Across different national contexts, liberal legal frameworks have primarily focused on human victims of war crimes and violence 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. Informed by fieldwork among magistrates, bureaucrats, and Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and campesino victim organizations, this talk examines how communities inhabiting the epicenters of violence, along with officials responsible for public policies of transitional justice, are attempting to expand the tenets of this dominant post-conflict paradigm. 

Kristina Lyons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds affiliations with the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.  Kristina’s current research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts, and science and legal studies in Colombia and Latin America.  Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics (Duke 2020) was awarded honorable mention by the Bryce Wood Book Award committee from the Latin American Studies Association.