Returning Archives - Archiving Return

This proposal explores archives as both objects and instruments of colonial restitution in the Netherlands within frameworks of transformative justice. European governments have adopted restituting objects looted in colonial
contexts as central forms of engagement with their colonial pasts. Herein archives play a fundamental role as they store knowledge about the objects’ provenance. Archives are, after all, not neutral in this process: the decision of
what to archive in which ways is highly biased as looting archives has been a colonial practice as such.

This inherent duality of archives as both institutive and constitutive is underexplored in current restitution research which lumps archives together with other cultural objects, thereby overlooking archives as active agents
in restitution processes. This proposal argues that precisely this duality makes the study of archival restitution valuable for transformative justice – an emerging field that emphasizes the need to counter power imbalances
within current justice mechanisms often disadvantaging instead of advantaging marginalized groups – because it creates possibilities of researching restitution not as isolated events but as social processes that extend over the actual event of return.

By comparing two case studies of archival restitution to Indonesia and Suriname, this interdisciplinary proposal that connects archival, historical, and memory studies approaches, explores ways in which archival colonial restitution practices are shaped by underlying power imbalances. The aim is to answer the question under which conditions the return of archives can contribute to transformative justice and thereby contribute to restitution guidelines that are more inclusive and equal, and therefore transformative.