I am interested in exploring these oblique and furtive 'spaces of betweenness', and in how they figure in producing meaning in a mode of representation that seems so often predicated on specificity and transparency.”[11] Her 2009/2010 book of photography As Terras do Fim do Mundo (Portuguese for "The Lands of the End of the World"), also known as "The Aftermath of Conflict" or "The Ghosts of Angola's Civil War," is a collection of black and white film photographs that capture the lingering end of Angola's Civil War.

It includes fifty-five photographs, sometimes sixty when printed with earlier works such as Terreno Occupado, which traced the routes of the Border War fought by South Africa in Angola through the 1970s and 80s.

Her pictures document mass graves, minefields, abandoned crops, ambush sites, improvised memorials, trench systems, and dusty battlefields, singling out some small marker or piece of evidence in the otherwise indifferent landscape.

Her platinum prints further soften the harshness of the environment, their tonalities more gentle and forgiving; stands of swaying long grass hide a minefield, pockmarked murals lurk in quiet buildings, or lines of white stones call out the edges of a missile bunker.

"[14] The most published photo of the collection depicts seven pairs of black and blue overalls hanging from a tree, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art chose to represent Ractliffe's solo show in 2015.

"[16] In conversation around As Terras do Fim do Mundo, Ractliffe has been quoted to say, “One of the reasons for embarking on this project was, in some way, to attempt to locate the imaginary of [The Angolan War], to engage the myths that circulate and to retrieve a place for memory… I’ve spoken a bit about this collision of past and present in the landscape, but it was also colliding in me.”[17] Ractliffe's works have been discussed in many publications, from her own photography collections, such as her book As Terras do Fim do Mundo: The Lands of the End of the World ,[18] to group collections, such as Okwui Enwezor's book of over 250 photographs by 30 African artists: Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography.

This book features "some of the most iconic images of our time" and a "unique combination of photojournalism and commentary [that] offers a probing and comprehensive exploration of the birth, evolution, and demise of apartheid in South Africa.

"[20] In a New Yorker preview and review of Ractliffe's exhibit The Aftermath of Conflict," her body of work is described as having “an odd charge nonetheless, as if the South African photographer had channelled some collective memory.

With the photographer’s camera focused tightly on imagery which is often trimmed of context, we are confronted with the unsettling truth that war, in its awful beauty, ravages not just distant lands, but lives closer to home as well.

It was presented in relation to Prime Evil, a documentary film about Vlakplaas commander Eugene de Kock.”[22] The conference, and Ractliffe's show, were designed in response to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the lasting legacy of apartheid.

The exhibition uses this association to focus on a similar loss of utopian perspective following the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Communist Bloc’s investment in African cultural and political development.