Archiving Justice

This chapter interrogates this link between archives and transitional justice, and idea of justice more generally, in three parts. First I examine the ways in which the archive reinforces core aspects of transitional justice as practice and a set of normative values. This does so by both focusing on the support role that archives play in rendering justice a possibility (and in many cases beckoning a ‘justice to come’)(Derrida 1992; and 2001), and second viewing the archive as itself a site of justice in and of itself. The second section turns to a more critical assessment of the relationship between archives and justice, as I explore the archive’s logics, and drive. Ultimately, this points to the role that archives play in the governance – and disciplining – of community, and shows a concerning synergy between archival practice and the very violence that transitional justice (claims to) confront. The final section looks at practices that might offer a way in which a more transformative vision of archive and community can emerge. This both focuses on what Stewart Motha and Honni van Rijswijk (2016) have called the ‘counter-archive’ and explicitly points to the possibility of alternative archival practices that drawn on an aesthetic approach to the production of knowledge, and community.