Combining the knowledge and experience of leading international researchers, practitioners and policy consultants, Knowledge for Peace discusses how we identify, claim and contest the knowledge we have in relation to designing and analysing peacebuilding and transitional justice programmes. Exploring how knowledge in the field is produced, and by whom, the book examines the research-policy-practice nexus, both empirically and conceptually, as an important part of the politics of knowledge production. This unique book centres around two core themes: that processes of producing knowledge are imbued with knowledge politics, and that research-policy-practice interaction characterises the politics of knowledge and transitional justice. Investigating the realities of, and suggested improvements for, knowledge production and policy making processes as well as research partnerships, this book demonstrates that knowledge is contingent, subjective and shaped by relationships of power, affecting what is even imagined to be possible in research, policy and practice. Providing empirical insights into previously under-researched case studies, this thought-provoking book will be an illuminating read for scholars and students of transitional justice, peacebuilding, politics and sociology.

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.