The pursuit of transitional justice- seeking truth, reparation, accountability, and reconciliation following large-scale systemic violence and repression- is deeply entrenched in memory politics. However, the knowledge that drives and is created by transitional justice discourses and practices has been mainly shaped by epistemic communities of legal actors and human rights agents. This is despite the centrality of documentation and the integration of computing technologies in transitional justice mechanisms. From the mass digitization of paper-based police records to the design of large-scale databases of victims, the materialities and underlying logics of documents and computing have implications on not only what we remember and forget, but also on how we are being made to do so.
Adapting and expanding Bowker's work on memory practices, I look into the different and at times conflicting ways we document atrocities and the web of technical, formal, political, and ethical practices that surround such processes. In particular, I analyze what technologies of memory do for as well as to transitional justice mechanisms. How, given the jussive and sequential logics of archives as sociotechnical systems, it enables the rendering of justice while shaping its very form. This paper frames and articulates what it means for transitional justice to be a memory practice in the "epoch of potential memory."
