Transitional justice and the significance of more-than-human worlds: Some reflections from the Russia-Ukraine war

The continuing Russia-Ukraine war has had huge environmental impacts. What has received little attention is the significance of these impacts for how we think about and operationalise transitional justice. Herein lies the contribution of this interdisciplinary article. Cross-fertilising transitional justice scholarship with literature on multispecies justice, and drawing on original qualitative data from Ukraine, the article discusses and unpacks two possible ways of developing more inclusive and relational transitional justice practices that reflect our ontological entanglement with different lifeworlds. The first entails acknowledging more-than-human worlds as storytellers. The second involves listening to them. The article highlights in this regard the important scope that exists for expanding the field of transitional justice in new acoustic directions.