This research examines how grassroots documentation efforts in Northern Uganda are reshaping the methods and objectives of transitional justice and contributing to truth, memory, acknowledgment, healing, and repair in a context where state-led transitional justice processes have largely stalled.
It investigates the diversity of actors involved in grassroots documentation, their motivations, and the tools and methods that they employ. It pays particular attention to the power dynamics embedded within documentation processes, including questions of who documents, whose experiences are prioritized, and how narratives are constructed, negotiated, or contested. It also analyzes how grassroots documentation interacts with formal transitional justice processes, whether by engaging with, challenging, influencing, or circumventing them, and the implications of these interactions for inclusive and victim-centered justice approaches.
While transitional justice is often associated with political transitions, it is increasingly pursued in contexts without meaningful political change, as well as in situations of ongoing conflict and repression. Uganda exemplifies such a context. Transitional justice is being pursued in the absence of a political transition and amid persistent repression and ongoing human rights violations.
Uganda has adopted several formal transitional justice frameworks, including the 2007 Agreement on Accountability and Reconciliation from the Juba Peace Process and the 2019 National Transitional Justice Policy. These frameworks provide for criminal accountability, truth-telling, reparations, and traditional justice processes. However, implementation has been constrained by weak political will and the inherent challenges of pursuing justice when the state itself is implicated in past and ongoing violations. As a result, many victims’ demands for truth, acknowledgment, reparations, and justice remain unmet.
In response, civil society organizations, community-based groups, victims’ networks, and conflict-affected communities have developed locally driven initiatives, including memorialization, storytelling, peer support, community-led documentation, and traditional justice mechanisms such as Mato Oput, to preserve historical memory, repair social relations, and address victims’ demands for healing, recognition, accountability, reparations, and reintegration.
Despite their significance, grassroots documentation practices remain marginalized within mainstream transitional justice scholarship and policy, even though they play a crucial role in shaping how communities understand and pursue justice. They are frequently characterized as informal, peripheral, or subordinate to formal state-led mechanisms, which are regarded as the primary site of transitional justice. When acknowledged, documentation practices are often framed either as complementary to formal processes or as operating in tension with them. This framing risks obscuring the extent to which these practices constitute forms of transitional justice in their own right. It further constrains our understanding of how victims and communities actively produce and enact justice from below, particularly in contexts where formal mechanisms are absent, delayed, or ineffective.
By foregrounding grassroots documentation efforts, this research challenges state-centric and institutionalized approaches to transitional justice and advances a pluralistic conceptualization in which community-driven initiatives operate alongside formal mechanisms. It highlights how victims’ agency and local knowledge systems expand the transitional justice paradigm and help construct victim-centered, context-appropriate, and inclusive approaches from the ground up.
