On Insurgent Knowledge and Affiliative Powers. Human Rights Violations, Civil Society Archives and Alternative Forms of Repair

In Chile, human rights archives created by civil society organisations during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) have been essential for transitional justice processes since 1990 but were also crucial for civil society’s political resistance, denunciation, and assistance to those affected during the military regime. This paper approaches human rights violations reparation through the paradigmatic case of dictatorial Chile’s foremost human rights archive. Multi-sited analysis of documents and interviews with creators, managers and users of the Vicariate of Solidarity archive (1973-1992) leads an exploration of how this archive instigates and inscribes alternative forms of repair of human rights atrocities. Approaching the archive as a locus of heterogeneous relations and socio-material inscriptions, within power relations, entangled with the activities of the organisation of which it is part, I show that the human rights archive mobilises and inscribes practices of contestation, resistance and care that engender forms of individual, collective and public repair we need to consider if we want to understand more fully how societies cope and heal their wounded worlds.

Through three operations– making visible, making common and forging futures–I propose that this archive repairs through its institutive power, which contributes to making the reality of state terror visible through the voices of its victims and witnesses, and importantly, restoring their identities. This process of restoration activates processes of identification and belonging that engender affiliations over time. I also claim that the archive’s conservational power repairs by sustaining a repertoire that documents the damage caused, as well as collective practices for confronting it, while safeguarding sources as open latencies that refer to other appropriations and future affiliations. Thus, the question of reparation shows that the power of a human rights archive does not exhaust itself in its enunciative capacities. Still, it is intimately linked with its affiliative powers.