This collection adds to the critical transitional justice scholarship that calls for "transitional justice from below" and that makes visible the complex and oftentimes troubled entanglements between justice endeavours, locality, and memory-making. Broadening this perspective, it explores informal memory practices across various contexts with a focus on their individual and collective dynamics and their intersections, reaching also beyond a conceptualisation of memory as mere symbolic reparation and politics of memory. It seeks to highlight the hidden, unwritten, and multifaceted in today's memory boom by focusing on the memorialisation practices of communities, activists, families, and survivors. Organising its analytical focal point around the localisation of memory, it offers valuable and new insights on how and under what conditions localised memory practices may contribute to recognition and social transformation, as well as how they may at best be inclusive, or exclusive, of dynamic and diverse memories. Drawing on inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches, this book brings an in-depth and nuanced understanding of local memory practices and the dynamics attached to these in transitional justice contexts. It will be of much interest to students and scholars of memory and genocide studies, peace and conflict studies, transitional justice, sociology, and anthropology.

Drawing on conceptual debates in transitional justice and critical archival studies, as well as empirical cases from various countries around the world, the contributions in this book critically examine how archives are produced by and used in transitional justice processes such as tribunals, truth commissions and remembrance processes. This edited volume provides conceptual critiques of the transitional justice paradigm and innovations in providing a new lens on archival practices in transitional justice. In doing so it offers in-depth analyses of the relationship between archives and transitional justice in France, Colombia, Rwanda, South Africa and Northern-Ireland; it highlights truth commission and (international) court archives as much as personal collections and oral histories. The authors bring critical archival studies into dialogue with transitional justice discourses to highlight the activism and emancipatory potential but also the possibilities of injustices inherent in archives and archival practice. Crucially, the book goes beyond merely highlighting the evidentiary value of archives by linking them to a multitude of transitional justice processes, goals and ideals, including remembrance processes, witnessing, reconciliation, non-recurrence, and various struggles against injustices and prevalent violence. This collection contributes to and expands our understanding of archives in transitional justice and critically questions core assumptions being made about the inherently positive contributions archives and records make to dealing with a violent past. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Human Rights.