Abstract
This chapter introduces an inclusive online archive, combining institutional and community records, for promoting alternative narratives and memory of conflict and reconciliation in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, specifically Srebrenica. It reviews and proposes necessary changes in archival functions, procedures, and curatorial attitudes and in different stakeholders’ rights and responsibilities in records, bringing in practices from participatory, community archiving. It argues that including forensic evidentiary materials and post-atrocity photographs is essential for the new archival model to become an affective human rights platform. Free of geographic, temporal, and generational limitations, the platform could be distributed and shared, and thus suitable for members of disintegrated communities to recreate their own histories and identities and to reconnect online. Emotionally and imaginatively engaging, such survivor-centered memory spaces could be useful in local activism, serve as a dialogical space for confronting disputed histories and play a role in promoting reconciliation among affected communities.
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Szilagyi, C. (2018). Re-archiving Mass Atrocity Records by Involving Affected Communities in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Ristovska, S., Price, M. (eds) Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75987-6_8
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