Truth-Telling through Digital Narratives

The work of the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation has shown the importance of documenting serious human rights violations and supporting victim-led memorialization efforts, as these experiences constitute a solid base for knowledge transferring for other civil society organizations working in transitional justice contexts.

This program will support digital memory activism to establish alternative platforms for dealing with systematic human rights violations and ensure that human rights documentation actively informs the public’s understanding of the past rather than remaining tucked away in NGO archives. Digital narratives will give a prominent platform to victims of war crimes and human rights violations and will be based on well-documented facts and findings. It will use a language and format that appeals to broad segments of the population. To that end, the digital narratives will counter the divisive public discourses that ignore the systematic nature of human rights violations and push victims’ perspectives to the margins. This project will provide the broader public with tools and resources to tackle public discourse and empower critical parts of society to take the lead in alternative dealing with the past and reconciliation processes.

Digital narratives will be based on the enormous wealth of documented facts and findings documented by civil society organizations, international and domestic courts and truth and reconciliation commissions. This material has enormous potential for an inclusive, facts-based, victim-centered dialogue on wars and human rights violations.