From Documentation to Justice: Rethinking Evidence
The new episode of our miniseries on the role of documentation in transitional justice focuses on the politics of documentation and the relation between documentation and evidence. To unpack this relation, Tine Destrooper is joined by Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College. Drawing on his work on evidence, forensics and visual culture, he argues that evidence does not speak for itself: it needs to be interpreted, narrated, and mobilized to contribute to justice – and this is not a neutral process.
The conversation opens with a seemingly straightforward question about what documentation is. In his publication What Is a Document?, co-authored with Hito Steyerl, Keenan traces the word “document” back to its Latin root “docu,” which is to teach. This etymology, he explains, points to an often-overlooked dimension of documentation: its pedagogical and instructive function. “And it felt to me like we didn’t maybe take that dimension, that sort of next step, after we’ve found the document or made the document, the step of presenting and working with the document seriously enough.”
Building on this insight, Keenan challenges the assumption that evidence carries an inherent authority or that truth automatically leads to justice. He emphasizes the importance of the forums in which evidence is presented, contested and interpreted. Whether in courts, truth commissions or public spaces, evidence acquires meaning through processes of mediation. This brings the politics of documentation into sharper focus. Who gets to interpret evidence? Whose interpretations are considered credible? And how can documentation be mobilized to foreground particular justice claims?
The conversation also examines the changing relationship between evidence and survivor testimony, and notably the risk that the growing reliance on scientific and material evidence marginalizes the expertise of victim-survivors. Yet, grassroots organizations are reshaping the production, interpretation, and mobilization of documentation, creating new possibilities for collective engagement in justice efforts. Keenan finds particular inspiration in the proliferation of grassroots initiatives, observing that “there are more and more collective endeavors and the evidence that is being produced or deployed in those situations bears the traces of this more collective production process.”
Thomas Keenan,© Mark Lewis
