Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of the book. It highlights three vantages on what it means to value nature on an aesthetic basis – philosophies of environmental aesthetics, aesthetic theories for the visual arts, and practices of international environmental law. It provides an outline of the book over the eight chapters, explaining how the different vantages on nature’s aesthetic value inform the analysis of photographic images in the book’s case studies of the World Heritage Convention, the Whaling Convention and the Biodiversity Convention. An overview of the international materials examined, and the visual art analysed, is provided. Here, particular mention is made of the book’s use of the rules and documentation of the decision-making processes of the World Heritage Committee, the International Court of Justice, and the Conference of the Parties to the Biodiversity Convention. In a final section, the scholarly theories that inform the book’s methods of analysis are introduced. This includes discussion of academic literature on law and image, sometimes called visual jurisprudence, and debates among philosophers of environmental aesthetics and theorists of visual art.

The treaty processes examined so far are replete with nature photographs. To consider the significance of such images, Chapter 4 starts by explaining aesthetic theorisations of nature in visual art. Over philosophical objections, it maintains that artistic depictions of the environment can be understood both critically, for example with insights from eco-criticism, and in terms of the multi-sensory experiences contemplated by philosophers of environmental aesthetics. The chapter then describes conceptions of ‘image’ in aesthetic theory for the arts, and in the field of law and aesthetics or, more particularly, visual jurisprudence. Despite a privileging of worded text, law’s visual manifestations have been identified by jurisprudents of common and civil law. The aesthetic analysis of visual art for law by scholars such as Desmond Manderson is found in studies of art for international law, and for environmental law. This chapter argues that understandings of image in scholarship for the arts can be combined with the distinct characterisations of the environment by philosophers of environmental aesthetics, to analyse the concept of aesthetic value for international environmental law.

The book begins with a short introduction to the broad problems and key questions which shape the enquiry. Namely, that an holistic perspective of transitional justice should include legal, social, and cultural measures, within which visual art has an important role. I identify the tendency in transitional justice scholarship which addresses the arts to privilege civil society arts initiatives over state-sponsored ones and to focus on the performing arts over visual art – two gaps which the book begins to fill. I then outline the two-part case study of post-apartheid South African visual art across important national and international institutions, the Constitutional Court of South Arica and the South African Pavilion at the International Art Biennale in Venice. The introduction concludes with a breakdown of the individual chapters and the arguments presented.

Chapter 6, The Visual Jurisprudence of Transition, theorises the Constitutional Court of South Africa’s art collection as a new kind of visual jurisprudence—the philosophy of the visual in law.I analyse the ways in which people, especially judges, talk about the art collection in order to show how artworks at the Court become central to the bodies of aesthetic knowledge that shape the appearance of justice and that shape how justice is understood. I argue that the artworks at the Court engage the moral imagination—a position which intersects with the debate in human rights scholarship over whether moral discourse or sentimental education is more effective in promoting respect for rights. In such close proximity to the Court, the art collection inhabits a unique position in which the assumptions of justice (and Justices) and what it means to uphold the Constitution can be probed.This creates a visual jurisprudence that reflects both the values which underpin the Court as well as the ways of practicing justice in post-apartheid South Africa.

The conclusion outlines the key implications and contributions of the book. Art is a radical form of political participation in times of transition.In South Africa visual art creates new critical spaces of political recognition and representation.Art is embedded in creative state-building, both internally and externally.The state uses visual art from the inside out to reconceptualise the South African justice system, and from the outside in to re-engage the international community with the South African state.The conclusion also addresses two potential criticisms facing the book, namely that what is discussed does not count as transitional justice and whether art really matters in post-conflict settings in the face of urgent human need.