Green Transitional Justice could not be more timely, given the clear entanglement of the massive harms to human and nonhuman animals and ecological destruction caused by some of the most recent wars and genocides, from Ukraine to Palestine. With a tough love and moral urgency, Rachel Killean and Lauren Dempster engage critically and boldly with transitional justice scholarship, questioning some of the field’s most fundamental assumptions and limitations. Examining with an almost surgical precision the shortcomings of dominant approaches to transitional justice in addressing harms against Nature, they uncover the factors and contexts that have produced these limitations. While critical throughout, the authors do not even once give in to cynicism, remaining hopeful and aspirational, drawing on diverse theories of justice and alternative epistemological frameworks in order to reimagine the future of transitional justice through an urgently needed ecological lens. In their view, a green transitional justice framework would be “an approach which better recognizes and responds to harms against Nature” (p. 5). The book is built directly on scholarship and practices that enable the fulfillment of these two aims: better recognition and better response.

A tour de force , the book draws on a wide range of empirical contexts and an extraordinary amount of literature to make its case for “greening” transitional justice. It starts by scoping the field in relation to its engagement with harms against Nature, surprisingly arguing that harms against Nature do not seem to actually constitute a “blind spot” in transitional justice, given a proliferating literature on this in the last decade. Nevertheless, as the authors argue, this growing literature consistently reiterates the argument that harms against Nature are not at all mainstream in the field. In addition, the existing literature does not systematically analyze the reasons for transitional justice’s failure to engage with harms against Nature, which is instead a major ambition and task that the authors set for themselves. Finally, the existing transitional justice literature fails to undertake a thorough engagement with other areas of scholarship and practice that might support a greener transitional justice. The authors take stock of the advances made while building directly on these identified gaps. Interestingly, they develop their sustained critique of transitional justice by drawing largely on existing critical strands within the field itself. Four key critiques structure their analysis, ensuring that the critical building blocks are laid down clearly before new proposals can be made.

The first critique aims at the epistemology of transitional justice, particularly its modes of knowledge production. The authors acknowledge, as a matter of fact, that knowledge production within “institutionalized” transitional justice is often neocolonial and shaped predominantly by Eurocentric and Global North perspectives and epistemic communities. By interrogating dominant approaches to knowledge production in the field, the authors show how these dynamics shape the emergence of “expertise” and contribute to forms of epistemic injustice. The privileging of Eurocentric and technocratic forms of knowledge marginalizes Indigenous and local understandings that emphasize the interconnectedness of humans and Nature. In foregrounding the ethics of knowledge production and drawing on feminist and decolonial epistemologies, the authors open up possibilities for a more relational and collective understanding of harm, one that includes cultural, spiritual, and ecological dimensions.

After this foundational epistemic critique, the authors move to a rather more familiar and established critique, the critique of the dominance of legalism in transitional justice. While not particularly new as a critique in itself, unpacking the exact ways in which the dominance of legalism leads to anthropocentric conceptions of harm and victimhood and privileges violations of civil and political rights over other forms of harm is essential for the topic and arguments of the book. The authors argue that transitional justice mechanisms, largely shaped by human rights and international criminal law, treat the environment as property, resource, or backdrop, rather than as a subject of harm in its own right. Consequently, environmental destruction is addressed only insofar as it affects human interests, if it is addressed at all. The authors argue that it is the anthropocentric orientation of human rights and international criminal law, combined with a crime-driven lens, that has systematically obscured harms against Nature. It is in particular Western law and legal traditions, exported through colonial expansion, that displaced the pluralistic, often relational legal orders it encountered. Traditions that recognized rivers as ancestors, forests as persons, or land as a web of reciprocal obligations were dismissed as primitive, prelegal, or superstitious. The authors engage with ecocentric legal developments and highlight emerging efforts to recognize Nature as a protectee, a rights-bearer, and/or a victim. While this discussion opens up important conceptual possibilities, the authors remain attentive to the limits of relying on legal frameworks to address their own blind spots and limitations, resisting therefore the temptation to present legal reform as a magical solution. Developments such as ecocide law proposals and the legal personhood of nature, they argue, hold promise but also risk remaining largely symbolic unless accompanied by deeper transformations in how harm and justice are understood.

One of the most interesting critiques elaborated in the book takes issue with the ways in which transitional justice frequently leaves intact the structural inequalities and forms of “slow violence”—gradual, cumulative harms that unfold over extended periods—that both precede and follow periods of mass violence. The authors show how the field’s focus on discrete episodes of harm obscures the interconnectedness of human and environmental violence, as well as the role of structural forces. The limitations identified are not unique to transitional justice but reflect a broader epistemological tendency to privilege visible, event-based violence over structural and slow forms of harm. For example, insights from critical criminology, particularly zemiology, reinforce and deepen this critique. A substantial body of work has long questioned the tendency to prioritize spectacular, intentional acts of wrongdoing, drawing attention instead to harms that are routine, normalized, and embedded in everyday practices. From this perspective, many of the most pervasive harms, such as those occurring in asylum regimes, border control, or indeed environmental degradation, do not stem from extraordinary moments of violence, but from bureaucratic decision-making, indifference, and failures to act. These forms of harm are often less visible precisely because they are continuous and normalized, yet they may produce more enduring damage. This line of thinking resonates strongly with the book’s concern that transitional justice frameworks isolate events of mass violence from the broader social processes in which they are embedded. If harm is understood not as exceptional but as part of a continuum, produced through structural and institutional arrangements, then the limits of transitional justice become more apparent. Mechanisms designed to address past atrocities may leave untouched the very systems that continue to generate inequality and suffering in less visible ways. Environmental degradation, climate change, and long-term health impacts do not fit easily within the event-focused timelines and temporalities that structure most transitional justice mechanisms. The author’s engagement with environmental justice, transformative justice, and Nancy Fraser’s trivalent justice framework points toward a more holistic understanding of harm.

The fourth strand of critique relates to the ways in which the transitional justice field is underpinned by taken-for-granted assumptions that political and economic (neo)liberalization provides the most effective means of post-conflict transitions. The authors argue that transitional justice processes and mechanisms have often operated alongside, and at times reinforced, economic models centered on market liberalization and resource extraction. They argue that the field risks reinforcing neoliberal logics by privileging individualized harm and sidelining structural injustices, while insufficiently questioning environmentally unsustainable economic models. Their discussion of alternative frameworks, such as Buen Vivir , Ubuntu , and Ecological Swaraj , offers a thought-provoking, if somewhat aspirational, counterpoint. The authors are cautious of reductionism and appropriation of Indigenous worldviews, while at the same time being hopeful about their potential to push the boundaries of our political imagination that can shape and develop alternative economic models that are less harmful to Nature than neoliberalism.

The final chapter brings these strands and arguments together, reflecting on the possibilities and limits of “greening” transitional justice. Convinced that transitional justice in its current form offers an “incomplete justice” (p. 221), the authors argue that transitional justice needs to recognize Nature as a legitimate subject of justice in the aftermath of mass violence. This recognition cannot come without questioning, challenging, and “reimagining the field’s underpinning anthropocentric, legalistic, temporal, and neoliberal assumptions and integrating new perspectives, particularly those rooted in Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial thought” (p. 221). While the authors acknowledge the structural constraints within which the field operates, they argue that moments of transition may nonetheless provide openings for more ecologically attuned approaches. Their proposed six principles for a green transitional justice—decolonization, justice from below, ecocentrism, temporal expansion, contingency of neoliberalism, and holistic justice—are generative and open up new ways of thinking about justice in the aftermath of violence, and especially in showing that environmental harm is integral to understanding both conflict and its legacies.