Unsettling Accounts: Legal Liabilities and Transformative Landscapes of Memory

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Transitional Justice and Reconciliation

Abstract

War crimes trials and truth commissions have intervened in the politics of memory by focusing on emotional testimonies and interior trauma experienced by victims, which limits their role as a basis for exposing structural injustice and systemic logics of abuse (Baines 2016, Chakravarti 2014, Kendall 2016, Mihai 2016, Teitel 2000). This paper investigates how community-based organizations have responded to the limitations of such frameworks as a basis for investigating hazards associated with environmental legacies of war and war crimes. As theorized by environmental justice scholars, “frontline communities” are not defined by proximity to war zones, as conventionally understood, but by proximity to hazards that threaten and injure communities. This paper investigates how frontline communities based in inland California have worked to expose hidden burdens and threats associated with toxic legacies of weapons testing, pesticide exposures, and military bases. More specifically, it examines how community-based organizations have developed distinctive pedagogical strategies to expose systematic patterns of injury and destruction that would qualify as war crimes had they been committed in combat, on enemy territory. In analyzing such strategies, the paper focuses on how frontline communities have intervened in debates on climate justice by reformulating assumptions about the meaning and role of reparations as a response to the violent after-effects of “environmental war crimes,” and environmental legacies of war at home. The paper argues that these pedagogical strategies represent a uniquely important form of critique, which exposes limitations and contradictions associated with the storytelling strategies championed by professional human rights advocates, while unsettling widely shared assumptions about the temporal and spatial boundaries of war.

Author

• Bronwyn Anne Leebaw, University of California, Riverside