Truth Beyond Prosecution – Reassessing Documentation and Truth-Seeking in the Syrian Conflict

In protracted conflicts like Syria, human rights violations are often denied or even memorialized in a distorted way that deprives victims of justice. This generates social divides that traditional documentation alone may not be able to counteract. In this report, SJAC engages with that problem through an analysis of surveys that assessed the degree to which Syrians trust different types of documentation material. It finds that documentation is still able to lead to a significant revision of personal narratives about the conflict, but also suggests how alternative forms of collecting and staging documentation could address deep polarization and distrust.