Podcasts

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

In this new episode of the mini-series on documentation, we continue the conversation on documentation and archiving practices together with Eva Willems and Mina Ibrahim.

⁠Eva Willems⁠ is a post-doctoral researcher at the History Department and the Department of Conflict and Development Studies of Ghent University. She examines how peasant militias in Peru use archives to organize life amid conflict. ⁠Mina Ibrahim⁠ is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg and a visiting professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University. He builds archives to hold on to family memories and cope with ongoing displacement.

In the conversation with Kim Baudewijns, Eva and Mina reflect on how the distinction between documentation and archiving practices is informed by shifting temporalities. Documentation, as Eva demonstrates, “has a very pragmatic aspect of organizing the war, of organizing military actions, of organizing social cohesion. But archiving has this aspect of organizing the documentation in a way that it can be preserved for the future.”

Another key issue emerging from the conversation is the importance of considering a more encompassing view on archiving practices that goes beyond conceiving archives as collection linked to a state. As Mina emphasises, all types of archiving or archival practices – such as family photos, community collections, personal archives – “can intersect with the state, but they should not always be subject to state institutions.”  

Moving beyond the archives, we also need to think of justice as broader than judicial or state-led initiatives and consider shifting meanings of justice. In the context of Peru, Eva reflects on the difficulty actors such as armed groups face in imagining a post-conflict period in which legal justice or accountability can be pursued. Mina then foregrounds how in the Syrian context universal jurisdiction cases in Europe on international crimes have highlighted the shifting meanings of justice and the continued importance of archives. He explains how the same activists who compiled evidence for criminal justice were often also critical of the legal process, which led them to develop new ideas about why archiving is important.

Eva Willems © Gabriela Zamora Castellares

Mina Ibrahim © Community archive initiative Cairo

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast turns the spotlight on the role of documentation in TJ. This theme will guide much of our future work as Tine Destrooper’s project GROUNDOC “Innovation and documentation: Reconstructing the paradigm of transitional justice from the ground up” was awarded an ERC Grant. In this conversation Tine Destrooper, Brigitte Herremans, and Elke Evrard explore the centrality of documentation in TJ initiatives. They discuss how innovations in documentation practices – particularly those emerging from grassroots actors – challenge us to reimagine the TJ paradigm.

Highlighting the politics of documentation, Elke Evrard emphasizes how community-based acts challenge conventional notions of evidence and foreground questions of narrative ownership. She also draws attention to the increasing role of new media and digital technologies in documentation processes. While these tools may democratize the landscape because they offer new possibilities for collecting, verifying, and preserving evidence, “the expertise and the technical knowledge that these tools require, can also reinforce certain existing power imbalances between who is creating knowledge and whose knowledge is validated.”

Drawing on her research in Syria and Palestine, Brigitte Herremans highlights how grassroots actors are using innovative approaches to documentation as a baseline for proposing new ways of ‘doing transitional justice’. For these justice actors, documentation is not only intended to facilitate judicial proceedings, it is a counter-hegemonic practice that challenges epistemic injustice in various ways. “It’s not just ‘cold archiving’, but the cold archiving is also part of it. And that’s so interesting: the interaction between a variety of actors who understand that what they’re doing together serves a higher purpose, because they need to resist the erasure of these violations.”

Tine Destrooper emphasizes that these contemporary and experimental transitional justice practices are causing a paradigm shift. A more ecosystemic understanding of transitional justice is needed, and documentation efforts driven by grassroots justice actors are a central component thereof. This emerging reality requires us to “rethink transitional justice and transitional justice change theories from the ground up, not just to respond to two decades of increasingly critical transitional justice scholarship, but also to really better capture the reality of those contemporary transitional justice struggles.”