Kristina Marie Lyons

Across different national contexts, war crimes and violence have primarily focused on humans as victims within legal frameworks concerned with the defense and violation of human rights and international humanitarian law. In Colombia, there is growing legal debate over the way nature and territories are also casualties of war, requiring criminal prosecution and reparative treatment in the country’s transitional justice process. This research project asks how ethnically diverse rural communities inhabiting the epicenters of violence together with those responsible for public policies of transitional justice are attempting to transcend the conceptual and practical limits of this dominant post conflict paradigm. With fieldwork among magistrates, law clerks, and interethnic victims’ groups, I explore what happens to transitional justice frameworks when communal understandings of harms to territories are placed in dialogue with new heuristics in environmental and international criminal law. This project focuses on building transdisciplinary collaborations between anthropology and legal pluralism to examine how the inclusion of ‘nature’ into transitional justice frameworks transforms conventional understandings of war, memory, reconciliation, justice, and peace. It asks how biocentric legal turns may not only be changing the interface between diverse communities and environmental constitutionalism, but also the epistemic parameters of transitional justice.