Call for Abstracts

Special Issue on Documentation, Human Rights & Transitional Justice

Journal of Human Rights Practice

Guest Editors
Brandon Hamber and Grainne Kelly (INCORE, Ulster University)
Elisabeth Baumgartner, Briony Jones, Ingrid Oliveira (swisspeace, University of Basel)

The role of testimony and documentation is crucial to human rights work in transitional contexts. Such evidence is vital in societies seeking to deal with a past of human rights violations, and for ongoing human rights campaigns. That being said, the identification, protection, preservation and management of archives and records related to human rights violations, as well as their dissemination and utility within transitional justice mechanisms, has often been under-estimated or overlooked.

This special issue of the Journal of Human Rights Practice on Documentation, Human Rights and Transitional Justice addresses this gap by bringing together academics and practitioners in an exchange on the role which documentation can, does, and should play in addressing human rights abuses of the past, and ensuring non-repetition of violations and that a human rights legacy can be established for the future.
Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

• Accessibility, reliability and utility of existing archives for human rights practice.
• Creation of new archives by transitional justice mechanisms.
• Alternative forms of documenting human rights abuses such as digital archives, popular song, and art.
• The relative value of different forms of archive for human rights practice.
• Use of archives of transitional justice mechanisms whose mandates have expired.
• Research methodologies for working with and on archives documenting human rights violations.
• Ethical implications of the creation, use and analysis of archives documenting human rights violations.

Submission Details

Please submit abstracts of no more than 400 words by the 1 December 2014 to Grainne Kelly (g.kelly@ulster.ac.uk). We will review abstracts for articles as well as for policy and practice notes.

The review of abstracts submitted will take place in the first week of December, and authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers for peer-review by 25 February 2015.