Podcasts

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

What role does documentation play in the pursuit of truth and justice in context of ongoing violence? In this new Justice Visions podcast episode, we take up this question by exploring documentation practices in Mexico, a context marked by an ongoing and deeply complex crisis of enforced disappearances. With more than 133,000 people officially registered as disappeared and numbers continuing to rise, families have become central actors in the search for truth and justice. 

In this episode, co-hosts Amanda Rossini Martins and Büşra Cebeci speak with Anna Karolina Chimiak, whose work has been closely grounded in accompanying families of the disappeared since 2016. Drawing on both practice and research, Anna reflects on how families of the disappeared have placed documentation at the core of their strategies in a context marked by state-criminal collusion and the lack of effective institutional responses.

Zooming in on grassroots initiatives, the conversation highlights how families have stepped in to fill profound institutional gaps. In a context where violence is ongoing and state responses remain limited, fragmented, and ineffective, families have developed their own grassroots justice efforts by organising searches for the disappeared, mobilising collectively, advocating for policy reform, and documenting both the disappearance and the lives of their loved ones. 

As Anna explains, these documentation practices are multifaceted: they range from personal archives and community databases to search flyers, memorialisation initiatives, and artistic expressions, documentation takes many forms. 

“Families document to generate the information that institutions failed to produce and to build the evidence needed for search, for truth and for justice processes. But their objectives go far beyond that. […] Documentation is not only a technical activity, but also an act of resistance, of care, and of collective organisation.” 

These practices also sustain memory, challenge official narratives, and make visible patterns of violence that might otherwise remain hidden. Through documentation, they build evidence and push for accountability beyond national borders. At the same time, as Anna notes:

“Families of the disappeared in Mexico rarely invoke the language of transitional justice explicitly. Instead, they mobilise narratives grounded in its core pillars: truth, justice, memory, non-recurrence, and reparation, adapting these frameworks to a shifting and often adverse context that they face”. 

In doing so, families are not only responding to the crisis; they are actively reshaping what justice looks like in a context where violence persists and formal transitional processes remain limited. Their work expands the boundaries of transitional justice, grounding it in lived experience and everyday practices of love and care. 

Anna Karolina Chimiak is a human rights lawyer and PhD researcher at the Human Rights Centre, Ghent University. Her research focuses on Mexico, where families of the disappeared have become central justice actors, placing documentation at the core of their strategies in a context marked by state-criminal collusion and the lack of effective institutional responses. By analysing these practices, she examines how family-led documentation produces and sustains forms of truth and justice in a setting that does not align with dominant transitional justice mechanisms, and how these practices interact with, challenge, and expand such frameworks from the ground up. Before joining the Human Rights Centre, she served as co-director of the Centro de Justicia para la Paz y el Desarrollo (CEPAD), a human rights organisation based in Jalisco state, Mexico, where she provided legal, political, and psychosocial accompaniment to families of the disappeared and victims of torture. 

Photo Credit: Anna Karolina Chimiak

Justice Visions’ new research project – GROUNDOC -focuses on the role of documentation in transitional justice processes. In this mini-series of the podcast, we explore documentation practices across a range of cases that are part of the GROUNDOC project. This episode focuses on Uganda where the transitional justice process can be traced back to the peace negotiations between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, which provided for the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms including reparations, criminal accountability, truth seeking, and local justice processes. Yet, these measures are implemented amidst ongoing political repression and violence, the absence of a political transition, and democratic regression. In this complex context, we ask what the role of – grassroots – documentation is and can be.

Co-hosts Amanda Rossini Martins and Büşra Cebeci, speak with Sarah Kasande, who works  on the case of Uganda. By shifting the conversation from state-led mechanisms to grassroots documentation practices, this episode explores grassroots actors’ intentions, challenges, and complementarities.

Sarah highlights the responses of civil society actors and victim groups to the stalled state-led transitional justice process:

“After years of engaging with and supporting state-led transitional justice processes with limited substantive progress to show for it, civil society organisations,  and victims’ groups have increasingly turned to community driven alternatives. These initiatives offer more realistic pathways for truth-telling, recognition, social repair, and prevention of future violence, filling out the void created by the stalled state-led process.”

Documentation efforts from a variety of actors, such as local NGOs, cultural institutions, and community groups, helped to make the scale and patterns of violence visible beyond the affected communities, leading to international advocacy campaigns and criminal accountability. For victims, particularly women and girls who suffered gendered harms that remain unaddressed and unacknowledged, documentation serves as a pathway to draw attention to the violations they suffered and their enduring impacts. At the same time, it resists efforts to minimize, silence, or erase their experiences. As Sarah explains:

“Through documentation, women get to decide what to record, how to narrate the harm they experience beyond the narrow confines of these formal processes, and when to share their stories. This control allows them to reclaim the narratives that were previously shaped by violence, stigma, and exclusion. So documentation, in a sense, becomes a space where women assert voice, reclaim their dignity, and transform private suffering into collective knowledge and collective healing.”

By unpacking the complex transitional justice landscape in Uganda and exploring the diverse documentation actors and practices, Sarah shapes the scope of this episode beyond what is commonly recognized as a transitional justice process, toward a more transformative process spearheaded by grassroots actors.

Sarah Kasande (center) is a PhD researcher at the Human Rights Center, Ghent University. Her research examines how innovations by grassroots actors in Northern Uganda reshape the goals and methods of transitional justice beyond state-centric models, toward an inclusive, victim-centered approach. She has over 14 years of experience as a human rights lawyer and transitional justice practitioner supporting peacebuilding and transitional justice initiatives in Uganda and other African contexts. Before joining the Human Rights Center, she served as Head of the Uganda Office of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). She also led the Initiative for Transitional Justice in Africa.

Photo Credit: Sarah Kasande

In this new episode of our mini-series on documentation and archiving, co-hosts Kim Baudewijns and Gretel Mejía Bonifazi explore how community actors in Guatemala are reimagining archiving and documentation practices today. Guatemala is known for its longstanding civil society efforts in truth-seeking, accountability, reparations and memory. Yet, as our guests show, these practices are not static: they transform as new generations continue mobilizing and draw on documentation and archives in new ways.

We speak with Paulo Estrada, president of the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared (FAMDEGUA), and Miriam de Paz, member of the Historical Memory Consortium of the Ixil region and long-time advocate working with Ixil survivors and affected communities. Both guests emphasize that documentation and archives do more than preserve facts, they sustain identity, culture, and intergenerational knowledge.

Miriam highlights how community initiatives link archiving with cultural survival: “These practices, in one way or another, continue in the spaces of the victims’ organizations that remain committed to rescuing cultural heritage and ancestral knowledge, while also seeking strategies to make the truth visible and to disseminate it.”

While documentation has been essential for truth-seeking and legal accountability, Paulo explains that new generations are expanding the notion of what should be documented, and consequently, archived. Beyond documents and case files, they are beginning to safeguard cultural dimensions of memory, the memories transmitted through food, dreams, and everyday practices.  “We are now in a generation that can begin this process of documenting the immaterial within reconstruction, within memory, within justice, within truth… practices like cooking for the searchers (personas buscadoras) became an exercise of memory. These intangible forms also tell our history.”

Both Miriam and Paulo also highlight the risks that accompany contemporary archival and documentation work in Guatemala, including surveillance, threats, and criminalization. Despite the risks, in the Ixil region, community members are building a museum that will preserve historical documents but also safeguard ancestral knowledge, such as weaving, gastronomy, and language. FAMDEGUA, meanwhile, develops intergenerational memory exercises through art and pedagogical initiatives that invite young people to engage with archives through new approaches.

Miriam Gloria de Paz Brito

Miriam is a Maya Ixil woman with a long trajectory working and accompanying survivors and relatives in exhumation and reparation processes. Miriam is a member of the Historical Memory Consortium in the Ixil Region, a collective of grassroots organizations mobilizing to create a Museum of Historical Memory.

Paulo René Estrada Velásquez

Paulo is the President of the Association of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared of Guatemala – FAMDEGUA – and is also a member of victims’ organizations in Mexico and Canada. He has conducted searches for victims of enforced disappearance and advised on cases of serious human rights violations in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and Canada. He is a co-founder of the judicial observatory “Verdad y Justicia”, which monitors and analyzes cases of transitional justice and criminalization in Guatemala.

We would like to thank Arnaud Thaler and Sarah Kerremans for their voiceover work.

Photo credit: Gretel Mejía Bonifazi

In this new episode of the mini-series on documentation practices, we turn to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Together with Dr. Valérie Arnould, Legal and Policy Advisor on transitional justice with the international NGO Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF), we explore the challenges and possibilities of documenting human rights violations in a country marked by protracted violence, impunity, and ongoing transitional justice initiatives.

Valérie reflects on ASF’s multi-layered documentation practices, emphasizing that documentation forms the foundation of transitional justice. She explains that its value extends far beyond supporting trials or reparations mechanisms such as the relatively new Congolese National Reparations Fund (FONAREV). It also serves to counter misinformation, resist denial, and make visible under-recognised forms of victimisation—such as enforced disappearances.

The key question in our work is how do you engage in documentation that is truly meaningful to the victims, and in which they can have a direct stake in shaping the record of violations.

Furthermore, Valérie sheds light on the practical and ethical dilemmas of documenting in an ongoing conflict. Where you “need to develop a documentation strategy, accepting that it will be imperfect.” While open-source intelligence (OSINT) is often presented as the cutting edge of innovation in human rights monitoring, Valérie warns that in the DRC such tools can risk detaching documentation from the lived realities of victims, particularly given the limited accessibility of digital spaces.

She stresses that innovation should not only be about digital methodologies, but also about rethinking “documentation and archives as not being just about data collection and about information, but also about lived experiences and storytelling.” Community-based practices such as local storytelling, dialogue processes, or the preservation of atrocity sites and mass graves already exist, yet remain under-supported by traditional human rights organisations.

Bio

Dr. Valérie Arnould is Legal and Policy Advisor on transitional justice with the international NGO Avocats Sans Frontières. She has more than 15 years of experience working on transitional justice as an academic researcher, policy researcher and practitioner, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. She works at the intersection of political science and international law, with a focus on conflict-affected countries. She is currently also an Affiliated Senior Researcher with the Leuven Institute of Criminology at the University of Leuven and a Senior Associate Fellow with the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Leuven Transitional Justice Blog. She holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London and degrees in international relations, international law and war studies from King’s College London and the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Valérie Arnould, ©ASF