Ass. Prof. Marília de Nardin Budó, Rechtswissenschaft, Universidade  Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil 

“Environmental Restorative Justice Beyond Modernity's Colonial and Ecological Divides”

Wednesday, 26 March 2025, 6  pm (CET), online

Registration for participating via zoom please write to: niels.weidtmannspam prevention@cof.uni-tuebingen.de

Abstract

Environmental restorative justice offers a powerful framework for addressing ecological destruction and loss. However, enduring challenges have limited its transformative potential. This presentation examines these challenges through Malcolm Ferdinand's concept of the "double fracture of modernity", Arturo Escobar’s “coloniality of nature”, and Cida Bento’s “narcissistic pact of whiteness”.

The first challenge involves confronting entrenched power structures where environmental harm is perpetrated by privileged actors whose actions are legitimized by state systems prioritizing "development." The second challenge concerns the marginalization of those most affected by environmental degradation—women, Black and Indigenous communities, more-than-human animals, and natural entities—who have resisted to multiple "ends of the world" in their territories.

Both challenges stem from the coloniality of power: the colonial fracture that establishes racial hierarchies to rank humans, knowledge, and territories; and the ecological fracture that positions humans above other species through anthropocentrism. Both challenges are perpetuated not merely through capitalism's material relations, but through interlocking systems of whiteness and cis-hetero-patriarchy—forms of colonial supremacism that systematically exclude plural epistemologies and ontologies from global policymaking and international justice systems.

This exclusion severely limits our capacity to establish meaningful accountability for perpetrators of ongoing ecocides and genocides, while simultaneously preventing our collective imagination from conceiving justice beyond Western frameworks. By understanding environmental justice through this dual lens, we can shift from merely restorative to truly transformative justice approaches. This presentation argues for contextualizing environmental conflicts within their historical and present-day colonial continuities, creating space for epistemologies and ontologies other than modern western rationality that can guide us toward broader and plural perspectives of justice.