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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 Despite the risks, in the Ixil region, community members are building a museum that will preserve historical documents but also safeguard ancestral knowledge, such as weaving, gastronomy,and language.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 Velásquez Paulo 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.

We kick off this new season of the Justice Visions podcast with a set of conversations that we initiated during the recent Justice Visions Conference, exploring victim participation, mobilization, and resistance within the realm of transitional justice. In this first episode of these miniseries, we shed light on victims driving transitional justice efforts in Turkey and Tunisia. Our guests, Dr. Sélima Kebaili and Dr. Güneş Daşlı, both focus in their research on women survivors in contexts of conflict. Sélima, a senior lecturer at the University of Geneva, touches on the marginalization of female survivors in the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission and how survivors sought to overcome this. Güneş, a research fellow at Loughborough University, speaks of the mobilization of members of the Saturday Mothers who seek justice for enforced disappearances and crimes committed by Turkish state forces and paramilitaries. Both scholars unpack the nuances of labels such as “leaders” and “victims”. Sélima explains that while “victim leadership” might make sense in terms of underlining the important role victims play in driving transitional justice efforts, we have to be mindful of the label when applying it in the context of movements, as it runs the risk of defining certain victims as leaders and pushing others into more passive identities. Many women assert their agency beyond the public realm, and a discourse of leadership may render their actions invisible. Güneş points to the ways in which in Turkey survivors and family members use the labels of victim and survivor flexibly and how they navigate multiple identities. Starting their justice activism as relatives of the disappeared, they often evolve into human rights defenders, political actors, or lawyers, embracing multiple roles that sustain their resistance and resilience. In both cases, acknowledging a diversity of experiences, identities and approaches is crucial, since rebuilding identities after extreme violence is a very delicate process. As Sélima notes, "It doesn’t always require a grand gesture, and often it unfolds through more modest everyday forms of reparation, like returning to work, reconnecting with others, and restoring a social life." In the absence of an official transitional justice process in Turkey, groups like the Saturday Mothers have for nearly 30 years led informal efforts for legal accountability, memory work, and truth recovery. Güneş emphasizes that victims maintain a long-term perspective and are not dissuaded by the apparent lack of hope: "We know that there is no hope now, but we continue. We are going to archive. We are going to focus on what we do now. But when the time comes, we are going to act."

The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this third episode of the miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization and documentation efforts in Afghanistan, and reflect on the merits of arts-based approaches, as well as the challenges posed by such approaches.Sophia Bijleveld Milosevic is a member of AHRDO, an Afghan human rights organization that uses a transformative, victim-oriented approach. Their work aims to document human rights violations for judicial purposes while also telling victims' stories in a way that reflects their lived experiences, among others via art-based approaches. Through the Memory Box initiative, AHRDO collected over 15.000 personal items of war victims, creating a space for individual and collective memorialization in Afghanistan. "We felt it was important to continue to share these testimonies and to continue to advocate for victims", states Sophia. "In the Afghan context, memorialization can be considered as a form of symbolic reparation and a way of acknowledging the stories of the victims." To leverage their expertise in documentation, and launch an online platform, AHRDO partnered with HURIDOCS.HURIDOCS is an organization specializing in archival and documentation practices in the domain of human Rights. Its documentalist, Bono Olgado talks about how the victim-centred and arts-based practices of AHRDO challenged his organization to revisit its existing archival practice, and how memory and memorialization are understood. "When we are talking about creating a platform or a database that would reflect these art-based approaches, then we would need a different form of expertise, which is quite challenging because we're technically creating counter-epistemologies to existing practises of documentation." Initiatives such as the Memory Box and art-based methodologies, Bono stresses, reconfigure our understanding of documentation and data. "The challenge is to design technologies that actually support this new set of methodologies as opposed to flattening them."

The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this second episode of these miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization efforts through embroidery practices in Shatila camp in Beirut. Since the increasing repression by the Assad regime and the war in Syria, there has been a large influx of refugees into Shatila, originally a Palestinian refugee camp. Our colleague Sofie Verclyte recently defended her PhD project ‘Migrating heritage’, and developed a co-creative project with women in Shatila. In that project, she explored the role of embroidery practices in the context of conflict and displacement. Tine De Strooper and Brigitte Herremans spoke to Sofie about the practice of embroidery, and how it has been used in the Syrian context, as a way to remember, and an important element in the broader struggle for justice. While embroidery might not seem directly reconcilable with a struggle for justice, it has a long history of narrating lived experiences. There are many instances where practitioners use their skill to remember and transmit lived experiences of harm. As Sofie highlights: “this is also the case in Shatila, where embroidery, rooted in the region’s rich textile tradition, plays a central role in the lives of makers, typically women.” Traditionally, these women often passed down their craft through intergenerational mentorship, often as a form of storytelling. As such, embroidery is a way to transmit knowledge, to express lived experiences, and therefore also a way to preserve memories and to prevent forgetting. As Boushra, one of the artists with whom Sofie worked states: “For me, embroidery is a revival of memory. It prevents me from forgetting the experiences I went through, such as war, displacement and being a refugee. Often experiences are harsh, whether due to war, displacement, or life circumstances.” Boushra emphasizes that she sees embroidery as a form of communication, a language for sharing experiences. This perspective highlights the significance of nonverbal practices in capturing and conveying experiences of harm. In a context where formal memorialization initiatives are absent because of the ongoing injustices and the context of the entrenched non-transition, informal memorialization efforts can be seen as a way to express, share, and resist memories of injustice. These private practices preserve unarchived and previously unrecorded memories, but also, and often simultaneously, they make it possible to imagine a more just future.

The latest miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memorialization as the fifth pillar of transitional justice. The miniseries foreground innovative grassroots memorialization efforts from a wide array of contexts dealing with impunity, revisionism and lack of political will. This episode focuses on the vibrant memorialization landscape in Guatemala and El Salvador where victims-survivors and civil society organizations are actively constructing memory and dignifying the victims after mass atrocity. In this episode, Prof. Tine Destrooper brings into conversation Gretel Mejía Bonifazi and Prof. Amanda Grzyb, about working together with victims-survivors to undertake memorialization efforts in Guatemala and El Salvador respectively. Amanda discusses the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador project, which involves a participative methodology that involves documentation, research and commemoration initiatives that “reject an extractive model of research and focus instead on public facing projects… and that aim to recognize how community-based research and co-creation can count as research”. In the same vein, Gretel talks about the new research project that focuses on memorialization from below in the Ixil region. Gretel and Prof. Destrooper will work with Ixil survivors and grassroots actors who are currently mobilizing to create a Museum of Memory. The museum aims to both commemorate the victims of the genocide and to recover the cultural heritage of the Maya Ixil. In line with a participative and collaborative approach, the project looks at working with “victims-survivors according to their needs and worldviews, and to contribute to their ongoing memorialization efforts”. According to local actors and partners, engaging in bottom-up memory collaborations holds great importance. For Felipe Tobar, a Salvadoran survivor and local founder of the Surviving Memory project, the significance of the project lies in “facilitating and strengthening the organization of all the survivors and relatives” who are now more involved in the different initiatives. It has allowed the communities to have access to “health programs and psychosocial attention for the first time, which has helped them to heal the wounds” and work for the non-repetition of human rights violations. Guests:  Prof. Amanda F. Grzyb, is Professor of Information and Media Studies at Western University, where her primary teaching and research interests include state violence, genocide studies, social movements, and memory studies. Her edited books, articles, book chapters, public reports, and research-creation projects focus on Central America, Nazi-occupied Europe, Rwanda, and Sudan. Dr. Grzyb currently serves as the project director for Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador (a SSHRC and CFI-funded community-based research partnership committed to documenting the history of the Salvadoran Civil War and preventing future violence. Felipe Tobar is a survivor of the Sumpul Massacre and the El Alto Massacre. During the war, 18 members of his family were murdered. Throughout the war, he was displaced with his family, fleeing in the mountains and suffering the inclement weather, hunger, diseases and the persecution of the repressive forces of the government until the signing of the Peace Agreements in 1992. Don Felipe is the President of the Board of Directors of Asociación Sumpul,.an organization of massacre survivors in Chalatenango, and former mayor of San José Las Flores, Chalatenango, El Salvador. Felipe is one of the founders of the Surviving Memory project and a key collaborator on many sub-projects, such as the memorial at Las Aradas, the massacres map, workshops, testimonies, amongst other projects.

Between 1956 and 2011, Tunisia endured decades of authoritarian rule under Presidents Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian Revolution in 2011 led to the ousting of Ben Ali and catalysed the start of the institutional transitional justice process. Yet, mobilisation against authoritarian rule and the curtailment of basic freedoms also predated the establishment of this formal process. In this episode, our guests Houcine Bouchiba, Hamza Ben Nasr and Leila Bejaoui discuss how the participation and activism of victims, supported by victims’ organisations and civil society, profoundly shaped the transitional justice process in Tunisia. Survivors and activists have played a pivotal role in pushing for accountability, supporting truth-seeking, and advocating for reform – despite facing numerous obstacles and waning public and political will. Houcine, Hamza and Leila speak to the realizations and setbacks of the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) and the Specialized Criminal Chambers, whilst illustrating the importance of foregrounding gendered harms and socio-economic demands (for employment, and livelihoods) in the Tunisian context. At the same time, the events of July 2021 have caused widespread concern about the country’s transitional justice trajectory. This also prompted our guests to reflect on how the current reality affects victims’ experiences and trajectories, and how it pushes victims’ organisations and civil society to reorganize in order to revitalize justice efforts and resist autocratization. This episode was realized in collaboration with Avocats Sans Frontières (Lawyers Without Borders), Tunis branch.

The new season of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on issues surrounding victim participation, mobilization and resistance. It focuses on debates that will also be addressed during the upcoming Justice Visions conference, taking place 13-15 March 2024, in Ghent (Belgium) and online. In this episode, we talk about the methodological challenges of doing research on victims’ lived experiences of participation in and resistance against formal transitional justice processes. Our studio guest is professor Sanne Weber. Her research focuses on gender-just reparations in rural communities in Colombia’s Caribbean region, where survivors were engaged in the process of land restitution and collective reparations. In the episode we focus on participation in formal avenues, because, as Sanne argues, thee continue to be of paramount importance for victims: “What is really important about the more formal processes is the recognition by the state, because eventually it’s the state’s responsibility to redress the harm and transform the situation. Even though informal or non-formal spaces are very important and can have very important goal of rebuilding social fabric and recreating trust.” Yet, while her initial plan was to employ participatory research methods, she soon found that her potential research participants had limited interest in this approach, due to a “participation fatigue” which can be traced back to how the formal transitional justice process was organized. Colombia’ Victim law is often hailed for promoting innovative forms of victim participation, yet significant challenges have characterized its implementation. As Sanne argues, “Participation in this process had required a great investment of time and effort, but they weren’t seeing the results of their participation.” This raises important questions for researchers in terms of how to navigate this scepticism regarding participatory methods, the power dynamics surrounding it, and the concrete strategies for foregrounding the voices of people who experienced violence. As Sanne underscores in the podcast, this is a trial and error process: “It is really a way of trying to overcome obstacles by sharing the power between participants and researchers. This has a long history in Latin America - this approach of combining research with activism and valuing grassroots knowledge.” This episode on research methods lays the foundation for a next episode which focuses on the actual experience of survivors who participated in formal processes.

The new episode of Justice Visions takes a distinct approach. In response to the escalating violence in Palestine and Israel following the Hamas attacks on October 7th and Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip, we felt compelled to address these critical issues of justice and accountability. Our focus today are these international crimes occurring in an environment where impunity prevails.