The archiving of oral histories and the performance of life testimonies of life testimonies have long been regarded as practices aimed at preserving memory and pursuing social justice, particularly in contexts marked by historical oppression, structural violence, and systematic attempts to erase voices and strip people of their humanity. Yet these practices extend beyond documentation alone, becoming forms of political and ethical action. Testimony itself turns into a space for restoring recognition and reconstructing a collective understanding of what has taken place.
In this context, South Africa offers a foundational example. Following the end of Apartheid, transitional justice processes became closely linked to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, which brought together the testimonies of victims and perpetrators in a public forum. These testimonies were not merely historical records; they constituted a collective ritual of acknowledgement and symbolic reckoning with violence. They later extended into artistic and theatrical practices that re-enacted these narratives, transforming memory into a living, embodied presence within the public sphere.
In Canada, the testimonies of survivors of the Indigenous residential school system acquired a similar significance, as they were documented through truth and reconciliation processes. This work helped expose the systematic colonial violence inflicted on Indigenous children, their cultures, and their languages. At the same time, it created space for testimony to become an act of symbolic resistance, one that challenges the state and restores recognition to Indigenous memory.
In Argentina, the period following the military dictatorship, known as the Dirty War, offers another example of the role of oral archiving in resisting denial. The testimonies of families of the forcibly disappeared, along with those of survivors, contributed to the construction of a counter-memory that evolved into the foundation of memory institutions and commemorative spaces, where documentation itself became an act against impunity.
In Rwanda, following the 1994 genocide, testimonies played a central role in processes of truth-building and the reconstruction of collective memory, whether through community courts, museums, or documentation initiatives. These testimonies remained marked by a persistent tension between the need to acknowledge the horror of what had occurred and the simultaneous need to rebuild the possibility of living together.
In Chile, after the end of the military dictatorship, the archiving of testimonies emerged as a key tool for exposing systematic human rights violations. These testimonies were incorporated into memory institutions and artistic and documentary projects, transforming oral accounts into both archival and performative material, thereby resisting attempts at silence and forgetting.
Taken together, these examples demonstrate that the archiving of oral histories and the performance of testimonies do more than preserve what happened; they reshape how societies relate to memory and to the violence they have endured. They expand the question of justice beyond the legal realm, turning it into a multidimensional practice that restores value to voice, embodiment, and lived experience in the face of a long history of exclusion and erasure.
Yet the conventional ethical frameworks that have guided such experiences may require further reflection and examination when genocide, war, or forced displacement are still ongoing. What ethical challenges arise when collecting, archiving, and performing testimonies in the midst of continuing violence?
When the Question Itself Becomes Part of the Violence
Amid the systematic and widespread destruction of southern Lebanese villages, extending even to cemeteries, Lebanon is witnessing a genuine and growing concern with preserving what remains of personal and collective archives. Individuals, groups, and institutions are racing to salvage photographs, documents, and memories at risk of being lost forever. At the same time, other initiatives are emerging to document personal narratives of loss, even as that loss is still unfolding and has not yet become a past that can be recounted from a distance.
This is an ethically and intellectually unusual moment. While there is heightened awareness of the importance of archives and oral history, these initiatives are in a race against time and the overwhelming, accelerating scale of destruction. It is an urgent and pressing effort to save what can still be saved and to create some form of resistance to the ongoing genocide. In this regard, all of these sincere efforts deserve recognition and respect.
Yet this urgency leaves little room to raise fundamental questions about the ethics of archiving, the limits of publicly exposing personal narratives, and people’s right to grieve before their experiences are transformed into documentary or performative material. It is a state of emergency driven by genuine intentions to preserve what remains, but one that often sacrifices spaces for reflection and critical self-examination. Necessity becomes so pressing that it can crowd out consideration of the impact that archiving itself may have on those being asked to narrate their pain while they are still living through it.
There is no doubt that many are motivated by a sincere ethical commitment, a deep sense of responsibility toward what remains of collective memory, and a genuine desire to express solidarity. Yet a pressing question remains: what if this solidarity itself, unintentionally, becomes another form of violence? What if the desire to preserve, document, and make violence visible becomes part of a process that re-exposes people to loss, strips away their privacy, or reopens wounds that have not yet been given time to heal?
Can the archiving of a genocide as it unfolds take place without reproducing the very logic of violence it seeks to document? And who has the right to narrate death when death itself remains an open and unfinished event?
The Need for Space to Live Within Loss
In this context, the need for a safe space in which to grasp what has happened, to bear its impact, and to allow people to experience grief as a process unfolding over time rather than as a fleeting moment becomes essential and cannot be overlooked. Communities living through ongoing violence do not only need documentation, recording, or archiving; they also need the right to pause, to slowly make sense of what they have lost, and to coexist, however temporarily, with trauma before it is transformed into a narrative, a testimony, or public material.
We often speak of “respecting the time of mourning” as an ethical principle. Yet in practice, that very time seems to be shortened, compressed, or depleted under the pressure to document. Grief is thus transformed from a collective right into a temporal luxury that the conditions of war, catastrophe, or genocide do not permit. This deprivation of the time needed for understanding and partial recovery raises an even deeper question:
How can an ethical archive be produced in a context where people are denied the right to slow down in the face of loss?
This question resonates with both Mahmoud Darwish’s reflections on loss and Judith Butler’s understanding of mourning as an extended temporal process that resists reduction or premature closure. In In the Presence of Absence, Darwish offers a poetic experience in which loss becomes a prolonged dwelling within language and memory, rather than an event that is completed and then put away. Similarly, in Precarious Life and Frames of War, Butler argues that mourning is not merely a private experience but a social and political condition shaped by systems of recognition that determine which lives are considered grievable.
In both perspectives, recovery does not appear as a linear or rapid process but as an open-ended one through which meaning and subjectivity are continually reconfigured. Slowness, therefore, is not a failure to “move on”; it is a necessary condition for deeply acknowledging loss and rebuilding a relationship with the world after rupture.
The Archive as a Relationship of Power
Archives have long been presented as neutral repositories of facts. Yet the critical history of archiving reveals that they have often functioned as instruments of power as much as instruments of knowledge. Those who decide what is preserved, what is discarded, and how materials are classified are, in effect, participating in the production of history itself.
In contexts of war and displacement, this reality becomes even more pronounced. Archives do not merely document violence; they also help determine who is recognised as a victim, who is allowed to be visible, and who is left outside the narrative.
In southern Lebanon, where cycles of violence and displacement have recurred for decades, from the invasions of 1978 and 1982 to the 2006 war and, most recently, an unprecedented war in which Israel has systematically destroyed villages and even their cemeteries, documentation becomes an act of resistance against erasure. At the same time, however, it raises a troubling question: can resistance to erasure avoid reproducing the very logic of control it seeks to oppose?
These concerns intersect with the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Māori scholar of postcolonial studies, who argues in Decolonizing Methodologies that research and archiving are neither innocent nor neutral processes. Rather, they are historically entangled with colonial projects that produced forms of representation and epistemic ownership, where “knowledge” itself becomes an instrument of power.
Similarly, Lauren A. Jessee, whose work focuses on oral history, violence, and genocide studies, demonstrates through her research on genocide survivors’ testimonies that documenting memory is not a neutral practice. Instead, it is shaped by power relations that determine whose voice is heard, how that voice is framed, and how it is ultimately incorporated into the archive.
From this perspective, the archive is not understood as a repository of memory or an innocent space of preservation. Rather, it is a site of knowledge production where power, ethics, and politics intersect, sometimes resulting in the reproduction of the very patterns of exclusion it claims to resist. In contexts of collective violence, the archive thus becomes a contested space of recognition rather than a fixed historical record.
When Testimony Becomes Material
In today’s digital landscape, testimonies move with remarkable speed: from the phone to the platform, from the recording to the report, from lived experience to the archive. Yet in the course of this movement, testimony becomes detached from the person who gave it.
The child who recounts the loss of their home becomes “documentary material.”
The woman describing displacement becomes a “field testimony.”
The farmer who has lost his land becomes a “case.”
This transformation does not always stem from ill intent. More often, it takes place in the name of solidarity, documentation, or research. Yet its outcome may be the same: the person is reduced to a conduit for their own story rather than remaining a participant in its fate.
At this point, the ethical question becomes even more pressing: is testimony an ongoing relationship of responsibility, or is it a resource that can be circulated and exchanged?
Is Consent Enough?
Traditional research ethics rely heavily on the concept of informed consent. Yet in the context of war, this notion becomes profoundly limited.
How can someone living through displacement, bombardment, or deep uncertainty anticipate the future trajectory of their testimony years down the line?
How can a mother who has lost her home or her children foresee how her voice or image might circulate across spaces over which she has no control?
Under such circumstances, consent cannot be reduced to a one-time procedural act. It becomes an ongoing relationship of responsibility that extends beyond recording, publication, and archiving.
The ethical question, then, is not simply: “Did we obtain consent?”
Rather, it is: “How do we continue to uphold our responsibility toward those who have granted us the right to listen?”
Who Has the Right to Perform Death?
The issue becomes even more complex when testimonies move from the archive into the realm of performance and artistic representation.
In recent years, oral history has been increasingly incorporated into theatre, documentary filmmaking, and art exhibitions. These works have enabled marginalised voices to reach wider audiences and have created important spaces for empathy and solidarity.
Yet they have also raised a troubling question: can suffering be represented without being turned into spectacle?
When stories of death, displacement, and loss become part of a cultural product, who has the right to retell them? The artist? The researcher? The institution? The audience?
And what happens when pain becomes aesthetic material?
In southern Lebanon, many stories remain unfinished. Their protagonists have not returned to their homes, have not rebuilt their lives, and some do not even know whether return will ever be possible. Transforming these testimonies into complete and coherent narratives may therefore constitute a form of symbolic violence, insofar as it imposes a final meaning on experiences that have not yet ended.
The Right to Remain Silent
In times of war, much is said about the duty to bear witness.
Yet there is another right that is no less important: the right to remain silent.
Not everyone who lives through war is obliged to speak, and not every silence is a sign of fear or denial. Sometimes silence is a form of mourning, protection, or resistance. Just as individuals have the right to be heard, they also have the right not to have extracted from them what they do not wish to say.
An ethical archive is built not only on what is spoken, but also on respect for what is consciously left unsaid.
Toward an Ethics of Accompaniment
Ultimately, the question is not only how to archive a genocide as it unfolds, but how to avoid reproducing its logic through the act of archiving itself.
The alternative is not to abandon documentation, but to redefine it: from extraction to accompaniment, from ownership to responsibility, from representing pain to safeguarding its dignity.
In southern Lebanon, where life is intertwined with threat and memory with danger, the archive becomes an ongoing ethical test. Not simply because it documents what has happened, but because it shapes the kind of relationship we build with those who are still living through it.
Perhaps the greatest challenge is recognizing that we do not possess the right to narrate death. We possess only the responsibility to listen to it without claiming ownership over it.
