Abstract

Documentation lies at the heart of a wide range of justice struggles, human rights claims and transitional justice processes. Yet, documentation practices have received scant attention as justice practices in their own right, and are mostly treated as a helpmeet of, or precondition for, other (often formal) justice processes. This is striking considering that notably grassroots documentation practices offer an avenue for studying how justice initiatives shape up, are negotiated and (re)imagined from the bottom-up. Moreover, in the past decade, documentation practices have changed drastically, in ways that entail both promising advancements and new concerns. These changes include growing availability of publicly accessible data and capacities to analyse these, as well as innovative grassroots and artistic documentation initiatives, but also, for example, the defunding of and attacks on existing archives. This article argues, based on a secondary analysis of fieldwork across eight different contexts, that these documentation practices should be better understood and theorised, and that this theoretical exercise can serve as a starting point for a more fundamental endeavour of reimagining theories of change from below, notably in the field of transitional justice something particularly urgent at a time when formal justice mechanisms are increasingly under threat and critiqued.