ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2023-24
ISRF Mid-Career Fellow 2023-24
Biography coming soon.
This interdisciplinary research will explore how political transitions from atrocities, war, and conflict can be explained through and within the social and cultural life of trees and forests. In situating a critical political ecology at the heart of social and political transition, the research seeks to challenge the prevailing anthropocentrism of the dominant fields that lay claim over the question of what must beknown and done after episodes of conflict and atrocity, namely, peacebuilding and transitional justice. Indeed, both transitional justice and peacebuilding are fields that specifically periodise histories of conflict, atrocity, and transition through human centric lenses, and have paid scant attention to questions of ecological harm arising from violence. Drawing on recent theorisations of social and cultural order that seek to collapse any distinctions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and instead emphasise ‘agency’ as “entangled” between relations (and exclusions) of humans and the material world, the research takes seriously the role of more-than-human entities i.e. trees and forests, in making and remaking social and political life during and after transition. In Cambodia, over forty years of human conflict and atrocity, appended by accelerating regimes of unsustainable development and land dispossession in the 1990s through ‘liberalised’ market reforms, have dramatically reduced and remade forest ecologies. These challenges are especially acute for Cambodia’s Bunong indigenous communities in the country’s east, who occupy social and cultural worlds that are explicitly made possible only in relation to the vitality and ‘agency’ of forest ecologies. The project therefore asks two interrelated questions – with implications across cases – that arise in the work of transitional justice and peacebuilding practice, with political ecology and the more-than-human instead centred: how do human and more-than-human forest ecologies remember conflict and atrocity? And how do ecological harms figure within (entangled) social and cultural memories of transition?
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at lars.cornelissen@isrf.org.