ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to trouble and complicate core assumptions about transitional justice and archives and to critically examine the relationship between them. Understanding archives as a mere instrument of human rights obscures the silence of disenfranchised voices and the workings of power and exclusion that foreground the practice and discursive conditions of the transitional justice and human rights paradigms. Records about conflict and dictatorship are like records in general never only a reflection of realities, but they constitute these realities.¹1 Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science 2 (2002): 221–38, 222, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435623; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). Following Harris’ plea to find ‘exigencies’²2 Verne Harris, ‘Antonyms of Our Remembering’, Archival Science 14 (2014): 215–29, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-014-9221-5. to the transitional justice paradigm it suggests the term transitional archives to highlight the multi-layered afterlife of human rights records. It thereby emphasises the open-ended nature, ‘the in-becoming’,³3 Derrida, Archive Fever; Sue McKemmish, ‘Placing Records Continuum Theory and Practice’, Archival Science 1, no. 4 (2001): 333–59, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02438901. of transitional archives. It argues that by including critical archival studies in our thinking of transitional justice and a violent past, we can push beyond the dominant discourse of healing, closure and reconciliation, and open up space to investigate not only how the past but also transitional justice itself is produced at the intersection of power, memory, narrative and violence.