Archiving (In)justice: Building Archives and Imagining Community

This article explores the role that archives play in the constitution and governance of the international community. First, drawing on post-colonial scholarship, it develops a framework to explicate the link between archive and community, centring on questions of voice, identity and responsibility. It then examines how the archive can be analysed, pointing additionally to the importance of the archive’s materiality. Second, these ideas are explored through a reading of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s (ICTR) archive, which helped rebuild the international community in the wake of its failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide. By providing a detailed reading of the ICTR’s records, and drawing on the framework established in the first section, the article shows that the archive constructed a liberal, patriarchal and colonial understanding of the international community.