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

该项目对学生进行经验、科学数据收集和分析方法的培训，研究冲突后背景下的文献记录过程如何受到基于社会的关于证据是什么、证据是如何产生的以及什么使证据可信的预设的影响。在世界各地的长期冲突中，非战斗人员经常在交火中丧生。科学研究人员已经证实，由于种种原因，官方对战斗人员和平民死亡人数的估计并不总是准确的。在某些情况下，为了夸大死亡人数以满足记录保存和提高生产率的动机，一些国家行为者被证明将平民死亡人数虚假地（但官方地）记录为战斗死亡人数。这对冲突后解决和过渡时期司法提出了重大挑战。本项目探讨了冲突后的情况下，这些官方估计受到质疑，以及如何制作和传播书面证据来反驳这些说法。除了为人类学研究生的培训提供经费外，该项目还将通过向对人权和冲突后和解问题感兴趣的组织广泛传播其研究结果来增进科学理解。在乔治华盛顿大学的莎拉·瓦格纳博士的指导下，莎拉·理查森将探讨如何审查国家暴力受害者的交叉目的文件，以阐明知识是如何产生的，以及文件证据如何在长期冲突的情况下被赋予价值和意义。这项人种学调查将在哥伦比亚进行，在那里，超过4000名所谓的假阳性（平民被杀害，然后在死后打扮起来，拍照，并在全国范围内被统计为游击队员）已被国家自己的检察官确定。该项目提出，两种形式的文件- -军事人员和受害者家属- -可以阐明人们如何制造和解释证据、建立或破坏社会关系以及描述社会经验。调查的目的是接触受影响的家庭及其文件（通过访谈、生活史和参与观察）以及军事文件（在800多起起诉中，大量此类文件已在法庭上提交）。该项目的研究问题围绕三个方面的文件组织：文件如何揭示或掩盖信息；文件是如何使缺失的东西物质化的；以及文档如何重新配置社会和符号关系。这项研究非常及时，因为哥伦比亚正处于谈判和平的边缘，结束了西半球现代持续时间最长的军事冲突。随着国家向和平过渡，文件将继续在受害者如何提出赔偿和恢复要求、如何查明失踪人员的下落以及如何想象和执行司法方面发挥关键作用。对哥伦比亚文件的详细研究也有助于确定人们如何使用、理解或不信任文件方面的障碍或不一致之处，从而可以对一系列地方和国际组织有所帮助。

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.