upon those present’ (Mitchell, 2020: 449). Some of the interviews from Ukraine also illustrate this idea.

One interviewee spoke fondly about a forest near her childhood home, where she used to forage for mushrooms with her mother. She also enthused about what she described as ‘one of the happiest periods of my life’, during which she spent a lot of time in Ukraine’s forests as part of her environmental work against illegal logging. There was a strong sense that the different stages of her life were closely interwoven with forests. ‘And one day’, she emphasised, ‘you understand that they [Russians] have stolen your memories because you cannot visit the places that you loved anymore’ (interview, 3 October 2024). There were now new memories taking shape – especially painful memories of forests being burnt, destroyed by fire and made inaccessible due to landmines and other UXO – and forming in palimpsestic layers over the old ones. ‘I think that I have lost something special and something really crucial in my life because of the war’, she explained, looking visibly upset. One of her two soundscape recordings also merits comment in this regard. The recording captured the sound of her and her husband walking in a forested area of a park in Kyiv. What the interviewee wanted to stress, however, is that the sense of happiness that she initially felt was clouded by growing feelings of guilt; she was enjoying herself while Ukrainian soldiers were dying on the front line.

A potential critique of this account is that it centres the interviewee’s own memories of forests, thereby reproducing the very anthropocentrism that this article expressly seeks to challenge. Yet such a critique can itself be challenged on the grounds that it effectively accentuates, and assumes, an ontological separation between human and more-than-human worlds. One way of moving beyond such binary thinking is to ask: ‘Where does remembering and forgetting begin and end. . .?’ (Hoskins, 2016: 348). Relatedly, where do different memories, human and other-than-human, begin and end? Such questions richly capture some of the complexities of memory in the context of deeply entangled lifeworlds. The crucial point is that the memories that the interviewee shared were not just her memories. Rather, they reflected a sympoietic process of ‘making-with’, in the sense that her connectedness to the forest imbued these memories with affect and deep emotional content. I often wonder whether for her, the war will ultimately be (partly) ‘a memory of [and with] trees’, just as the Great War was for Talbot Kelly.

Another interviewee, a botanist, spoke about his time working in Askania-Nova. Located in Kherson region, Askania-Nova is Ukraine’s oldest nature reserve and it has been under Russian occupation since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Consequently, the interviewee is no longer able to go there. Now based in Kyiv, he made one of his soundscape recordings in a local park that he walks through every day on his way to work. During the interview, he explained that when he listened to the recording – which captures a mixture of geophonic sounds (wind, rustling trees) and biophonic sounds (bird vocalisations) – it made him think about Askania-Nova. ‘It [the recording] reminds me’, he mused, ‘of the winter landscape in Askania, when winter starts and we have the very first snow on the trees and the sounds of Rooks, the sounds of birds. I really started to think about my days in Askania’ (interview, 22 November 2024). In other words, there are ‘memories in the living vegetation itself’ (Balée, 2013: 2), co-created and entangled memories that keep the interviewee connected to Askania-Nova. The recording and his reflections on it can be viewed, thus, as an illustration of ‘multidirectional eco-memory’, a concept that locates memory in ‘an ecological assemblage in which all elements, human and nonhuman, are mobile, connected, and interactive’ (Kennedy, 2017: 269).

Growing research on plant/vegetal memory (see, for example, Crisp et al., 2016; Gagliano, 2018) elucidates some of the diverse roles that trees play within these ecological assemblages. When bullets or pieces of shrapnel get lodged in them, for example, trees become a corporeal ‘memory store of traumatic events’ (Henig, 2012: 22), and, hence, vital witnesses (see, for example, Ibarra et al., 2024; Ruiz-Serna, 2021). The fact, moreover, that this memory store (which includes a tree’s rings) is embedded in a life form that continues to grow – and in a larger ecosystem of which every part ‘is engaged in a continual dance of relationships’ (Maser et al., 2008: 4) – highlights that memories do not remain still (Erll, 2011: 11). This is very relevant to transitional justice, raising critical questions about the temporal parameters within which memory work and discussions about memory take place – and the ‘temporal lived experiences’ (Davidović, 2021: 937) that these parameters might exclude. As Cloke and Jones (2002: 54) remark, for example, trees ‘operate in their own ecological time which is rather different from the typical time scales of human-centred analysis’.

That trees have memory is also reflected in how they respond to disturbances and stressors. Significant in this regard in the concept of ecological memory, which refers to ‘the study of memory as it operates in natural settings’ (Bruce, 1985: 78). The basic idea is that an ecosystem’s history, in the sense of past abiotic and biotic events, will influence and guide that system’s future behaviour. As Peterson (2002: 329) articulates, ‘The degree to which an ecological process is shaped by its history can be thought of as the strength of the ecological memory of that process’; and a strong ecological memory is a marker of a system’s resilience (Schaefer, 2009: 172). The concept of ecological memory is often discussed in relation to trees and forests (see, for example, Johnstone et al., 2016), although it has a wider application.

None of the interviewees in Ukraine specifically referred to ecological memory. The concept arose implicitly, however, through several references to invasive species. One participant, for example, complained that invasive species – including Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), Canadian horseweed (Erigeron canadensis) and Bitterweed (Hymenoxys odorata ) – are having a transformative effect on the landscape in Ukraine. ‘Everything is green’, he underlined, ‘but the plants that make this greenery are invasive, and they have nothing to do with native plant cover or with native habitats’ (interview, 20 September 2024). Indeed, war environments can foster the growth and spread of invasive species in a variety of ways, including through the movement of military vehicles (especially if they are not regularly cleaned) (Francis, 2011: 991) and fire damage (Zymaroieva et al., 2024: 499–500).

It is essential to acknowledge that the concept of invasive species is not unproblematic and has been heavily critiqued. ¹³ Some experts have questioned whether it even makes sense to refer to certain species as ‘invasive’. As Warren (2007: 432–433) underlines, ‘Every species is native somewhere and alien somewhere else’. Yet what is also important to note for the purposes of this discussion on memory is that invasive species can potentially interfere with and disrupt ecological memory. Schaefer (2011: 36) points out that ‘Alien invasive species can create their own ecological memory that can preclude native ecosystems from becoming re-established’. Research will be needed, therefore, to explore whether and to what extent ecological memory shapes how Ukraine’s forests (and indeed other ecosystems) deal with the damage that they have suffered due to the ongoing war. Relatedly, it will be important to examine whether and how invasive species weaken or contribute to a loss of ecological memory at specific sites (Schaefer, 2011: 39), and whether there are contextual and cross-site differences. In other words, there are other-than-human memory dynamics entangled with the environmental impacts of the Russia–Ukraine war.

On the issue of ecological memory, there is one further pivotal point to highlight. Just as many interviewees spoke about the loss of and damage to Ukraine’s forests, almost all of them also referred to the destruction, in June 2023, of the Kakhovka dam in Kherson region (Gardner, 2023). The dam, part of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant, held back a vast reservoir, and when Russian aggressors deliberately breached the dam, more than 16 cubic kilometres of water from the reservoir rapidly surged downstream. This resulted, inter alia, in severe flooding, loss of habitats, mass deaths of animals, contamination of the Black Sea and damage to multiple ecosystems (Kvach et al., 2025; Vyshnevskyi et al., 2023). Ukrainian prosecutors are currently investigating the attack on the Kakhovka dam as a potential case of ecocide under article 441 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code (Kostin, 2024).

In speaking about the many environmental consequences of the dam’s destruction, some of the interviewees also noted that there is now a willow forest growing on the site of the former Kakhovka reservoir (see, for example, Dzyba and Kyriienko, 2024: 33). What is thus occurring, as one of them emphasised, is ‘the quite rapid and rich restoration of a floodplain ecosystem, known as Velykyi Luh or ‘Great Meadow’, that existed long before the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant was built during the 1950s’ (interview, 13 February 2025). The restoration of this ecosystem can be viewed as an expression of its ecological memory and capacity to absorb disturbance. As one of the ornithologists stressed, ‘Nature is telling us that it can regenerate, that it can heal itself’ (interview, 23 October 2024).

This is very relevant to transitional justice and in particular to reparations, which can take many different forms – from monetary compensation and restitution of property to guarantees of non-repetition (Moffett, 2023). What the example of Velykyi Luh specifically illuminates is the important issue – which can be framed as an aspect of ‘reparative ecology’ (Patel and Moore, 2017) ¹⁴ – of how reparations might be used to support an ecosystem’s ecological memory, including by protecting the system from further anthropogenic disturbances. This is especially pertinent in light of the fact that the future of Velykyi Luh is currently uncertain. It is not yet clear whether Ukraine – and more precisely the state-run hydroelectric company Ukrhydroenergo – will eventually rebuild the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (Hodunova, 2024).

The article’s discussion of other-than-human memory in the context of the Russia–Ukraine war is an original way of thinking about, and drawing attention to, the war’s environmental impacts. What this research also seeks to make clear, however, is that in order to comprehensively address the marginalisation of more-than-human worlds in transitional justice, it is not sufficient to focus only on the harms done to them. It is also essential to acknowledge their agency and to examine potential ways of doing justice not just for but also with them. In his work on the memory of lakes, Smith (2021: 253) makes the richly evocative argument that ‘memory pools at the low points of the earth, carried by rivers, springs, or oceans and coalescing for a time in a self-contained world, and yet always reaching out to connect’. A key question, therefore, is how can memory-building work in transitional justice contexts ‘reach out to connect’ with more-than human worlds? More specifically, how can societies engage in memory-building practices with more-than-human worlds? Asking such questions is an important part, in turn, of exploring and operationalising the aforementioned concept of ‘response-able memory’ – as a form of ‘splitting’ – referred to in the article’s introduction.

Memory-Building With More-Than-Human Worlds as ‘Response-able Memory’

Memorial trees

In Ukraine, a group of wives of fallen soldiers have planted 10 maple trees in the Sovky Park in Kyiv. A QR code on each of the trees allows visitors to find out more about the soldiers they represent. In addition, 30 hornbeam trees have been planted – at the suggestion of families of dead soldiers – in Levandiv Park in Lviv, each tree dedicated to a particular Ukrainian defender (Rubryka, 2024). Using trees to honour and remember the dead is a long-established practice (see, for example, Dargavel, 2000). The idea of memorial trees is also an obvious starting point – consistent with this article’s arboreal thematic – for thinking about and developing memory-building that is inclusive of more-than-human worlds. Scholars writing about memorial trees have emphasised, however, that the practice often reinforces human/nature dichotomies.

In 1917, for example, Allied Forces took control of Vimy Ridge in northern France and held onto it, unchallenged, for the rest of the war, thanks to the Canadians who joined the British army that year. In 1922, France gifted the land to Canada, to build a memorial park to honour Canadian soldiers who died fighting for Vimy Ridge. A large edifice, standing 27 m tall, that took 11 years to build became the centrepiece of the park, and thousands of trees – many of them non-local species, such as Austrian pines – were planted for their ‘softening’ effects (Leonard, 2024: 1268). Reflecting on the completed memorial park, Leonard (2024: 1269) argues that ‘it presented a deliberately sculpted landscape in which the more-than-human aspects were used to create an entirely human-focused place. . . Nature was conscripted, not considered’. In this hierarchical space, the experiences of more-than-human worlds – including soil cratering that forms part of the land’s own memories (Janzen, 2016: 1430) – are not hidden or concealed, but they are framed ‘as the setting for human tragedy, not tragedy itself’ (Leonard, 2024: 1272).

In a very different context, scholars have discussed the ‘Survivor Tree’ at Ground Zero in New York. Weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a Callery pear tree (Pyrus calleryana) was found buried in the rubble of the Twin Towers. After being nursed back to health for nearly a decade, it was moved to the 9/11 Memorial Plaza in 2010. According to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum (n.d.) website, the tree is ‘a living symbol of hope and resilience’, and in a video on the website, the tree tells its story and ‘speaks’ through the voice of the Hollywood actress Whoopi Goldberg, declaring: ‘My blossoms remind us how strong we all are: I’m a living reminder of how we rose from the dark’. For Heath-Kelly, however, casting memorial trees as vegetal expressions and symbols of resilience is deeply problematic. As she asserts, ‘This is a trans-species “puppetry” whereby trees can be made to speak of human resilience and regeneration, whereby trees are supposedly deployed on equal footing to human life, without dead trees ever receiving memorials to their lives’ (Heath-Kelly, 2018: 71). Expressing similar concerns, Micieli-Voutsinas and Cavicchi (2019: 507) argue that the use of trees as symbols of resilience ‘represents a tacit alienation from the natural world that these plants inhabit, whereby the trees become blank slates on which human meaning is imputed’. Even as we anthropomorphize memorial trees, thus, we accentuate their ‘otherness’ and ‘non-humanness’ by co-opting them to serve our own purposes, thereby reasserting ideas of human exceptionalism. ‘Quite simply’, as Heath-Kelly (2018: 71) remarks, ‘we don’t memorialise the death of a tree; however, we memorialise the death of a human with a tree’.

These are powerful critiques. Yet it is also important to acknowledge and take note of some of the ways that memorial trees resist attempts to control them, effectively ‘outgrowing’ the original purpose/s assigned to them (Cloke and Pawson, 2008: 107) – and thereby challenging memorial spaces as highly managed ecologies of ‘tidiness and order’ (Charlesworth and Addis, 2002: 246). Discussing, for example, the Victorian Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol, a vast space set over 45 acres in which more than 300,000 people are buried, including war dead from the First and Second World Wars, Cloke and Jones (2004: 325) argue that ‘Trees have made “wild” the very place where they were deployed to contribute to order’. In a similar vein, Cloke and Pawson’s (2008: 115) work at three sites in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand, accentuates the relational agency of trees and their ‘transformational energy’. Noting, for example, that ‘the genetic memory of trees works against the cultural memories projected by those who planned the commemorative sites’ (Cloke and Pawson, 2008: 120), they adopt the term ‘treescape memories’ to underline that trees are ‘active coconstituents in memorialisation’ (Cloke and Pawson, 2008: 107).

Linking this discussion of memorial trees back to transitional justice, there is considerable scope for incorporating our arboreal kin into memorialisation and memory-building practices. This does not mean, however, simply planting trees as a way of remembering lost human lives – and it is important to further stress in this regard the damage being done to Ukraine’s forests. It means, rather, engaging with trees (and with more-than-human worlds more broadly) in ways that give expression to response-able memory and link ‘the painful memories of humans to the silenced, ignored, or dismissed memories of the more-than-human world’ (Gündoğan İbrişim, 2024: 104). The concept of response-able memory strongly resonates, in turn, with what Mihai and Thaler (2023) call ecological commemoration. This involves, inter alia, ‘summoning the audience to acknowledge our species’ entanglement with the more-than-human world’ (Mihai and Thaler, 2023: 1379), and forging a novel memory politics aimed at creating spaces where interconnected losses across different lifeworlds are both acknowledged and mourned (Mihai and Thaler, 2023: 1391). These ideas, and the huge creative potential that exists for translating them into practice, further reinforce the article’s core argument that expanded thinking about memory in transitional justice is a crucial part of challenging the field’s anthropocentrism and developing, ontologically and epistemologically, new relational approaches.

There is a significant role for scientists to play in helping to design and develop memorials that capture cross-world experiences, especially as dialogue and interaction between transitional justice and the natural sciences is critically lacking. The input of scientists would be especially valuable for interpreting ecological information. The key point is that these memorials should not be associated only with loss, but should also acknowledge trees’ own agency and memories, ‘as dynamic living presences’ (Cloke and Jones, 2004: 337). The previously discussed example of the willow forest now growing on the site of the former Kakhovka reservoir is pertinent in this regard. While the willow trees are not memorial trees, they have actively contributed to transforming the landscape as a place not just of ecological death but of ecological recovery and renewal, which supports the article’s assertion that memory-building is a sympoietic process. Fundamentally, if we refrain from trying to control more-than-human worlds and we respect their ecological memory, we open a potential space for co-creating new memories with them. This further reinforces Erll’s (2011: 11) argument that memories are fluid rather than static and fixed. It also thereby highlights the importance of thinking about and conceptualising memorials and memorialisation in transitional justice in longitudinal terms. For example, how do memorials physically change over time, and does this affect the memories associated with them? As Barad (2007: 181) remarks, ‘the making/marking of time is a lively material process of unfolding’.

Listening to more-than-human worlds

Another potential way of developing ‘response-able memory’, which ties in with the acoustic elements of this research, is by listening to more-than-human worlds and (re-)learning ‘the forgotten language of the land’ (Kimmerer, 2016: 49). The interviewees, as previously explained, were asked to make recordings of their local soundscapes and to subsequently reflect on those recordings by listening back to them. Embedded in the research methodology and in some of the acoustic data, thus, are questions such as the following: ‘And what now are the sky, land, and sea saying to us? And are we listening?’ (Moore, 2002: 11).

Illustrating a well-researched nexus between sound and memory (see, for example, Morris, 2001), the recordings are also about memory-building. An ornithologist in central Ukraine, for example, captured the songs of Chiffchaffs, Song thrushes and Wood warblers as a drone hovered over a forest near her office. A herpetologist in Zaporizhzhia, in southeast Ukraine, recorded neighbourhood dogs persistently barking as Ukraine’s air defence system shot down enemy Shahed drones. Another herpetologist, during fieldwork in Mykolaiv region in southern Ukraine, recorded ‘the sound of the wild steppes [grasslands] awakening in early spring’. The most prominent bird sound in his recording is the song of the Corn bunting, an iconic grassland species. In all of these cases, the interviewees were effectively co-creating acoustic memories of the Russia–Ukraine war with more-than-human worlds. In this way, the recordings – which will be archived in the British Library – are a tangible legacy of the war that reflect ‘an entangled form of living and remembering’ (Gündoğan İbrişim, 2024: 103). They can be viewed, thus, as response-able memory.

While the recordings have obvious significance in transitional justice terms, it is also important to think more broadly about how acoustic expressions of response-able memory might be incorporated into, and operationalised within, transitional justice practice. This is a field which, unsurprisingly, has paid little attention to the sounds and ‘voices’ of more-than-human worlds – or indeed to some of the many ways that war and armed conflict reconfigure quotidian auditory landscapes (Wood, 2021: 186). One way of addressing this is to develop what Janzen (2009: 2772) calls ‘listening places’, defined as ‘places where, in patient quiet, we press our ears to the earth and listen for its pulse’. These listening places could be created in the context of criminal trials, through the introduction of auditory material that gives a ‘voice’ to more-than-human worlds and their experiences of war. This is something that I would like to see happen in Ukraine, given the large volume of potential cases of environmental war crimes and ecocide that the country’s prosecutors are currently investigating. More informally, listening places could take the form of art-based initiatives, such as interactive exhibitions and theatre performances.

The syntax of the ‘forgotten language of the land’ to which Kimmerer (2016: 49) refers is connection, and greater awareness of the many living sounds that surround us intensifies ‘our connection to the biosphere’ (Krause, 2013: 223). Opening up the field to the sounds of different lifeworlds, therefore, is an essential part of the relational reframing of transitional justice that this article strongly advocates. By listening to more-than-human worlds, moreover, and thereby showing attentiveness to them (Kohn, 2013: 138), we also acknowledge their own memories and agency as memory builders.

Conclusion

While memory – and especially the politics of memory – is a richly explored theme within transitional justice scholarship, the field has largely neglected other-than-human memory and its importance. Herein lie the originality and significance of this article. Drawing on empirical data in the form of semi-structured interviews and soundscape recordings, the article has reflected on the destruction of Ukrainian forests – one of the many environmental consequences of the war that interviewees frequently spoke about – in terms of other-than-human memory. In so doing, it has sought to demonstrate that developing response-able memory and thereby expanding how we think about memory-building are a critical part of forging more relational approaches to transitional justice that destabilise its liberal foundations and undermine its anthropocentricity.

The article began by introducing the distinction – which meshes beautifully with the arboreal threads of this research – that Ingold (2024) makes between ‘cutting’ and ‘splitting’. Associating human-centred approaches to transitional justice with cutting, it has framed its own relational approach as an original and creative example of splitting. The distinction between cutting and splitting, however, does not have to be as pronounced as Ingold suggests – and cutting does not need to reinforce human/nature binaries and hierarchies. Much depends on how we cut and for what purposes. Barad’s reflections on cutting are especially relevant. According to her, cuts do not make absolute separations ‘but only contingent separations – within phenomena’ (Barad, 2014: 175; emphasis in the original); and through the act of cutting, we are actually making ‘agential cuts’ that enact ‘agential separability’ (Barad, 2014: 177).

These arguments offer a different way of conceptualising the relationship between cutting and splitting. If, moreover, these are mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting processes, they are both relevant to transforming how we think about and approach transitional justice – and the nexus between memory and transitional justice. This article has ultimately involved elements of both cutting and splitting. It has made important agential cuts to accentuate the role of more-than-human worlds as actors in memory-building practices. Relatedly, it has conceptualised memory work as a fundamental expression of splitting that both reflects and extends ‘the entanglements and responsibilities of which one is a part’ (Barad, 2007: ix).