Justice Visions

What role does documentation play in the pursuit of truth and justice in context of ongoing violence? In this new Justice Visions podcast episode, we take up this question by exploring documentation practices in Mexico, a context marked by an ongoing and deeply complex crisis of enforced disappearances. With more than 133,000 people officially registered as disappeared and numbers continuing to rise, families have become central actors in the search for truth and justice.In this episode, co-hosts Amanda Rossini Martins and Büşra Cebeci speak with Anna Karolina Chimiak, whose work has been closely grounded in accompanying families of the disappeared since 2016. Drawing on both practice and research, Anna reflects on how families of the disappeared have placed documentation at the core of their strategies in a context marked by state-criminal collusion and the lack of effective institutional responses.Zooming in on grassroots initiatives, the conversation highlights how families have stepped in to fill profound institutional gaps. In a context where violence is ongoing and state responses remain limited, fragmented, and ineffective, families have developed their own grassroots justice efforts by organising searches for the disappeared, mobilising collectively, advocating for policy reform, and documenting both the disappearance and the lives of their loved ones.As Anna explains, these documentation practices are multifaceted: they range from personal archives and community databases to search flyers, memorialisation initiatives, and artistic expressions. Documentation takes many forms.“Families document to generate the information that institutions failed to produce and to build the evidence needed for search, for truth and for justice processes. But their objectives go far beyond that. […] Documentation is not only a technical activity, but also an act of resistance, of care, and of collective organisation.”These practices also sustain memory, challenge official narratives, and make visible patterns of violence that might otherwise remain hidden. Through documentation, they build evidence and push for accountability beyond national borders. At the same time, as Anna notes:“Families of the disappeared in Mexico rarely invoke the language of transitional justice explicitly. Instead, they mobilise narratives grounded in its core pillars: truth, justice, memory, non-recurrence, and reparation, adapting these frameworks to a shifting and often adverse context that they face.”In doing so, families are not only responding to the crisis; they are actively reshaping what justice looks like in a context where violence persists and formal transitional processes remain limited. Their work expands the boundaries of transitional justice, grounding it in lived experience and everyday practices of love and care.

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 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.

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, andintergenerational 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… practiceslike 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 VelásquezPaulo is the President of the Association of Relatives of the Detained-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, Canada, and Argentina. 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.

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.

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 documentationand 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 onarchiving 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 oninternational 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 legalprocess, which led them to develop new ideas about why archiving is important.

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast turns the spotlight on the role of documentation in transitional justice. 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.”

In this special episode of Justice Visions, we shift our typical focus on innovations in transitional justice to a broader debate about international law, its shortcomings, and how to rethink it in ways that benefit victim-survivors of gross human rights violations. We do so on the occasion of the inaugural Lecture of the Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University, which this year was given by Palestinian-American human rights attorney, legal scholar, and activist Noura Erakat. The Chair is awarded to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of human rights.In an interview which took place just before the lecture, Brigitte Herremans talks with Noura about the limits and possibilities of international law amid unfolding atrocities in Gaza. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law, Noura argues that, though not neutral and biased against those most in need of protection, can still be repurposed by those mobilizing it to resist injustices. While Noura’s work and activism focus on Gaza, her arguments about the possibilities and challenges of International Law are relevant to a broad range of  TJ practitioners and scholars who are working in contexts of ongoing conflicts and entrenched accountability crises. It offers critical insights about how legal tools can be reclaimed in transnational struggles, rethinking justice beyond formal mechanisms. Touching on survivor-led agency, Noura challenges the framing of Palestinians as passive victim-survivors. Instead, she insists on recognizing their active role in resisting domination and their capacity to demonstrate the full spectrum of their potential as humans, despite the genocide and complicity of states in the Global North. For Noura, part of the Palestinian victory lies not only in the struggle for liberation, but in living that liberation, through joy, care, and collective action. As she states: "We are not defined by what Israel does to us. We are defined by who we are. We are defined by what we do, what we produce, what we write, how we love one another…. We are defined by who we are, despite that harm, and how we respond to it.”Throughout the conversation, Noura emphasizes the importance of counter-hegemonic knowledge production and the need to resist dominant legal and media frameworks as these continue to erase Palestinian experiences and perspectives. She calls for a decolonial and feminist understanding of justice, and resistance that connects Palestine to global struggles. She also reminds us of the responsibility that comes with activism. “If Palestinians who have been placed in a cage and basically shot at with the most advanced weapons technology is a form of experimentation and without mercy have not given up. What right do I have to give up?”

On December 8, 2024 the unthinkable happened: the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.This new episode of the Justice Visions podcast explores how the mobilization for justice shapes up in the post-Assad era. Brigitte Herremans is joined by our new colleague, Layla Zibar, an urban researcher who focuses on the spatio-temporal dimensions of forced displacements and justice. Together they examine what this historic moment means for the struggle for justice and how it affects victim participation and leadership.Joining the discussion are Yasmen Almeshan, founding member of the Caesar Families Association, and Lina Ghoutouk, a human rights defender researching the gendered impact of enforced disappearances. Yasmen and Lina share their perspectives on the fate of Syria’s disappeared, the urgent need to safeguard detention centers and mass graves, and the growing demand for victim participation in justice processes. The fall of the Assad regime and the transition have reshaped the struggle for justice, truth, and memorialization. One of the main challenges now is to ensure that justice is not delayed or denied.Yasmen has just returned from Syria, where she joined over 50 experts in a workshop on transitional justice, underscoring civil society’s role in shaping the transition, if the new caretaker government engages. The road to justice is long, Yasmen highlights, with the immediate priority being safeguarding records and mass graves, crucial to uncovering the fate of the missing, the most painful and urgent issue. "The stark contrast between the number of those documented as missing and the relatively small number of those released was a heartbreaking shock. It meant that the likelihood of our loved ones being dead had increased significantly, and any hope of their return had all but vanished. Conflicting reports about their fate, along with a spread of rumors, often fueled by social media, only added to the confusion."Lina emphasizes the urgent need for trust among stakeholders and cooperation from the caretaker government, international institutions such as the Independent Institution for Missing Persons in Syria, civil society, and victims. The Syrian government should, in her view, focus on urgent transitional justice measures, such as securing detention centers and mass graves, preserving evidence, and preventing impunity. The most pressing issue is the call from families of the disappeared for a unified approach to address their plight. "They need one place that they can go to and inquire about the fate of their loved ones. They really need to know where they can go to have verified information, to know about services and to inquire about what is available for them and for the survivors and also for the families."

This new episode zooms in on the invisibilization of certain voices in transitional justice discourse and practice, namely LGBTQIA+ and children’s perspectives, whose lives and experiences have been excluded from most formal and informal transitional justice initiatives. Our guests, Pascha Bueno-Hansen and Caitlin Biddolph, both conduct research on transitional justice issues from LGBTQIA+, intersectional and decolonial perspectives. Pascha, associate professor at the University of Delaware, works on LGBTQIA+ mobilization and resistance in defense of human rights in Latin America. Caitlin, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, spoke about one strand of her research that focuses on queering childhood in global transitional justice governance.Both scholars touch upon how LGBTQIA +, intersectional, and decolonial approaches help problematize and unsettle some of the current assumptions and challenges in transitional justice.Pascha foregrounds that both the gender and sex binary, as well as the temporally bounded nature of transitional justice, limit our understanding of structural and historical violence against certain populations. This is clear for example, in the erasure of the lived experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community from transitional justice initiatives. Caitlin focuses on the paternalistic and protectionist nature of global transitional justice governance that tends to depict (queer) children as passive victims stripping their agency away and thus reproducing power hierarchies. They both see opportunities in local intergenerational spaces to dismantle these discourses and practices. Through examples from Latin America, Pascha reflects how artivism paved the way to include LGBTQIA+ issues in transitional justice mechanisms. She also stresses how “younger generations have done such an incredible job of making inroads into inclusive language and preferred gender pronouns. And that is something that the older generations struggle with comprehending”.  Intergenerational dialogues can make global transitional justice more inclusive; Caitlin emphasizes too. She sees this as an opportunity to “stitching together stories across temporalities… of trying to put together the fabric of a country so that we have a more rich and ongoing narrative about injustice and violence and atrocity”. In her view, this has the potential of destabilizing power hierarchies present in global transitional justice institutions and turn them into dialogical and relational processes.

In this new episode we zoom in on an oft-overlooked dimension of victim participation in formal transitional justice processes, namely the labor that victims invest in justice processes. In a conversation with professor Leila Ulrich, we explore the intricate relationship between the ICC’s engagement with victims and the global capitalist systems in which the court operates. The dynamics of under-valorization of victims time-investment, the offloading of care work to local and gendered practitioners, and the invisibilization of victims’ contributions to formal justice processes, characterize many international justice processes, Leila argues. Therefore, it is crucial to acknowledge and make this work politically visible as labor. Foregrounding the knowledge, resources, and time people dedicate allows us to acknowledge their contributions and better understand the depth of their involvement. "[T]here is a lot of tension between those who work and those who don't work in the same way that there's a lot of tension between those who are recognised as victims and those who are not. So there's a lot of complexities and paradoxes involved in how victim participation functions." In this new episode, Tine Destrooper is joined by co-host Kim Baudewijns, who recently became a member of the Justice Visions' team, doing research on TJ processes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kim’s work situates this conversation in the broader landscape of justice initiatives: standardized and informal, local and international, judicial and non-judicial, etc. This inspires a reflection on how victims’ roles alter across these various justice sites.