Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Influencing the Validity of Documentary Evidence in Post-Conflict Contexts

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This project, which trains a student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, asks how the process of documentation in post-conflict contexts is impacted by socially based presuppositions about what evidence is, how it is created, and what makes it credible. In long-term conflicts around the world, non-combatant women and men are often caught fatally in the crossfire. Scientific researchers have established that official estimates of combatant and civilian fatalities are not always accurate, for myriad reasons. In certain cases, in the interest of inflating body counts to satisfy recordkeeping and productivity incentives, some state actors have been shown to falsely - but officially - document civilian deaths as combat kills. This presents a significant challenge for post-conflict resolution and transitional justice. This project explores the post-conflict contexts where such official estimates are contested, and how documentary evidence is produced and circulated to counter those claims. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations interested in issues of human rights and post-conflict reconciliation.Sarah Richardson, under the supervision of Dr. Sarah Wagner of the George Washington University, will explore how cross-purposed documentation of victims of state violence is examined to shed light on how knowledge is produced and how documentary evidence come to be invested with value and meaning in situations of long-term conflict. This ethnographic investigation will be conducted in Colombia, where over 4000 so-called false positives (civilians killed and then posthumously dressed up, photographed, and counted system-wide as guerrilla combatants) have been identified by the state's own prosecutors. This project proposes that two forms of documentation - by military personnel and by victims' families - can shed light on how people make and interpret evidence, establish or damage social relationships, and depict social experience. The investigation is designed to engage with impacted families and their documents (through interviews, life histories, and participant observation) as well as with military documentation (of which an extensive amount has been presented in court in over 800 prosecutions). The project's research questions are organized around three aspects of documentation: how documents reveal or obscure information; how documentation can serve to materialize what is absent; and how documentation reconfigures social and symbolic relationships. The research is particularly timely because Colombia is on the verge of a negotiated peace, ending the Western hemisphere's longest continuous military conflict of the modern era. As the country transitions to peace, documentation will continue to play a critical role in how victims make claims for reparation and restitution, how missing persons are accounted for, and how justice is both imagined and administered. A detailed study of documentation in Colombia can also help identify obstacles or inconsistencies in how people use, understand, or mistrust documents and thus could be of use to a range of local and international organizations.