What does data – including its infrastructures, ownership norms, and archives – have to do with transitional justice? Since 2024, transitional justice has been at the forefront of academic and political conversations in and around Syria. Its pursuit has brought together a range of actors: newly-established national institutions, Syrian civil society organizations, local community groups, international NGOs, two UN-mandated institutions, and private sector actors. These diverse actors were established with equally diverse mandates and within a wide spectrum of social and political frameworks. Many have built digital infrastructures – formal and informal, housed inside and outside Syria -- that are governed by varying regulations and norms. Today, those infrastructures are crucial for the gathering, storage, and analysis of information for anticipated trials and accountability processes.
As data sovereignty initiatives and scholars across the world argue, no technical infrastructure is neutral (e.g., GIDA, Winner 1988, Benjamin 2019). Norms and infrastructures for data and its stewardship will also have a formative impact on political representation and its asymmetries, agency in knowledge production, property rights, and the forms of individual and collective memory in Syria.
This workshop invites an initial conversation with scholars and practitioners who wish to explore data sovereignty and stewardship within the framework of transitional justice in Syria. It turns a spotlight on the “how’s” of owning, storing, and sharing data on Syria today, as well as on ways to empower the constituencies most affected by the violence of the war years and their aftermath. It invites discussion across topics including: just norms and sustainable structures for storage and stewardship, community-led knowledge production, critical data literacy and rights, the weaponization of data for surveillance and extraction, and the role of corporate infrastructures (e.g., al-Khatib 2020).
It will begin with a short introduction from SYRASP and members of the Lab for the Study of Violence before opening to a general discussion with participants. Based on this, we will explore next steps for longer-term collaborations and for policy- and academic-facing publications.
This session is part of the SYRASP Online Workshop Series “Syria After the Assad Regime: Community Voices, Research Methods, and Digital Tools”, organized in cooperation with The Lab for the Study for Violence. A description of the workshop series is avaible on SYRASP's website, including information on other sessions.
The session will take place online via Zoom. Participation upon prior registration via syrasp[at]trafo-berlin.de.