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On August 30, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, I sat beside the president of Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons at its headquarters in Damascus for a historic moment: the launch of a platform through which families will be able to report their missing loved ones. For Syrian families, August 30 has long been a day to remember those they lost to the unknown and renew their demand for truth. This year, marking it inside a Syrian institution created to search for them had a very different significance.

At an ICTJ-organized symposium in Istanbul, artists, civil society leaders, journalists, academics, and transitional justice practitioners from around the world discussed the ways art can serve as a catalyst for change in societies emerging from conflict or repression as well as explored local non-state-led approaches to truth seeking and truth telling.