The Perfect Data-Marriage: Transitional Justice Research and Oral History Life Stories

Abstract

There is a growing recognition in transitional justice research of the crucial significance of context-appropriate measures of justice practices and needs, which account for the diversity, locality, and complexity of individuals’ experiences of the past. In this perspective, this paper highlights the significance of oral history collections for exploring pluralistic understandings of the personal past and their relation to symbolic justice practices and needs. We argue that their audio-visual dimension and multi-layered nature makes them a unique qualitative data source that can contribute to a more realistic assessment of justice concerns in transitional settings. As tools of social dialogue and inclusive justice, they are also valuable means to promote the mutual acceptance and recognition of suffering and responsibility. We demonstrate how findings based on the analysis of survey data collected in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) can be enriched by the exploration of oral history narratives from a dataset collected in BiH.