“Nature” and territories as victims: Decolonizing Colombia's transitional justice process

Abstract

AbstractAcross different national contexts, liberal legal frameworks have primarily focused on war crimes and violence against human victims as violations of human rights and international law. In Colombia, there is growing legal recognition that “nature” and territories are also casualties of war, requiring punitive sanctioning and reparative treatment in the country's transitional justice process. This article examines how local communities inhabiting the epicenters of violence, along with officials responsible for administering transitional justice, are attempting to expand the tenets of this dominant postconflict paradigm. Informed by fieldwork among magistrates, bureaucrats, and Indigenous, Afro‐descendent, and campesino victim organizations, it attends to the tensions and ontological openings that occur during a criminal investigation process when multiple concepts of nature, territory, crime, and harm are held in frictive tandem. It also demonstrates the challenges of doing ethnography during times of explicit political transition and in collaboration with open judicial cases. While the anthropology of law has relied on concepts of coordination and hybridity to describe the interactions between diverse realities and legal systems, this article proposes analyzing the more radical work and limits of progressivism that are unfolding simultaneously within temporary tribunals.