Drs. Erin Baines (JRP co-founder) and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá from the University of British Colombia (UBC) have recently had an article on survivor documentation published in the International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ). The article is based off of an exchange between survivors in northern Uganda and Colombia that took place in July and November 2010. Here is the article’s abstract:

Through an exchange between members of community-based organizations that document human rights violations in northwest Colombia and northern Uganda, this article examines multiple strategies of memory making in which an individual or a collective creates a safe social space to give testimony and re-story past events of violence or resistance. In settings of chronic insecurity, such acts constitute a reservoir of living documents to preserve memories, give testimony, contest impunity and convey the meaning, or the ‘truthfulness,’ of survivors. The living archive disrupts conventional assumptions about what is documentation or witnessing in the field of transitional justice and introduces new interdisciplinary tools to the field with which to learn from and listen differently to survivors.

To read the full article, click here, or visit http://ijtj.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/19/ijtj.ijr025.abstract?sid=5452fb38-03f4-4274-bbe1-7adbdd264905.