In contexts where no formal transitional justice (TJ) mechanisms exist, displaced communities often find alternative ways to respond to human rights violations, forced displacement, and ongoing marginalization. Türkiye, the world’s largest refugee-hosting country, presents a unique setting in this regard. While not undergoing a formal political transition, the country hosts millions of refugees, many of whom have fled armed conflict, persecution, and state violence. In this legal and political limbo, refugee communities, particularly Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi groups, have developed their own grassroots documentation practices to seek justice and preserve their histories.
This research project investigates how displaced communities in Türkiye mobilize documentation as a means of truth-seeking, advocacy, and memory preservation. These practices include collecting testimonies, producing human rights reports, organizing digital archives, and engaging in strategic litigation, often through refugee-led NGOs and informal networks. The project explores how such bottom-up initiatives embody transitional justice values such as recognition, accountability, and non-repetition, despite the absence of a formal TJ framework.
By focusing on these refugee-led efforts, the research aims to broaden our understanding of transitional justice in aparadigmatic settings. Through ethnographic fieldwork, legal and archival analysis, and engagement with community actors, the project will analyze how TJ concepts are appropriated, adapted, or reimagined by refugees themselves.
This case study contributes to the ERC-funded GROUNDOC project’s broader objective of tracing how grassroots actors innovate documentation practices in settings that fall outside the conventional boundaries of transitional justice. Ultimately, the research seeks to challenge dominant, state-centered models of justice and foreground the agency, resilience, and expertise of displaced communities.
Image credit: Courtesy of Fotohane & The Darkroom Project
