Brick, Wood, and Metal: Material Configurations of Transitional Justice in War and Disaster-Torn Environments

This article argues that the built environment actively critiques transitional justice, exposing how material forms produce alternative temporal relations between violence, recovery, and justice. Drawing on ethnographic research in the post-war and post-disaster region of Banija, Croatia, and archival analysis of reconstruction programmes and policies, I show how transformations of brick, wood, and steel into various forms of built environment materialize layered, recursive temporalities that unsettle transitional justice's linear script. Brick debris fuses decades-old wartime destruction with earthquake fractures, revealing the incompleteness of restitution and the fragility of celebrated recovery. Decaying wood houses register the ordinary ruination and normalization of neglect, while corroded steel connects failed visions of industrial modernity to suspended futures and precarious life in the post-earthquake container settlements. These material configurations do not merely document transition. They actively reflect conditions under which violence and justice are imagined, contested, and deferred. By conceptualizing built environments as agents of transitional justice, the article advances a material-temporal approach that foregrounds how built environments expose the protracted violence of the conflict aftermaths, the unfinished transitions and suspended visions of just futures, often obscured by institutional frameworks. The article concludes that built environments can generate politically potent critiques of transitional justice by rendering visible the entanglement of environmental degradation, structural abandonment, and deferred accountability.