Rethinking Transitional Justice

The ACA Soundscape Field Station is pleased to share a guest exhibition by Janine Clark that features soundscape audio recordings collected in the Ukraine, and speak to the truths that sound can reveal.

EXPERIENCE THE ONLINE EXHIBITION BY CLICKING HERE

In the words of the artist:
In September 2024, I started a 12-month research project focused on some of the many environmental impacts of the russia-Ukraine war – dating back not just to russian aggression in 2022, but to the start of the conflict in 2014. Vast areas of Ukrainian forest have been burned; fragile steppes (grasslands) have been destroyed; soil, air and rivers have been heavily polluted; many protected areas, such as national parks and biosphere reserves, have suffered extensive harm and damage; countless animals have been traumatised, killed or have lost their habitats; and everyone with whom I have spoken has mentioned the egregious destruction by russian forces of the Kakhovka dam, in Kherson region, in June 2023. According to Ukraine’s former Prosecutor-General, Andriy Kostin, the destruction of the dam – one of the crimes that Ukrainian prosecutors are now investigating as a possible case of ecocide – is ‘probably the biggest environmental disaster in the history of independent Ukraine’.

The exhibition has three core aims. The first is to encourage new reflections on the russia-Ukraine war through the use of sound. Taken together, the recordings and related stories offer some fascinating insights into both human and other-than-human experiences of war. The second aim is to demonstrate that there is a significant yet completely unexplored role for soundscape recordings and soundscape ecology in transitional justice – meaning the variety of judicial and non-judicial processes that societies adopt to deal with the legacies of large-scale human rights violations. More specifically, the aim is to show that we need to develop more inclusive ways of doing transitional justice that do not neglect or overlook the environmental impacts of war and armed conflict. The significance of the soundscape exhibition in this regard is that it constitutes a unique acoustic testimony of the war and one that highlights the importance of listening – a neglected thematic within transitional justice theory and practice. The third objective is to give back to the Ukrainians who have participated in this research, by creating something tangible that they can keep and share with their children and grandchildren in years to come; and, in so doing, to contribute, more broadly, to important memory-building work – itself a key aspect of transitional justice – in Ukraine.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Janine Natalya Clark is a professor of Birmingham Law School. Her research interests include transitional justice, armed conflict, resilience, social-ecological systems, posthumanism, new materialism and disability. Janine has four research monographs and one co-edited book. Her most recent book – Resilience, Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and Transitional Justice: A Social-Ecological Framing – resulted from a research project funded by the European Research Council (grant number 724518). Janine’s interdisciplinary work has also been published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals, including The International Journal of Transitional Justice, International Affairs, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, The British Journal of Sociology, Environmental Sociology and Qualitative Research. Janine has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2024-2025), to work on a project entitled ‘Rethinking Transitional Justice: The Significance of More-than-Human Worlds’.