Bringing Memories in from the Margins: Inclusive Transitional Justice and Creative Memory Processes for Reconciliation in Colombia

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Over more than five decades of armed conflict in Colombia, the memories of marginalised communities and victims of conflict have been silenced or excluded from dominant accounts. These memories, and creation of spaces to acknowledge them, will be crucial to an inclusive reconciliation.This project adopts a participatory, co-production methodology to support community members in Bajo Cauca, Florencia, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and Valledupar - some of Colombia's most marginalised municipalities - to produce creative pieces of memory work. Creating memory work means using the pain of the past to create something useful for working towards peace in the present and future. Working with a set of highly respected national partners (including the National Library of Colombia, the National Centre for Historical Memory, the Peaceful Route for Women, and the National Network of Memory Sites) the project will enable victims to develop the skills, networks, and confidence to share their memories on a national stage, including with Colombia's truth commission. Acknowledgement of victims' experiences by the truth commission is fundamental to reconciliation in Colombia, but it will not and cannot be the only space where reconciliation takes place. Victims' memories also need to be heard and acknowledged in everyday spaces of learning about conflict and peace, including in schools and online. In partnership with the National Centre for Historical Memory, the project will train over 200 teachers to use memory work for peace education and it will produce a set of resources for use in classrooms. In partnership with the project, the National Library of Colombia will design and host a digital resource that will effectively share the creative memory work of these marginalised communities with a wide audience nationally and internationally.We bring together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners who share a commitment to understanding and enabling the possibilities for a more inclusive process of reconciliation in Colombia. The team of researchers from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the University of Bristol works across the disciplines of history, education, area studies, politics, media studies, and feminism and has expertise in co-production and participatory methodologies, the use of digital technology to enhance research findings, as well of leading research projects in Colombia and Latin America focused on memory, reconciliation and education. The partnerships at the core of the project are based on existing and well-established relationships with leading organisations in Colombia working to promote memory and reconciliation at local, regional and national levels. The project works in three strands, first memories from the margins will support between 1,000 - 10,000 people from some of the most marginalised parts of Colombia to create transformative memory works, enabling individual and community processes of reconciliation and developing lasting skills for public participation. Physical objects created by the project will remain in the local municipalities. The second, reconciliation, shares this memory work on a national scale, including with Colombia's truth commission and in the nation's schools. The final strand, lessons from Colombia's transitional justice consolidates the work in Colombia, producing lasting digital resources, and shares findings, methodologies and lessons in Colombia, the UK and internationally. The project will contribute to a sustainable, inclusive reconciliation in Colombia. In doing so, it will also generate important knowledge about the potential for localised processes of reconciliation to be connected with formal initiatives like truth commissions and shared in schools using co-production and digital methodologies. These lessons will be valuable for global policy discussions around transitional justice and for academic debates across our disciplines.