Suchergebnisse

The relationship between the environment and mass violence is complex and multi-faceted. The effects of environmental degradation can destabilize societies and cause conflict. Attacks on the environment can harm targeted groups, and both mass violence and subsequent transitions can have harmful environmental legacies. Given this backdrop, it is notable that the field of transitional justice has paid relatively little attention to the intersections between mass violence and environmental degradation. This article interrogates this inattention and explores the limitations and possibilities of transitional justice as a means of addressing the environmental harms associated with mass violence. The article makes four key claims. First, that the "dominance of legalism" in transitional justice has produced anthropocentric understandings of harm which exclude environmental harms and victims. Second, that transitional justice's tendency towards neo-colonialism has led to the disregarding of worldviews that might encourage more environmentally inclusive responses to violence. Third, that transitional justice's inability to redress structural inequalities has often left environmental injustices intact. And fourth, that the field's complicity in normalizing neoliberal capitalism both overlooks environmental harm and facilitates future environmental degradation. In light of these claims, the article considers whether, and where opportunities might exist, for "greener" responses to mass violence.

This article examines victim representation in former atrocity sites in Cambodia. It concentrates on Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek, two prominent sites for the detention and torture of suspected enemies of the Khmer Rouge (KR) regime and the subsequent creation of mass graves. These sites of trauma, memory, and transitional justice are inextricably linked to the experiences of victims. Yet, the voice of victims, their visibility, and authentic representations of the past are not always centred in Cambodia's atrocity sites. Drawing on empirical fieldwork in Cambodia and an interdisciplinary literature, this article interrogates the intersections between selectivity, visibility, and authenticity in sites of atrocity associated with the Cambodian genocide. As this paper demonstrates, engaging with these themes of selectivity, visibility, and authenticity, and by extension issues of, for example, "who" is recognized as a victim, "how" responsibility for past horrors is represented, "which" sites become tourist facing attractions, and "why" certain narratives of the past are prioritized, is essential to recognizing the rights, humanity, and dignity of victims and survivors.