‘This is our Core Responsibility…’: Oral History Archives as Sites of Local Agency in Transitional Justice

Over the past decades, storytelling and oral history have had an increasing impact on the practice of transitional justice. Oral history testimonies have not only been considered in courts and truth commissions, but have also proven to be cathartic tools of memorialisation for victims and survivors. In addition, the consideration of oral histories has constituted part of the efforts to decolonialise transitional justice and to give voice to previously marginalised voices. In the contested narrative environments of post-conflict societies, oral history archives have additionally proven a source of bottom-up advocacy. They preserve alternative narratives and assert influence on more top-down institutionalised transitional justice mechanisms. At the same time and as places of community and solidarity, oral history archives have also been sites of activist resistance to the state. This paper aims to highlight how archivists in oral history projects conceive of their agency in dealing with the legacy of the past. Based on sustained oral history interviews with archivists in Eastern Germany and Northern Ireland, the paper engages in an actor-focussed analysis. It highlights archivists’ motivation, performance and impact on oral history archives, turning them into sites of resistance in transitional justice. By centring the experiences of archivists as local actors, it also sheds light on the emotional strain of such bottom-up engagement. This paper proposes three core dimensions of agency exercised by oral history archivists in transitional justice. By centring the narratives of my interviewees, I suggest that they take action to influence truth, accountability, and reconciliation through their archival work. 1. Firstly, oral history archivists influence processes of truth telling and truth establishment by encouraging contributors to deposit their narratives, conserving accounts of conflict that might otherwise be lost. Many archivists are actively advocating for community access to these voices and take action to make them heard beyond the local realm. In doing so, archivists encourage users to read state archives ‘against the grain’, and aim to promote a more holistic understanding of the past. 2. Secondly, archivists might enable oral history archives to constitute alternative forms of accountability: through the active long-term preservation of victim testimonies that might become relevant for future judicial processes, naming and shaming perpetrators even if these are not yet prosecuted, archivists establish a recognition for the needs of those affected by conflict the most. Archives can become places of moral accountability. 3. Thirdly, oral history archives are spaces of knowing and understanding the community. Archivists as custodians of testimonies take action in furthering greater understanding and places of recognition, potentially furthering reconciliation within communities. The article suggests an in-depth engagement with these three levels of resistance in oral history archives. By centring archivists as actors with agency, it seeks to motivate a wider focus on ‘regular people’ as actors in transitional justice.