Latin America has amassed comprehensive expertise in generating, managing, and providing access to archives documenting widespread human rights violations. This book explores and traces the multiple pathways that led to the creation and production of transitional justice archives in selected Latin American countries. Examining how transitional justice mechanisms have gathered and organised evidence by way of comparing traditional methods used in previous cases with the innovations introduced by digital technologies, the work also shows that the methods used to produce and create transitional justice archives will significantly affect their future utilisation.
Presenting the viewpoints of archivists, scholars, and professionals engaged in truth commissions and trials, it incorporates perspectives from diverse fields such as law, human rights, archival studies, history, anthropology, and criminology. The volume is divided into two parts. The first focuses on case studies from Argentina and Chile, two countries which have played a leading role in the development, management, and accessibility of extensive records documenting human rights abuses that occurred during the dictatorships in both countries. In the second part, academics and professionals of the Integrated System for Peace, Colombia's most recent transitional justice framework, discuss current challenges and developments in building the archives of the ongoing transitional justice process.
This book will be of significant interest to researchers and academics of transitional justice and human rights, as well as archivists and historians specialising in human rights.
Edited by:
Anita Ferrara,
Beatrice Canossi
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781041003397
ISBN 10: 1041003390
Series: Routledge Research in Human Rights Law
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 21 May 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming
Introduction: Transitional Justice Archives: Documenting Human Rights Violations in Latin America; Part I Chapter 1. From a Dangerous to a Usable Past; Chapter 2. The Archives about the System of Forced Disappearance of Persons in Argentina; Chapter 3. The Impact and Role of the Truth Commission Archives in Chile; Chapter 4. The Exhibition of Court Records at the Museum of Memory in Chile: When Law Meets Memory; Chapter 5. The Documentation Unit at The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC); Part II Chapter 6. The Role of Transitional Justice Archives in Supporting Justice, Reconciliation, and Memory in Colombia; Chapter 7. The Documentary Collection of the Truth Commission of Colombia: An Unprecedented Experience in Transitional Justice Archives; Chapter 8. The Precautionary Measures of the JEP and the DAS Archives: Fostering Public Dialogue on the Role of Secret Archives in the Colombian Armed Conflict; Chapter 9. Traces of Disappearance: A Groundbreaking Archive of Transitional Justice, from Investigation to Exhibition
Anita Ferrara is an Assistant professor at the Irish Centre for Human Rights (ICHR), University of Galway. Beatrice Canossi is a Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, School of Law.
