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 documentation and 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 on archiving 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 on international 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 legal process, which led them to develop new ideas about why archiving is important.
Baudewijns et al. (Wed,) studied this question.