Beyond Evidence

The Use of Archives in Transitional Justice

Julia Viebach, Dagmar Hovestädt, Ulrike Lühe, Julia Viebach, Dagmar Hovestädt, Ulrike Lühe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032197401
• eBook ISBN: 9781000541687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on conceptual debates in transitional justice and critical archival studies, as well as empirical cases from various countries around the world, the contributions in this book critically examine how archives are produced by and used in transitional justice processes such as tribunals, truth commissions and remembrance processes.

This edited volume provides conceptual critiques of the transitional justice paradigm and innovations in providing a new lens on archival practices in transitional justice. In doing so it offers in-depth analyses of the relationship between archives and transitional justice in France, Colombia, Rwanda, South Africa and Northern-Ireland; it highlights truth commission and (international) court archives as much as personal collections and oral histories. The authors bring critical archival studies into dialogue with transitional justice discourses to highlight the activism and emancipatory potential but also the possibilities of injustices inherent in archives and archival practice.

Crucially, the book goes beyond merely highlighting the evidentiary value of archives by linking them to a multitude of transitional justice processes, goals and ideals, including remembrance processes, witnessing, reconciliation, non-recurrence, and various struggles against injustices and prevalent violence. This collection contributes to and expands our understanding of archives in transitional justice and critically questions core assumptions being made about the inherently positive contributions archives and records make to dealing with a violent past.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.

Transitional archives: towards a conceptualisation of archives in transitional justice

Julia Viebach

ABSTRACTThis 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.

1 Introduction

This paper seeks to trouble and complicate core assumptions made about transitional justice⁴ and archives and to critically examine what is often presented as a comfortable and complementary relationship between them. At present it is generally accepted by scholars and human rights activists that archives play an important role in transitional justice processes. Yet a series of fundamental questions are rarely posed, much less answered: what type, in what ways, by whom and for what purposes are archives used in transition contexts. The absence of these questions leads Baumgartner et al to conclude that ‘in transitional justice literature and the human rights field the topic [of archives] has been under-explored’.⁵ They further emphasise the importance of a better understanding of archives in transitional justice to make sense of the past and ongoing contestations over its interpretation and adjudication. To that end, I bring into conversation archival studies and transitional justice scholarship by distilling the contours of some of the pressing issues at stake when ‘seeing with archives’⁶ violence, dictatorship and accountability measures. Its contribution is therefore twofold: first it establishes a more systematic conceptual relationship between transitional justice scholarship and archival studies in order to filter from this discussion what transitional justice can learn from specifically critical archival studies for its own modes of knowledge production. Critical archival studies is ‘emancipatory in nature, with the ultimate goal of transforming archival practice and society writ large’ and ‘builds a critical stance regarding the role of archives in the production of knowledge and different types of narratives, as well as identity construction’.⁷

Second, based on this literature and critical transitional justice scholarship, this paper introduces the concept of ‘transitional archives’ thereby moving away from a rights-based approach to transitional justice and its archives and in turn emphasising the open-ended nature, ‘the in-becoming’,⁸ of transitional archives. In doing so it adds to the flourishing discussion in archival studies on human rights records including a transitional justice perspective. This conceptual shift from human rights records to transitional archives, as I will demonstrate, enables us to trouble core assumptions made about the relationship between transitional justice and archives. As Caswell et al remind us, ‘naming is power. Naming is a way of demarcating and defining and delineating and harnessing’.⁹ Perhaps this re-conceptualisation of human rights archives as transitional archives attributes power to those archives and puts positive and negative obligations on transitional justice actors and states alike to protect, preserve and mobilise both the voices and silences residing in them for societal change. Not least the conceptual shift enables – whilst still embedded in the broader framework of transitional justice - to respond to Harris’ concerns of creating a dominant discourse of human rights records by precisely opening up conversation about ‘non-orthodox perspectives’¹⁰ and see transitional archives not only as an opportunity but, too, as a potential constrain in the search for justice and truth(s).

The overarching objective of this paper however remains one of sense-making. It seeks to open up space in which to reflect upon, and begin to engage with, a series of foundational issues that ought to inspire future research. In particular it calls for further research into transitional archives’ underlying principles, contexts of their creation, capture¹¹ and recontextualisation through transitional justice processes in order to better understand their workings in these contexts and their potential subversive nature.¹² Therefore this paper is the beginning of a reflection on and pressing conversation between archival studies and transitional justice.

But how can we understand transitional archives? There are different ways of arriving at a definition of transitional archives. The most obvious is to start from the debate on human rights records. A systematic definition is provided by Geraci and Caswell who identify five interlocking vectors structured around the questions of ‘who created them, why, where they are housed and how they are being used’¹³ in order to establish a typology of human rights records. Taking such systematisation further we can arrive at a working definition of transitional archives by thinking around description, function, inclusion/exclusion, and normative underpinning.

I propose the following definition: transitional archives encompass various types of records ranging from those collected by international and civil society organisations documenting harm and abuses of power by state and non-state actors to a broad assemblage of further documentation (description) supporting transitional justice’s goals of truth, accountability or reconciliation after conflict or dictatorship (function).¹⁴ Transitional archives are created through these different types of records and materials, once captured, (re)assembled, (re)purposed and (re)contextualised for an institutionalised state-led or bottom-up transitional justice process (inclusion/exclusion). Transitional archives have a broad societal, political and historical significance as a collection of relevant records and are therefore worth preserving and protecting (normative).¹⁵

A full mapping of transitional archives is a worthy, even if ambitious task still to be undertaken, but obvious examples some of which will be discussed here are the archive of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC), the Stasi Records Archive in Germany, the Secret Police Archive in Guatemala as well as the archives of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda (ICTR) and the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Further examples would include the Gacaca archives in Rwanda, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (D-Cam) as well as the archive of the Vicaria de la Solidaridad in Chile or Memoria Abierta’s archive in Argentina.

In further concretising the notion of transitional archives, I begin the exploration by establishing how we can make the rich body of critical archival studies fruitful for transitional justice scholarship. Herein, I identify three tropes that I argue enable us to leave epistemological constraints behind and offer entry points for connecting archives and transitional justice: time and temporality, memory, and, historical accountability. The following sections foreground these tropes and open them for further inquiry in the discussion of the principles of transitional archives’ context of creation and their subversive nature. Therefore the succeeding sections will investigate the role of human rights documentation and of (authoritarian) state archives in the creation of transitional archives before delving into a discussion on ways in which these are ‘activated’¹⁶ and circulated within transitional justice processes. The waypoints suggested are a kind of mapping exercise that necessarily remain sketchy and incomplete given the scope of the debates this paper taps into. The discussion shows, however, that we are still at the beginning of knowing and understanding how (and under what conditions) human rights records find their way into transitional archives or how such override previous truth(s) in their multiple activation and circulation within transitional justice. Even less do we know about transitional archives’ ‘afterlife’¹⁷ shaped by their circulation into the cultural sphere after they have been constructed and served in an institutionalised or bottom-up transitional justice process. These sections therefore call for empirically and theoretically informed research on these issues.

Following this is an inquiry into transitional archives’ organising principles and the ways in which these impact on what and whose voice is archived and what and who is silenced. With a focus on institutionalised ‘discursive transitional justice mechanisms’,¹⁸ I identify institutional preconditions, transitional justice ‘templates’ as well as silence and voice as organising principles. Such exploration acknowledges the ‘subversiveness’¹⁹ of archives yet notes that what actually resides in the archive remains a task still to be undertaken. However, I argue that an inquiry into institutional preconditions and international, normative and structural ‘templates’²⁰ that transitional justice institutions are embedded in, could enable us to attend to the factors that ultimately determine what resides in transitional archives. This is a significant task. The initial analysis undertaken, and examples discussed, provide a glimpse of what a framework of how to read transitional archives, in particular their silences, might look like. The analysis of silences speaks directly to preconditions and ‘templates’. It is driven by an acute awareness of the challenges and risks that come with silencing voices in the production, activation and circulation of transitional archives. It sets out to systematise specific silences that prevail in them and suggests locating silences through Trouillot’s²¹ approach of identifying distinct moments in the production of history. The vignettes presented are brief but serve to open the theoretical ground that transitional justice scholars ought to walk. The paper concludes with a critical deliberation on the relationship...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Beyond evidence: the use of archives in transitional justice
• 1 Transitional archives: towards a conceptualisation of archives in transitional justice
• 2 From the forerunners of document collection to the trial of Klaus Barbie and beyond: the transitional justice journey of the Izieu telegram
• 3 Remembering atrocities: legal archives and the discursive conditions of witnessing
• 4 There was this goat: the archive for justice as a remedy for epistemic injustices in truth commissions
• 5 Non-recurrence, reconciliation, and transitional justice: situating accountability in Northern Ireland’s oral history archive
• 6 Personal archives and transitional justice in Colombia: the Fonds of Fabiola Lalinde and Mario Agudelo
• Index