Sustainable Development Programme

This interdisciplinary research project seeks to address the aims of sustainable governance and of sustainable human development and creativity. Bringing together co-applicants and partners based in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and UK, the project will build upon the knowledge we each bring of centres of documentation that have arisen from within civil societies who have experienced conflict and violence. Sustainable governance requires that the population believe that their experiences of conflict and violence have been recognised and understood. As societies develop, they need also to attend to how that past experience is recorded and displayed. In part this relates to how criminal prosecutions take place, for archives and documentation centres become important for fact checking. But they are also important sources of cultural understanding, providingmaterials for cultural awareness and modes of representation for future generations to understand the past. That is, how the traces and records of past violence are ordered, and how they are displayed, will involve decisions that construct meanings and structure debates. Documentation centres and archives are crucial sites of socio-cultural reproduction in this regard that operate as keepers of the traces of violence and as participants as curators, influencing our imagination and our understanding.As this suggests, the research relates to the sub themes of Violence and Heritage. The project seeks to consider how documents of violence are constituted, collected and preserved in archives and documentation centres, the decision-making that takes place at those sites - and its problems - and how these centres are being utilised as ways of creating engagement with the violence of the past in ways that are culturally important. These involve legal processes, that recognise past crimes and establish the rule of law as well as socio-cultural processes that seek forms of sustainable peace through the understanding that make possible, that is, through understanding what present and future societies inherit from the experience of conflict.