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Paper short abstract

What norms for collective data stewardship can support community-led transitional justice today? This paper reflects on practical and theoretical insights from an ongoing collaboration with grassroots actors among Syria’s families of the disappeared.

Paper long abstract

Data on forced disappearance is at the core of transitional justice in Syria. In the absence of state action, scholarly and media observers look to UN mechanisms and foreign NGOs to manage technical infrastructures for Syria’s more than 100,000 disappeared people. Practically, these extractivist approaches have authorized the removal of evidence from Syria and weakened public trust. Conceptually, they sever transitional justice from technology. Yet the question of who stores, curates, and accesses testimonial data, and with what infrastructures, is critical to achieving not only legal, but also social and epistemic resolutions to years of war (Fricker 2007).

This paper describes an ongoing collaboration for technical futures with grassroots actors in Syria: Truth Tents, led by families of the disappeared. A decentralized movement that collects data from, and gives voice to, marginalized populations, the Truth Tents are typically read as a memory project (Bassisseh et al. 2025). Our collaboration recognizes them as local knowledge stewards who are advancing a community-led view of transitional justice. The paper presents our development of norms for data commons with actors who, underresourced, store data on chat platforms that expose them to risks of loss and surveillance (Zuboff 2019, Bratton 2016). Our collaboration finds that testimonial data in Syria concerns specific individuals but equally constitutes shared bodies of social knowledge. This view invites collective approaches to stewardship, beyond top-down regulations or data protection models. I conclude that data commons can support marginalized grassroots actors procedurally while enacting demands for transitional justice as an epistemic transformation.