Description
The paper offers insights into how green transitional justice can respond to challenges arising from the intersection between environmental harm and peace processes, focusing on Diyarbakir in Turkey’s Kurdish region. It draws on a month-long fieldwork with lawyers, environmental activists, and small-scale farmers who experienced and resisted the destruction of the natural environment, providing social and political accounts of the root causes, challenges, and potential solutions. Having been defined by activists as a crime scene of ecocide, the Kurdish region has experienced extensive environmental destruction over four decades of armed conflict. The research took place during political efforts to end the armed conflict. Our findings show, in parallel with the emerging scholarship on environmentally transformative justice, that transition to peace simultaneously brings opportunities and challenges: the absence of armed violence eliminates the justification of environmental harm while intensifying the harm in unexpected ways, such as attracting more multinational extractivist projects.
