New Paper: How Syrian Diaspora Use Digital Media to Pursue Justice

Introduction

Between 2011 and 2013, a photographer working for the Syrian government took pictures of over 6,000 people allegedly killed in government custody, often after being tortured (Human Rights Watch 2015). The photographer, who used the alias “Caesar,” smuggled these images out of Syria on USB sticks and compact discs.

Foreign governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) used the images to call for Syrian government officials to be held accountable for violations (United Nations Security Council 2014; Human Rights Watch2015), a major attempt to introduce transitional justice amidst a conflict. The images were also shared online among Syrian diaspora, including a Spanish citizen who found a photo of her dead brother and launched a criminal complaint in Spanish courts against senior members of the Syrian government (Entous 2017). It is one of several criminal cases in Europe that use digital evidence of violations in Syria (Human Rights Watch 2017).

As this sketch illustrates, digital communication technologies (DCTs) are enabling new practices of transnational advocacy and action. How might these developments affect the field of transitional justice, and in particular the role that diaspora can play in its processes and politics?

In this article, I argue that DCTs change the opportunity structures for diaspora to pursue transitional justice aims, even in the absence of homeland-based processes. They allow for relevant global publics to call for or engage in accountability-seeking, truth-telling, and the recognition or memorialization of victims. They do so through two main causal mechanisms. First, diaspora can use DCTs to mobilize online through a networks-based mechanism, which Bennett and Segerberg (2013) call “connective action.” Second, DCTs enable diaspora to participate in strategic crowdsourced documentation by contributing to the collection, archiving and verification of evidence of mass violence and rights violations in their original homelands. However, opportunities for diaspora to advance transitional justice are also affected by a third mechanism, digital repression, when their online activities are targeted by supporters or agents of homeland governments.

These three mechanisms have shaped diaspora efforts to advance transitional justice responses to repression and violence in Syria, efforts made during the popular uprising of 2011 and during the subsequent civil war. The Syrian case, I argue, is paradigmatic of two recent developments in the field of transitional justice: increasing attention to transitional justice processes in the absence of peace or regime transition, and the expanding role of DCTs in committing rights violations and pursuing transnational responses to them.

This article demonstrates that digital spaces play a crucial role as arenas where transitional justice claims are made, and Syrian diaspora have been crucial actors advancing these claims. Even as conflict continues, Syrian diaspora have explicitly stated – and continue to state – that they are pursuing transitional justice, and have received support from NGOs, governments, and international organizations (see also Stokke and Wiebelhaus-Brahm, this volume). Among these efforts to advance transitional justice, Syrian diaspora have helped create digital databases of rights violations to contribute to future accountability processes and to provide immediate forms of truth and recognition to victims. Syrian diaspora have also been targeted with techniques of online repression by the Syrian government, and some diaspora members have contributed to those repressive efforts…