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Diala Brisly and Hani Abbas, two cartoonists and contemporaries, know firsthand the power of images to document conflict, and of cartoons —consumed by children and adults alike —to promote action.

For years, ICTJ has championed the media and the role it plays in supporting truth-seeking and advancing accountability and redress for victims of conflict-related atrocities. In the places where we work, from South Africa, to the Gambia, Guatemala, Colombia and the Philippines, media projects and coverage—both mainstream and alternative—have been crucial in ensuring participation, mediating public discourse, contributing to acknowledgment for victims, and revealing long-hidden truths about crimes. This month, we share a dispatch from our work in Uganda.

Following the first international conference on the subject (Memorialization and Democracy), this report considers how memorialization efforts around the globe can serve democracy. It encourages policy-makers to view memorials as serious social and political forces and to create innovative strategies for integrating them into democracy-building plans. It aims to encourage continuing discussion and analysis on the subject, emphasizing that memorialization plays a central role in the direction and shape of civic life and politics.

ICTJ and the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation of Colombia are organizing an event on Memory: Public Policy for Transformation. Dialogue at the conference will serve as the basis for providing recommendations to the process of creating the Center for Historical Memory and designing public memory policy in the country.

In a simple house made of wood and straw and smelling of earth, women, girls, and the occasional man narrate, sometimes laughing and other times crying, the stories of how their life used to be before being forcibly displaced to San Juan Nepomuceno. This is one of the many local memory initiatives taking place throughout Colombia today.

The taboo around sexual violence against men and boys can leave victims in the shadows, write ICTJ's Kelli Muddell and Sibley Hawkins. Without acknowledgment of these crimes, efforts to address injustices of the past will be hard-pressed to develop inclusive and effective responses.

This is an audio recording of a live event. On September 15, ICTJ organized a side event on the missing and disappeared in Syria, sponsored by the governments of Luxembourg and Finland, during the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly. 

The transitional justice mechanisms the Mexican government put in place to investigate the grave human rights violations committed before the political transition of 2000 did not achieve their aims.

Issoumaila Touré grew up during Côte d'Ivoire’s devastating First Civil War (2002-2007), watching his community be torn apart by political manipulations and ethnic differences. When his country once again descended into civil war following the 2010 presidential elections, Issoumaila, then a young man in his early 20’s, came to a major crossroads in his life.

ICTJ’s Gender Symposium, held on February 2 to 4, 2019, in Tunis, Tunisia, brought together fearless women leaders working in 8 countries to advance the needs of victims and to bring gender issues to the center of transitional justice processes. What was achieved? What experiences cut across these diverse contexts? Kelli Muddell and Sibley Hawkins reflect on these questions and more in this short podcast.