UC Irvine

Transitional justice deals with the aftermath of mass atrocities, aiming to prevent recurrence by addressing root causes and providing redress for victims. It is a contested field that is currently in crisis where databases have emerged as central infrastructure to count the dead, trace the disappeared, and remember the deserted. Various forms of expertise, often within highly asymmetrical power relations, meet to configure these databases.This dissertation asks: what can we learn about transitional justice by attending to the politics of its databasing? I draw from my 26-month field work at an international NGO that develops databases for human rights actors. I primarily studied databasing initiatives in the Global South that are entangled with cosmopolitan expertise. Here we see, and I mainly argue, that databasing has become a site of subjugation, struggle, and solidarity. Negotiations and configurations within a network of expertise leave the field of transitional justice with infrastructure it builds upon and inertia with which it wrestles. I found that the inertia of established data models, controlled vocabularies, and expert practices are hard to resist, making alternative approaches difficult to pursue. We see through its databasing how transitional justice is shaped by the influence of international instruments, the logic of legalism, the seduction of quantification, and the political economy of nonprofitization. Yet there remain those that challenge this colonial capture of transitional justice discourses and practices. Locally-driven, victim-centered, and memory-based databasing initiatives reflect how actors in precarious situations reimagine the field. However, it is crucial to remain vigilant of how these concepts are enacted given that the transitional justice industry continues to appropriate new programs and blueprints for export, primarily to maintain its existence and relevance. This dissertation calls for transitional justice actors claiming expertise in the field to pay attention to the politics around the development and use of the databases they create. By failing to acknowledge their role in reproducing epistemic violence, experts and their databases not only continue to disenfranchise the communities they purport to support, but they also ignore and possibly even suppress crucial sites for the development of alternative and potentially more liberatory ways to contend with our violent pasts.