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

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.