ABSTRACT
The chapter explores a potential way legal witnesses could contribute to the plurality of memory in post-conflict societies, which is not rigid and fixed within the tightly controlled discursive conditions of legal proceedings. It begins by conceptualising the international criminal tribunals (ICTR) archives as a site where fragments of memories of legal witnesses exist; it does this by engaging with Emmanuel Levinas’s conceptual understanding of ‘relationality’ and Ricoeur’s understanding of the plurality of memory. The use of the term memory ecology instead of collective memory is deliberate. The chapter considers the empirical potential, and challenges, of proposing that legal witnesses can potentially contribute to the Rwandan memory ecology in the form of the ICTR archive material. The plurality of memory can be very useful in aiding dialogue about multiple perspectives of the past, and in doing so it is also vulnerable to abhorrent appropriations of the past.
