Transitional archives: towards a conceptualisation of archives in transitional justice

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to trouble and complicate core assumptions about transitional justice and archives and to critically examine the relationship between them. Understanding archives as a mere instrument of human rights obscures the silence of disenfranchised voices and the workings of power and exclusion that foreground the practice and discursive conditions of the transitional justice and human rights paradigms. Records about conflict and dictatorship are like records in general never only a reflection of realities, but they constitute these realities.¹ Following Harris’ plea to find ‘exigencies’² to the transitional justice paradigm it suggests the term transitional archives to highlight the multi-layered afterlife of human rights records. It thereby emphasises the open-ended nature, ‘the in-becoming’,³ of transitional archives. It argues that by including critical archival studies in our thinking of transitional justice and a violent past, we can push beyond the dominant discourse of healing, closure and reconciliation, and open up space to investigate not only how the past but also transitional justice itself is produced at the intersection of power, memory, narrative and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Archives
• human rights
• transitional justice
• silences
• violence

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my co-editors of this special issue, Dagmar Hovestädt and Ulrike Lühe, for many and fruitful discussions on the conceptualisation of transitional archives. Furthermore, I am grateful to them, Richard Martin and the two anonymous reviewers for the very constructive and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Julia Viebach is a Departmental Lecturer in the African Studies Centre at University of Oxford. Her work centres on violence, memory, trauma and transitional justice with a regional focus on post-genocide Rwanda. She is the curator of the award winning Kwibuka Rwanda photographic exhibition and the Traces of the Past installation showcased at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. Currently she is leading the project 'Memory Figurations' that explores diaspora memories of survivors of the 1994 Genocide living in the UK and the US.

Notes

1 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science 2 (2002): 221–38, 222, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435623; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).

2 Verne Harris, ‘Antonyms of Our Remembering’, Archival Science 14 (2014): 215–29, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9221-5.

3 Derrida, Archive Fever; Sue McKemmish, ‘Placing Records Continuum Theory and Practice’, Archival Science 1, no. 4 (2001): 333–59, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02438901.

4 There is a long-standing discussion in the field what transitional justice entails and a multitude of definitions have been developed. For the purpose of this article the United Nations’ definition is most appropriate: transitional justice is the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation. These may include both judicial and non-judicial mechanisms, with differing levels of international involvement (or none at all) and individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting and dismissals, or a combination thereof. United Nations Security Council, ‘The rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies’, S/2004/616: 4. https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/PCS%20S%202004%20616.pdf (accessed 19 June 2020).

5 Elisabeth Baumgartner, Brandon Hamber, Briony Jones, Gráinne Kelly and Ingrid Oliveira, ‘Documentation, Human Rights and Transitional Justice’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 8, no 1 (2016): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huw002, 5.

6 Tom Nesmith, ‘Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives’, The American Archivist 65 (Spring/Summer 2002): 24–41, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.65.1.rr48450509r0712u.

7 Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan and T-Kay Sangwand, ‘Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction’, Critical Archival Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.50, 2; Caswell et al. subsume approaches under this umbrella term that ‘(1) explain what is unjust with the current state of archival research and practice, (2) posit practical goals for how such research and practice can and should change, and/or (3) provide the norms for such critique’.

8 Derrida, Archive Fever.

9 Caswell et al., ‘Critical Archival Studies’, 2.

10 Harris, ‘Antonyms of Our Remembering’, 216.

11 This terminology is borrowed from the records continuum approach that will be discussed at a later point in this article.

12 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing me to these pressing questions.

13 Noah Geraci and Michelle Caswell, ‘Developing a Typology of Human Rights Records’, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 3, Article 1 (2016): 1–24, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol3/iss1/1.

14 To concretise description: documentation that resides in transitional archives can be textual, visual as well as material and oral: documents, photographs, video recordings, artefacts, forensic or human substances, textiles, material objects (e.g. weapons).

15 A normative dimension is recognised and formulated in the United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity, specifically principles 14–18. Records are according to the United Nations ‘information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an organisation or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business’ https://archives.un.org/content/understanding-records-management; whilst archive ‘refers to the records of long-term or permanent value, as well as to the institution that manages them and the building that houses them’, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/HR_PUB_14_4_Archives_en.pdf (accessed 19 June 2020).

16 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meaning of Archives’, Archival Science 1 (2001): 131–41, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435644.

17 Teresa Koloma Beck, ‘Forgetting the Embodied Past: Body Memory in Transitional Justice’, in Transitional Justice Theories, eds. Buckley-Zistel, Koloma Beck, Mieth and Braun (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013): 184–201.

18 Ibid., 184–201.

19 Harris, ‘Antonyms of Our Remembering’.

20 Kirsten Campbell, ‘The Laws of Memory: The ICTY, the Archive, and Transitional Justice’, Social & Legal Studies 22, no. 2 (2012): 247–69, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0964663912464898.

21 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

22 Briony Jones and Ingrid Oliveira, ‘Truth Commission Archives as ‘New Democratic Spaces’’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 8, no. 1 (2016): 6–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huv016, 7.

23 Ruti G. Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69–94, http://www.heinonline.org/HOL/Page?page=69&handle=hein.journals/hhrj16&collection=journals, 214.

24 Natascha Mueller-Hirth and Sandra Rios Oyola, ‘Introduction: Temporal Perspectives on Transitional and Post-Conflict Societies’, in Time and Temporality in Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Societies, eds. Mueller-Hirth and Rios Oyola (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018): 1–17, 3; Harry Hobbs, ‘Locating the Logic of Transitional Justice in Liberal Democracies: Native Title in Australia’, University of New South Wales Law Journal 39, no. 2 (2016): 512–52.

25 Julia Viebach, ‘Of Other Times: Temporality, Memory and Trauma in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, International Review of Victimology 25, no. 3 (2019): 277–301, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0269758019833281; Victor Igreja, ‘Multiple Temporalities in Indigenous Justice and Healing Practices in Mozambique’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 3 (2012): 404–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijs017.

26 Rosalinde Shaw, ‘Provocation: Futurizing Memory’, in Cultural Anthropology's Field Notes Series, chap. 5 September 2013, Cultural Anthropology's Field Notes Series (2013), https://culanth.org/fieldsights/376-provocation-futurizing-memory (accessed 20 March 2020).

27 Viebach, ‘Of Other Times’, 4.

28 Igreja, ‘Multiple Temporalities’; Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’; Kristin C. Doughty, ‘Sociality of Enforced Waiting in Rwanda's Postgenocide Legal Architecture’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 40, no. 1 (2017): 122–36, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/plar.12199.

29 Teitel,'Transitional Justice Genealogy’, 86.

30 Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Magdalena Zolkos, ‘Introduction: Gender in Transitional Justice’, in Gender in Transitional Justice, eds. Buckley-Zistel and Stanley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 1–33. 3.

31 Rosemary Nagy, ‘Transitional Justice as Global Project: Critical Reflections’, Third World Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2008): 275–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590701806848.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Derrida, Archive Fever, 18, 68.

35 Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives’.

36 McKemmish, ‘Placing Records Continuum Theory and Practice’; Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish, ‘Teaching Recordkeeping and Archiving Continuum Style’, Archival Science 6, no. 2 (2006): 219–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-006-9030-6.

37 See e.g. Oliver Walton, ‘Timing and Sequencing of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka’, vol. CRDP Working Paper No 44 (KU Leuven: Centre for Research on Peace and Development 2015); Tricia D. Olsen, Leigh A. Payne and Andrew G. Reiter, ‘The Justice Balance: When Transitional Justice Improves Human Rights and Democracy’, Human Rights Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2010): 980–1007, www.jstor.org/stable/40930342.

38 See e.g. Viebach, ‘Of Other Times’; Igreja, ‘Multiple Temporalities’; Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Transitional Justice Time: Uncle Sam, Aunty Yan, and Outreach at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal’, in Time and Temporality in Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Societies, eds. Mueller-Hirth and Rios Oyola (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018): 35–50.

39 Ibid.

40 Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003), 11.

41 Viebach, ‘Of Other Times’.

42 See e.g. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7–24, www.jstor.org/stable/2928520; Daniel Levy, ‘Changing Temporalities and the Internalization of Memory Cultures’, in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, eds. Gutman, Brown and Sodaro (Baisngstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 15–31; Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (Oxford: Berg, 2007).

43 Alexandra Barahona de Brito, ‘Transitional Justice and Memory: Exploring Perspectives’, South European Society and Politics 15, no. 3 (2010): 359–76, https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2010.513599; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (Penn State University Press, 2010).

44 Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law (New Brunswick, London: Transaction Publisher, 2000).

45 Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

46 Eric Ketelaar, ‘A Living Archive, Shared by Communities of Records’, in Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory, eds. Bastian and Alexander (London: Facet Publishing, 2009): 109–33; Campbell, ‘The Laws of Memory’.

47 Christine Bell, Colm Campbell and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, ‘Justice Discourses in Transition’, Social & Legal Studies 13, no. 3 (2004): 305–28, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0964663904044997, cited in Campbell, ‘The Laws of Memory’, 3.

48 Campbell, ‘The Laws of Memory', 8; Donald Winnicott, ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34, no. 2 (1953): 89–97, https://doi.org/10.1093/med:psych/9780190271350.003.0088.

49 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, 19, 24.

50 Ibid., 19.

51 Ibid., 13.

52 There are of course exceptions. Some TRC archives for instance contain artefacts of mass grave exhumations or material objects other than photographs. See e.g. Trudy H. Peterson, Final Acts: A Guide to Preserving the Records of Truth Commissions (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press with Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). For instance, the Canadian TRC was ‘gifted’ objects of reconciliation by members of indigenous communities who had fallen victim to the residential school system; see further Cynthia E. Milton and Anne-Marie Reynaud, ‘Archives, Museums and Sacred Storage: Dealing with the Afterlife of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 13, no. 3 (2019): 524–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijz027.

53 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 167–168; Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives'.

54 Anne Whitehead, Memory (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 16.

55 Barahona de Brito, ‘Transitional Justice and Memory’, 360; Duncan Bell, ‘Introduction: Memory, Trauma and World Politics’, in Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present, ed. Bell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006): 1–33.

56 Paul Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 59–71, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750698007083889.

57 Verne Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa’, Archival Science 2, no. 1 (2002): 63–86, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435631, 64.

58 Ibid., 65.

59 Derrida, Archive Fever cited in Ibid., 66.

60 Marc Augé, Oblivion (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

61 Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives’, 133.

62 Ibid., 133–4.

63 Laura Millar, ‘Touchstones: Considering the Relationship Between Memory and Archives’, Archivaria 61 (2006): 105–26, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12537, 105.

64 Koloma Beck, ‘Forgetting the Embodied Past’, 193–194. She differentiates between discursive transitional justice mechanisms and experimental ones; the latter being policies of socio-economic justice or traditional, localised forms of justice.

65 Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro, ‘Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow: The Internationalization of a New Commemorative Paradigm’, in Memory and the Future, eds. Gutman, Brown and Sodaro (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 66–86.

66 Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver’, 96; Koloma Beck, ‘Forgetting the Embodied Past’, 196. In the critical TJ-scholarship there are some studies however that are concerned with forgetting and silences. E.g. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 76, no. 2 (2006): 131–50, www.jstor.org/stable/40027106; Marita Eastmond and Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, ‘Silence as Possibility in Postwar Everyday Life’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 3 (2012): 502–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijs026; Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, ‘Gendered Silences in Post-Conflict Societies: A Typology’, Peacebuilding 8, no. 1 (2018): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2018.1491681.

67 Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’. Derrida, too, offers important insights into the work for forgetting by arguing that we archive against memory. The archive as location serves to put something somewhere safe (He even uses the metaphor of a safe) in order to be able to forget it. At the same time this means that archiving is also a work of mourning which we can remember and keep safe inside us and therefore ultimately forget it. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’, in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid and Saleh (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002): 38–61, 53–54.

68 See e.g. Bruce P. Montgomery, ‘Fact-Finding by Human Rights Non-Governmental Organizations: Challenges, Strategies, and the Shaping of Archival Evidence’, Archivaria 58, (2004): 21–50, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12477; Michelle Caswell, ‘Khmer Rouge Archives: Accountability, Truth, and Memory in Cambodia’, Archival Science 10 (2010): 25–44, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-010-9114-1; Richard J. Cox and David A. Wallace, Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in the Modern Society (Westport: Praeger, 2002).

69 Frank Haldemann and Thomas Unger, The United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Daniel Groome, ‘Principle 2: The Inalienable Right to the Truth’, in The United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity: A Commentary, eds. Haldemann and Unger (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2018; Julia Viebach, ‘Principle 3: The Duty to Preserve Memory’, in ibid. Groome argues that often the right to know is used interchangeably with the right to truth but the latter historically developed from the right to know. Both remain theoretically underdeveloped. The right to know was first introduced in the Geneva convention pertaining to knowing the whereabouts of the disappeared or missing persons and the circumstances of their forced disappearance.

70 Daniel Groome, 'The Inalienable Right to the Truth’, 69.

71 Valentina Cadelo and Trudy Huskamp Peterson, ‘Principle 14: Measures for the Preservation of Archives’, in eds. Frank Haldemann and Thomas Unger, The United Nations Principles to Combat Impunity: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 163.

72 Ibid.

73 Ibid., 165.

74 Louis Bickford, ‘The Archival Imperative: Human Rights and Historical Memory in Latin America's Southern Cone’, Human Rights Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1999): 1097–122, www.jstor.org/stable/762757, 1090–1100.

75 Ibid., 1100.

76 Caswell, ‘Khmer Rouge Archives’, 25.

77 Montgomery, ‘Fact-Finding’, 23.

78 Geraci and Caswell, ‘Developing a Typology of Human Rights Records’.

79 Derrida, ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’, 42, 48.

80 Ibid., 43. And that is precisely why the power of the archon is so important in his understanding.

81 Ibid., 44.

82 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science 2, no. 1 (2002): 87–109, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435632.

83 Derrida, ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’.

84 Harris, ‘Antonyms of our Remembering’.

85 Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives’.

86 Derrida, Archive Fever.

87 Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives’, 97.

88 Ibid.

89 Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives’. Reading with the grain enables to see the institutional processes in which the archives was created whereas reading against the grain can shed light on silences and subaltern voices. In historical research these are two methods discussed how to read archives.

90 The section on what determines what resides in the archive will explore this aspect in more detail.

91 Achille Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’, in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid and Saleh (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002): 19–28.

92 Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory’, Archival Science 2, no. 1 (2002): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628, 13.

93 For Guatemala see e.g. Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); for Iraq see Bruce P. Montgomery, ‘Immortality in the Secret Police Files: The Iraq Memory Foundation and the Baath Party Archive’, International Journal of Cultural Property 18, no. 3 (2011): 309–36, https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/immortality-in-the-secret-police-files-the-iraq-memory-foundation-and-the-baath-party-archive/721732833154E61FFEC3243276646FF1.

94 J. J. Ghaddar, ‘The Spectre in the Archive: Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory’, Archivaria 82 (2016): 3–26, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/13579.

95 See e.g. Weld, Paper Cadavers; Tamy Guberek, Velia Muralles and Hannah Alpert-Abrams, ‘‘Irreversible’: The Role of Digitization to Repurpose State Records of Repression’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 13, no. 1 (2019): 50–70, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijy035.

96 See e.g. Pablo De Greiff, ‘On Making the Invisible Visible: The Role of Cultural Interventions in Transitional Justice Processes’, in Transitional Justice, Culture and Society: Beyond Outreach, ed. Ramírez-Barat (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2014): 11–24; Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Narrative Truths: On the Construction of the Past in Truth Commissions’, in Transitional Justice Theories, eds. Buckley-Zistel, Koloma Beck, Braun and Mieth (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013): 144–63.

97 Jones and Oliveira, ‘Truth Commission Archives''; see also Peterson, Final Acts.

98 Peterson, Final Acts.

99 Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives’.

100 E.g. Caswell, ‘Defining Human Rights Archives’; Geraci and Caswell, ‘Developing a Typology of Human Rights Records’; Bickford, ‘The Archival Imperative’; Montgomery, ‘Fact-Finding’.

101 Tonia Sutherland, ‘Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice’, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 2–23, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.42.

102 Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, ‘Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices’, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5, Article 6 (2018), https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6.

103 Chandre Gould and Verne Harris, Memory for Justice, (Johannesburg: Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2015).

104 Stacie M. Williams and Jarrett Drake, ‘Power to the People: Documenting Police Violence in Cleveland’, Critical Archival Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 2–27, https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.33.

105 E.g. Michelle Caswell, ‘Toward a survivor-centered approach to records documenting human rights abuse: lessons from community archives’, Archival Science 14, no. 3-4 (2014): 307–22, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9220-6.

106 Katherine Biber, ‘In Crime's Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence’, The British Journal of Criminology 53 no. 6 (2013): 1033–1049, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azt049.

107 Biber, ‘In Crime's Archive’.

108 Ibid.

109 Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris and Graeme Reid, ‘Introduction’, in Refiguring the Archive, eds. Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid and Saleh (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002): 7–19, 9.

110 Antjie Krog and Nosisi Mpolweni, ‘Archived Voices: Refiguring Three Women's Testimonies Delivered to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 28, no. 2 (2009): 357–74,www.jstor.org/stable/40783424, 359

111 This makes in particular Chile but also Argentina unique cases where documentation was collected during the time of abuse. We can see similar developments in the case of Libya where civil society organisations on the ground collect evidence with the help of the UK-based non-governmental organisation Lawyers for Justice in Libya. This documentation is collected for a potential transitional justice mechanism. See for more information https://www.libyanjustice.org/ (accessed 4 May 2020).

112 Bickford, ‘The Archival Imperative’, 1104.

113 Ibid., 1105.

114 Joel A. Blanco-Rivera, ‘Truth Commissions and the Construction of Collective Memory: The Chile Experience’, in Community Archives: the Shaping of Memory, eds. Bastian and Alexander (London: Facet Publishing, 2009): 134–48, 139.

115 Ron Dudai, ‘Through No Fault of Their Own: Punitive House Demolitions During the al-Aqsa Intifada (review)’, Human Rights Quarterly 28 (2006): 783–95, https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2006.0033.

116 Makau W. Mutua, ‘Terrorism and Human Rights: Power, Culture, and Subordination’, Buffalo Human Rights Law Reviews 8, Article 1 (2002).

117 Groome, 'The Inalienable Right to the Truth’.

118 Montgomery, ‘Fact-Finding’, 25.

119 Ibid., 26–27.

120 Dudai, ‘Through No Fault of Their Own’.

121 Alison De Forges, Leave None To Tell The Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999).

122 Montgomery, ‘Fact-Finding’, 29.

123 I would like to thank Richard Martin for pointing me to this debate on the contested interpretation of human rights in Northern-Ireland. For further discussion of how ethno-national politics can temper human rights narratives in a transitional justice context see Richard Martin, ‘Ethno-National Narratives of Human Rights: The Northern Ireland Policing Board’, The Modern Law Review 83, no. 1 (2020): 91–127, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2230.12473.

124 Eitan Felner, ‘Human Rights Leaders in Conflict Situations: A Case Study of the Politics of ‘Moral Entrepreneurs’’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 4 (2012): 57–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/hus016.

125 Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives’, 135.

126 Mbembe, 'The Power of the Archive’, 23.

127 Ibid., 23, 24.

128 Montgomery, ‘Fact-Finding’, 24.

129 Colonial archives are often over-looked in the transitional justice discourse. However, those can play an important role in reparation claims and making visible the crimes committed by colonial powers. One example is the migrated Kenyan archive which was kept secret at the UK's Hanslope Park (where it was ‘migrated’ to at the end of British rule in Kenya) until missing information on British rule and the Mau-mau revolt was discovered through the so-called Mau-Mau case in 2011, see David M. Anderson, ‘Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial, and the Discovery of Kenya's ‘Migrated Archive’’, History Workshop Journal 80, no. 1 (2015): 142–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbv027.151. The archive was subsequently used in the Mutua and others v Foreign and Commonwealth Office case that commenced in 2009. The court judgement ruled the then British government responsible and issued the payment of reparations for the victims of the Mau-mau uprising. The British government agreed to £19.9 million worth of reparations to around 5000 claimants and to financially support a memorial commemorating the victims of colonialism that was inaugurated in 2015. See further Anderson, ‘Guilty Secrets’; David M. Anderson, 'Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 699–716, https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2011.629082.; Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005); Caroline Elkins, ‘Looking beyond Mau Mau: Archiving Violence in the Era of Decolonization’, The American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (2015): 852–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.3.852.

130 Caswell, ‘Khmer Rouge Archives’, 28.

131 Dagmar Hovestädt, ‘Beyond the Obvious: The Stasi Records Archive as Transitional Justice Tool in an International Context’, European Consortium for Political Research Annual Conference (Hamburg, 2018). SED officers had started the destruction of records in November 1989 but were stopped by people occupying their buildings. Citizens of East Germany demanded access to the archives so that the Stasi archive was opened on German Unification day in late 1990. It took the German parliament another year to officially launch the Stasi Records Act that determined modalities of the host institution and regulated use and accessibility.

132 James A. McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), cited in Hovestädt, ‘Beyond the Obvious’, 7.

133 Weld, Paper Cadavers.

134 Guberek, Muralles and Alpert-Abrams, ‘‘Irreversible’: The Role of Digitization to Repurpose State Records of Repression’, 51.

135 Weld, Paper Cadavers, 218.

136 Harris, ‘They Should Have Destroyed More’, 1–2.

137 Ibid., 3.

138 Ibid., 7.

139 Cited in Ibid., 14.

140 Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’.

141 Anita Ferrara, Assessing the Long-Term Impact of Truth Commissions: The Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Historical Perspective (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2015), 37–38.

142 Ibid., 36.

143 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Recordkeeping and Societal Power’, in Archives: Recordkeeping in Society, Topics in Australasian Library and Information Studies, eds. McKemmish, Piggott, Reed and Upward (Wagga-Wagga: Charles Sturt University, 2005): 277–98.

144 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 179.

145 Ketelaar, ‘Recordkeeping and Societal Power’.

146 Ibid.

147 Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons’.

148 Ibid., 137.

149 Jones and Oliveira, ‘Truth Commission Archives’.

150 Nancy Combs, Fact-Finding without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiay Foundations of International Criminal Convictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

151 Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons’, 137. Whilst Ketelaar generally assumes changes made to such records through the process of archiving can hamper their function as evidence, he is less clear on the extent to which, and, in what ways this process impacts the validity of these records and their further use in criminal proceedings.

152 See further on this point Lühe and Ledauphin in this special issue and Caswell, ‘Khmer Rouge Archives’.

153 Francesca Lessa, ‘Remnants of Truth: Archives and Judicial Accountability for Operation Condor’, Latin American Studies Review (2020, forthcoming).

154 Ibid., 31.

155 Caswell, ‘Khmer Rouge Archives’. For further information on D-Cam see http://dccam.org/home (accessed 20 April 2020).

156 Ibid., 32–3.

157 Upward and McKemmish, ‘Teaching Recordkeeping and Archiving Continuum Style’.

158 This description of the records continuum model is taken from Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, 13; Caswell uses this model in combination with Trouillot's moments of silence in the production of history and the social life of objects approach to make sense of the use and changing meaning of the Tuol Sleng mugshots.

159 Ibid., 13.

160 Caswell presents a categorisation based on the continuum model with regard to the S-21 mugshots. The categorisation underdone here follows her example.

161 Sue McKemmish, ‘Placing Records Continuum Theory and Practice’, Archival Science 1 (2001): 333–359, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02438901, 336.

162 Further on memory struggles in Chile see Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet's Chile: on the Eve of London, 1998 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Blanco-Rivera, ‘Truth Commissions and the Construction of Memory’, 142.

163 Ibid., 143.

164 J. O'Toole, ‘The Symbolic Significance of Archives’, in American Archival Studies: Readings in Theory and Practice, ed. Jimmerson (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2000), 71.

165 Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives’, 138.

166 Terry Cook, ‘Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts’, Archival Science 1, no. 1 (2001): 3–24, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435636, cited in Ibid., 138.

167 Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver’, 65.

168 Campbell, ‘The Laws of Memory’, 5.

169 Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives’.

170 Ibid. 107.

171 Ibid., 103.

172 Ibid., 104.

173 Ibid., 105.

174 Adam Sitze, The Impossible Machine: A Geneaology of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).

175 Sitze, The Impossible Machine, 16.

176 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).

177 See further on the rise of victims in transitional justice Michael Humphrey, ‘The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma’, in Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought (London: Routledge, 2002); Thorsten Bonacker, ‘Global Victimhood: On the Charisma of the Victim in Transitional Justice Processes’, World Political Science Review 9, no. 1 (2013): 97–129, https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/wps/9/1/article-p97.xml.

178 I have discussed this in more detail in Julia Viebach ‘The Evidence of What Cannot Be Heard: Reading Trauma into and Testimony against the Witness Stand at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’ (paper presented at the European Consortium for Political Research Annual Conference, Prague, 2016). See also Thorne, 'Remembering Atrocities' in this special issue.

179 It is beyond the scope of this article to outline Foucault's work here in more detail. Important to note here is however that there is a difference between the subject position within discourse, i.e. the one doing something and the subject position that is constructed through discourse, i.e. the one something is done to. For the purpose of this article the latter subject position is of particular relevance.

180 Jonneke Koomen, ‘“Without These Women, the Tribunal Cannot Do Anything”: The Politics of Witness Testimony on Sexual Violence at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’, Signs 38, no. 2 (2013): 253–77, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667200.

181 Koomen, ‘Without These Women, the Tribunal Cannot Do Anything’, 259–261; Molly Andrews, ‘Beyond Narrative: The Shape of Traumatic Testimony’, in We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights, Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography, eds. Jensen, Jolly and Robinson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014): 147–166.

182 Exceptions are only the rules regarding witness protection.

183 Julia Viebach, ‘The Evidence of What Cannot Be Heard: Reading Trauma into and Testimony against the Witness Stand at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 6, no. 1 (2017): 51–72, https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v6i1.352. I will discuss this further in the next section.

184 Hamilton, Harris and Reid, ‘Introduction’.

185 Campbell, ‘The Laws of Memory’, 5.

186 Ibid., 6.

187 Teitel, Transitional Justice, 220.

188 Tom Lodge, ‘Truth and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, in History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present, eds. Maerker, Sleight and Sutcliffe (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018): 222–50, 176.

189 Whilst the dominant discourse on TRCs suggest this conclusion, there are in practice many other different problems that arise from formalised testimony-giving in TRCs see e.g., Fiona C. Ross, ‘Speech and Silence: Women's Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery, eds. Das, Lock, Ramphele and Reynolds (Berkley and London: University of California Press, 2001): 250–81; Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele, There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile (Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009); Krog and Mpolweni, ‘Archived Voices’.

190 E.g. Selimovic, ‘Gendered Silences in Post-Conflict Societies’.

191 E.g. Ross, ‘Speech and Silence’; Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Emily Haslam, ‘Silencing Hearings? Victim-Witnesses at War Crime Trials’, European Journal of International Law 15, no. 1 (2004): 151–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/15.1.151; Viebach, ‘Of Other Times’; Jelena Obradović-Wochnik, ‘The ‘Silent Dilemma’ of Transitional Justice: Silencing and Coming to Terms with the Past in Serbia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 2 (2013): 328–47, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijt011.

192 Katherine M. Franke, ‘Gendered Subjects of Transitional Justice’, Colombia Journal of Law and Gender 15, no. 3 (2006): 813–28; Julie Mertus, ‘Shouting from the Bottom of the Well The Impact of International Trials for Wartime Rape on Women's Agency’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 1 (2004): 110–28, https://doi.org/10.1080/1461674032000165950; Elisabeth Porter, ‘Gendered Narratives: Stories and Silences in Transitional Justice’, Human Rights Review 17, no. 1 (2016): 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-015-0389-8.

193 Robin P. Clair, Organizing Silence: A World of Possbilities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 162.

194 Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

195 Such assumption is particularly informed by trauma and testimony studies. E.g. Shoshana Felman, ‘Forms of Juridical Blindness, or the Evidence of What Cannot be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repititons in the O.J. Simpson Case and in Tolstoy's “The Kreutzer Sonata”', Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 738–88, www.jstor.org/stable/1344048; Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening', in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Laub and Felman (London: Routledge, 1992): 57–75; Dori Laub, ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle', in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995): 61–76; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

196 Krog and Mpolweni, ‘Archived Voices’.

197 Tilly Olsen, Silences (New York: The Feminist Press, 2003 [1978]).

198 Caroline Willamson Sinalo, Rwanda After Genocide: Gender, Identity and Post-Traumatic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

199 Selimovic, ‘Gendered Silences’, 6.

200 Caswell, Archiving The Unspeakable, 11.

201 CNVR 1993, 900 cited in Blanco-Rivera, 'Truth Commission and the Construction of Collective Memory’, 140.

202 Krog and Mpolweni, ‘Archived Voices’.

203 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 79–134.

204 Caswell, ‘Defining Human Rights Archives’, 208.

205 I will only be able to briefly touch upon each point due to limited space.

206 Obradović-Wochnik, ‘The ‘Silent Dilemma’ of Transitional Justice’, 328.

207 Buckley-Zistel, ‘Narrative Truths’.

208 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67.

209 Julia Viebach, ‘Trauma on Trial: Survival and Witnessing at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South, eds. Carrington, Hogg, Scott and Sozzo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): 1011–30, 1014.

210 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996).

211 Viebach, ‘Trauma on Trial’; Selimovic, ‘Gendered Silences’, 15.

212 Viebach, ‘The Evidence That Cannot Be Heard’, 65.

213 Cited in David Hirsch, ‘The Trial of Andrei Sawoniuk: Holocaust Testimony Under Cross-Examination’, Social & Legal Studies 10, no. 4 (2001): 529–45, http://sls.sagepub.com/content/10/4/529.abstract, 536.

214 Krog et al., There Was This Goat. See also Wouters, ‘Epistemic Injustices’ in this special issue.

215 Ibid, 43.

216 Viebach, ‘Of Other Times’, 5.

217 Kristof Titeca, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/02/19/spirits-on-trial-the-case-of-dominic-ongwen-in-the-international-criminal-court/, Spirtis on Trial? The Case of Dominic Ongwen in the International Criminal Court, vol. 2020, London School of Economics, ed. Africa Blog (London: London School of Economics, 2019), accessed 5 April 2020.

218 Ibid.

219 Ross, ‘Speech and Silence’.

220 Ibid., 3.

221 Ibid., 4.

222 Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Chana Teeger, ‘Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting’, Social Forces 88, no. 3 (2010): 1103–22, www.jstor.org/stable/40645884, cited in Selimovic, ‘Gendered Silences’, 8.

223 Ibid., 8–10.

224 See Philipp Schulz, ‘The “Ethical Loneliness” of Male Sexual Violence Survivors in Northern Uganda: Gendered Reflections on Silencing’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 20, no. 4 (2018a): 583–601, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1489732; Philipp Schulz, ‘Displacement from Gendered Personhood: Sexual Violence and Masculinities in Northern Uganda’, International Affairs 94, no. 5 (2018b): 1101–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy146.

225 Schulz, ‘Ethical Loneliness’, 586.

226 Leila Ullrich, ‘‘But What about Men?’ Gender Disquiet in International Criminal Justice’, Theoretical Criminology, online first(2019), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1362480619887164.

227 Derrida, Archive Fever, 10.

228 Ibid., 7, 16.

229 Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

230 Ibid., 26.

231 Caswell, Archiving The Unspeakable, 21.

232 Ibid., 13, 21.

233 Tom Nesmith, ‘Seeing Archives’.

234 Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives’.

235 Montgomery, ‘Fact-Finding’.

236 Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons’, 222; Derrida, Archive Fever.

237 Tom Nesmith, ‘Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the “Ghosts” of Archival Theory', Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999): 136–50, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12701, 146.

238 British chief prosecutor of Nuremberg cited in Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archives as Spaces of Memory’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 29, no. 1 (2008): 9–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/00379810802499678, 10.

239 Daniela Accatino and Cath Collins, ‘Truth, Evidence, Truth: The Deployment of Testimony, Archives and Technical Data in Domestic Human Rights Trials’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 8, no. 1 (2016): 81–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huv019.

240 Caswell, ‘Khmer Rouge Archives’.

241 Derrida, Archive Fever.

242 J. J. Ghaddar and Michelle Caswell, ‘“To Go Beyond”: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis’, Archival Science 19, no. 2 (2019): 71–85, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09311-1.

243 Kieran McEvoy and Lorna McGregor, Transitional Justice From Below: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change (Oxford and Portland: Hart 2008); Rosalinde Shaw and Lars Waldorf, ‘Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence’, in Stanford Studies in Human Rights (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

244 See Kinder, 'Non-Recurrence, Reconciliation and Transitional Justice' in this special issue.

245 See Giraldo and Tobón, 'Personal Archives and Transitional Justice in Colombia' in this special issue.

246 Harris, ‘Antonyms of Our Remembering’.

247 William James Booth, ‘The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice’, The American Political Science Review 95, no. 4 (2001): 777–91, www.jstor.org/stable/3117713, 786.

248 Derrida, Archive Fever, 4.

249 Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons’.

250 Verne Harris, ‘Seeing (In) Blindness: South Africa, Archives and Passion for Justice’, paper presented at the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Conference XI, (Winnipeg, 2001), 4.

251 George Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949).