The NEXT STEPS Project: the Future of Dealing with Past in the Western Balkans is a project of Memria.org in collaboration with numerous partners in the region of Western Balkans.

The purpose of this project is to help states and societies achieve the goals of transitional justice, such as truth, accountability, the establishment of the rule of law and respect for human rights, reconciliation, and lasting peace, in the Western Balkans and beyond. We hope and predict that there will be initiatives, ongoing and future, which will also aim to achieve these goals. This project is intended to help improve those initiatives by learning from previous efforts.

Since the wars in the 1990s, many different kinds of organizations and individuals -- including lawyers, artists, victims, veterans, family members, sociologists, donors, historians, politicians, international experts, scholars -- have contributed to different national, regional and international transitional justice initiatives in the region of former Yugoslavia. After more than 20 years of engagement, we want to understand the lessons learned from this collective experience in order to inform future engagements both in this region and far beyond this region.

We are creating an audio archive of hundreds of accounts from participants in the process of dealing with the past all over the region. Some of these accounts might be published, others will be available for researchers.

Once we have all these materials, we plan to analyse them and come up with recommendations for donors and civil society. Our audio/video archive will present a base for future research - the report on findings and key recommendations will be presented for relevant stakeholders - donors, civil society, academic community, state officials, etc, however, virtual archive will be open to other researchers.

Dear All,

Transitional justice, as a field, is now approximately 35 years old, and has achieved some success, and also faced some challenges. Like any field, it has a lot to learn about the theories of change, methods, strategies, tactics, and institutions that have been at its core.

This is a perfect moment to assess our work. There are various efforts to do that, and the Next Steps project has particular promise.

This project is about listening and learning. The project aims at improving practice, both in the Western Balkans and beyond. Consequently, the project aims to engage in a rich dialogue with practitioners in the field to listen and learn from them, and then to share those findings with the same community. Drawing on diverse qualitative methods from, among others, oral history and transitional justice itself, the project team will collect and analyze the stories and reflections of those who have been the most engaged in transitional justice initiatives in the region. By collecting these recordings, the project team will build a significant audio archive. They are then committed to working with practitioners and other partners to rigorously analyze these and then find creative ways to share these narratives.

If you have been a practitioner in the transitional justice field in the Western Balkans, I urge you to take a few moments to click the PARTICIPATE button. You will then receive an email and be able to respond to a few questions and add your audio recording to this unique and important archive and project.

It only takes a few minutes.

With thanks,

Pablo de Greiff

Former UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence

Tuesday, May 15th, 2018