Surrogacy and Resistance: Evolving Patterns in Unofficial Truth Commissions and Truth Projects

Summary

INTRODUCTION

One of the most notable trends in contemporary transitional justice is the near-ubiquity of unofficial truth projects (UTPs) in post-conflict and post-authoritarian states. These are complex and idiosyncratic processes that serve multiple social purposes. The nature of these projects depends on the motivations for pursuing ‘truth’ and the political realities that contextualise them. Some of these UTPs mimic official truth commissions in terms of organisational practice (investigators, hearings, national reports) and state-wide coverage, like Guatemala's Recovery of Historical Memory project (Recuperación de la Memoria Historia, REMHI). Others, by contrast, are micro-scale and sui generis, like the memorial in a family compound honouring family members killed in anti-communist massacres in mid-1960s Indonesia. Some projects are primarily conscious attempts to recover historical memory (e.g. the Kosovar Memory Book and Bosnian Book of the Dead), while for others historical recovery is a by-product of other reconciliatory activities that nevertheless coalesce into memory production (e.g. the Sarajevo Women's Court). Some projects are extremely technical (the classic example being the Documentation Center of Cambodia's (DC-CAM) panoply of archival expertise, digitisation, outreach programmes and publications), while others are essentially low-tech and haphazard (clandestine monuments in Rwanda and Burundi, for example). Sometimes victims are the primary motive actors, as in the archiving and oral history projects of Argentina's Memoria Abierta, whereas in other cases it has been their descendants (Spain's ‘grandchildren generation’ have taken the lead in recovering Spain's historical memory through exhumations). Some employ traditional or indigenous methods (e.g. Guatemala n braid-weaving to commemorate abuses and atrocities), while others embrace Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The ubiquity of UTPs can be explained by a confluence of ‘a globalized discourse of memory as redemptive on both personal and national levels’, the inevitability of grassroots attempts to remake national or local social worlds, and the resources and globalised expertise available to domestic civil society actors concerned with documenting or remembering the past. However, it is notable that few have tried to understand what they signify in terms of the legacy of truth commissions.