Justice Visions' new research project - GROUNDOC - focuses on the role of documentation in transitional justice processes. In this mini-series of the podcast, we explore documentation practices across a range of cases that are part of the GROUNDOC project. This episode focuses on Uganda where the transitional justice process can be traced back to the peace negotiations between the government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army, which provided for the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms including reparations, criminal accountability, truth seeking, and local justice processes. Yet, these measures are implemented amidst ongoing political repression and violence, the absence of a political transition, and democratic regression. In this complex context, we ask what the role of – grassroots – documentation is and can be. Co-hosts Amanda Rossini Martins and Büşra Cebeci, speak with Sarah Kasande, who works on the case of Uganda. By shifting the conversation from state-led mechanisms to grassroots documentation practices, this episode explores grassroots actors’ intentions, challenges, and complementarities. Sarah highlights the responses of civil society actors and victim groups to the stalled state-led transitional justice process: "After years of engaging with and supporting state-led transitional justice processes with limited substantive progress to show for it, civil society organisations, and victims’ groups have increasingly turned to community driven alternatives. These initiatives offer more realistic pathways for truth-telling, recognition, social repair, and prevention of future violence, filling out the void created by the stalled state-led process." Documentation efforts from a variety of actors, such as local NGOs, cultural institutions, and community groups, helped to make the scale and patterns of violence visible beyond the affected communities, leading to international advocacy campaigns and criminal accountability. For victims, particularly women and girls who suffered gendered harms that remain unaddressed and unacknowledged, documentation serves as a pathway to draw attention to the violations they suffered and their enduring impacts. At the same time, it resists efforts to minimize, silence, or erase their experiences. As Sarah explains: “Through documentation, women get to decide what to record, how to narrate the harm they experience beyond the narrow confines of these formal processes, and when to share their stories. This control allows them to reclaim the narratives that were previously shaped by violence, stigma, and exclusion. So documentation, in a sense, becomes a space where women assert voice, reclaim their dignity, and transform private suffering into collective knowledge and collective healing.” By unpacking the complex transitional justice landscape in Uganda and exploring the diverse documentation actors and practices, Sarah shapes the scope of this episode beyond what is commonly recognized as a transitional justice process, toward a more transformative process spearheaded by grassroots actors. Sarah Kasande is a PhD researcher at the Human Rights Center, Ghent University. Her research examines how innovations by grassroots actors in Northern Uganda reshape the goals and methods of transitional justice beyond state-centric models, toward an inclusive, victim-centered approach. She has over 14 years of experience as a human rights lawyer and transitional justice practitioner supporting peacebuilding and transitional justice initiatives in Uganda and other African contexts. Before joining the Human Rights Center, she served as Head of the Uganda Office of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). She also led the Initiative for Transitional Justice in Africa.
