The political and legal geographies of archives: Evidence,expertise,place

Abstract

This paper establishes a framework for political and legal geographies of archives. Moving beyond catch-all definitions of ‘the archive’, it interrogates the specific practices and spaces by which materials become archival, the professional expertise required to do so, and the evidentiary authority this bestows. Marginalised groups – including Indigenous communities, unrepresented nations, and racial and religious minorities – must navigate a paradox of securing rights through the same archival structures that have historically facilitated their exclusion. Through interconnected lenses of evidence, expertise, and place, the paper draws attention to the contested and uneven processes by which community records are transformed into authoritative, admissible evidence.

Introduction

In November 2023, Israeli military forces bombed the Central Archives of Gaza City, destroying over 150 years of Palestinian documentary history. This act, condemned by the International Council on Archives (ICA) as a violation of the 1954 Hague ‘Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict’, underscores the essential political and legal role archives play in defending human rights and rebuilding post-conflict societies (ICA, 2023). In response, Palestinian archivists and activists have established digital initiatives that counter this cultural erasure and, as importantly, provide vital legal evidence of Palestine’s right to exist (Ghaddar, 2025). This case exemplifies a broader political and legal geography of archives: from China to Iran, Ethiopia to Laos, states increasingly redact or destroy documentary materials to rewrite the histories of marginalised groups – including Indigenous communities, unrepresented nations and peoples, and racial and religious minorities – while those same groups seek to secure claims to legitimacy, peoplehood, and self-determination through archival means.

The central argument of this paper is that geographers should move beyond metaphorical or methodological treatments of ‘the archive’ to develop a more substantive engagement with the formal practices and professional expertise that underpin archival production. While geographical scholarship has extensively interrogated the archive as a site of discursive and affective politics following the ‘archival turn’, this paper redirects focus toward the mobilisation of archives within formal political and legal-judicial settings. This engagement has become an urgent necessity in an era where the foundations of evidence and truth are being systematically undermined – from the redaction of documents to the physical destruction of repositories. As we show in this paper, such a shift prompts a very different set of political-geographical questions rooted in notions of evidence, expertise, trustworthiness, and truth. Ultimately, a strategic paradox emerges: modern rights discourses demand that marginalised groups evidence their claims through the very archival structures that have historically facilitated their exclusion.

The focus of this paper is prompted by scoping work with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), where diverse communities who are disenfranchised in their national contexts and consequently excluded from effective international representation – including Catalonia, Tibet, and Nagalim – are increasingly curating their own collections to assert political rights. These cases reveal a political geography operating across local, national, and international scales, in which the ‘activation’ of archives as legal evidence is central to emancipatory efforts and claims-making (Ketelaar, 2001). A reciprocal process can be observed whereby documentary records are required to establish ‘archival truths’ in legal spaces, and those legal spaces, in turn, re-shape the meaning of archives (Viebach et al., 2021). Such a focus draws attention to the concrete and formalised processes through which objects become archival, the expertise required to do so, and the discrete spaces through which authentication occurs. Whilst critical archival scholarship has rightly dismantled the myth of archival neutrality, legal systems still rely upon it to validate evidence, forcing communities to navigate state-accredited structures to secure rights and centring the professional role of archivists as key interlocutors in geopolitical claims-making.

To develop this agenda, the paper offers a brief overview of recent archival scholarship before proposing three political lenses to examinine how archiving functions as a material, professional, and geopolitical practice. First, we interrogate the role of archives as evidence in the substantiation of rights claims, analysing the processes through which archival materials become admissible within national or international evidentiary regimes. Second, we examine how the evidentiary power of archives is mediated by the politics of archival expertise. By centring the oft-overlooked labour of archivists, we examine how technical standards produce ‘archival truths’ and how expertise is socially, culturally and geographically constructed (Kothari, 2005). Third, we address the significance of place, showing how notions of evidence and expertise are rooted in specific sites and geographical imaginaries. The location of an archive – whether a centralised state repository or the transnational configurations of a digital platform – dictates its epistemic and political authority. Together, these lenses offer a framework for interrogating the political and legal geography of archives, one that promotes sustained dialogue between historical, political, legal and digital geographies and archival science.

Beyond the ‘archival turn’

Over the last three decades, the ‘archival turn’ has redefined archives from mere source repositories into complex subjects in their own right. This paradigm shift, rooted in the post-structuralist critiques of Foucault (2002) and Derrida (1996), recognises that collecting, cataloguing, and preserving the past is always a political act of the present. Encounters with archives are shaped by, what Schwartz (2006) terms, ‘landscapes of power’ – geographical sites where the social and political order is naturalised. For example, archives function as ‘instituting imaginaries’ (Mbembe, 2002) that fix truth claims or reflect the ‘epistemic anxieties’ (Stoler, 2002, 2009) of colonial administrators. Consequently, in geography, as elsewhere, archives are now widely understood as instruments that bolster state authority by controlling historical narratives (e.g. Beckingham and Hodder, 2023; Fairless Nicholson, 2023). This institutional power is cemented by what Hamilton et al. (2002: 16) call the ‘archival contract’ – the implicit societal agreement that invests archivists with the power to determine what is preserved, how it is organised and who has access.

As a result, in recent years, critical engagement with archives has diverged into two paths: one centred on deconstructing conventional archives by situating them within a wider field of truth, and another that foregrounds the emancipatory potential of alternative archives and archival practices. The former often treats ‘the archive’ metaphorically, using it as a catch-all conceptual category to understand wide-ranging political contestations of memory and history that have become particularly pronounced in recent years. These approaches often interrogate the limits and emphasise the partiality of the archive as a space of fragments, absences and ghosts (e.g. Mills, 2013). Farmer et al. (2022) go further, arguing that the very artefactual emphasis underpinning archives has worked to exclude Black groups, for example. By highlighting these gaps, scholars challenge the authority of fixed records in favour of more fluid historical narratives, with alternative methods such as ‘un-archiving’ (Pandey, 2013) and ‘critical fabulation’ (Hartman, 2008) being proposed. Building on these creative approaches, Byron et al. (2024) advocate for ‘animating’ absent archives as a specific political-geographical practice that goes beyond merely identifying archival silences to augmenting them with, for example, creative non-fiction.

The second major trend, prominent within archival studies, emphasises the development of grassroots, community-led counter-archives. These practices – variously described as activist archives (Flinn, 2011), reparative archives (Hughes-Watkins, 2018), or liberatory memory work (Caswell, 2021) – position archival collections as essential tools for pursuing social and restorative justice (Jimerson, 2007; Punzalan and Caswell, 2016; Sutherland, 2017). As noted by Eichhorn (2013: 7), the ‘archive is where academic and activist work frequently converge’, a theme that has been taken up in historical geography research (Cameron, 2014). In Cook’s (2013) terms, this shift is reflected in the transition from the 19th-century ‘custodian-archivist’ to an emerging paradigm of the ‘facilitator-archivist’. In this model, the archivist partners with communities to manage and preserve their own documentary heritage through co-curation (Brewis et al., 2023; also see Geoghegan, 2014). Initiatives like the Invisible Histories (2025) project and the Living Refugee Archive (2025) exemplify this turn toward challenging and providing alternatives to traditional institutional archives.

While both of these approaches address the power-laden nature of archives, they also risk diluting the concept’s definition beyond its usable limits. The first trend treats ‘the archive’ as an expansive metaphor or synonym for any trace of the past – a conceptual overstretch that archival studies scholars argue ignores the intellectual labour and professional training of archivists who are often deeply aware of the politics inherent in their craft (Ketelaar, 2017). As Caswell (2023: 21–22) notes, while humanities scholars may see ‘the archive’ as a ‘hypothetical wonderland’, for archivists, ‘actually existing archives’ are concrete collections of records, institutions that steward them, and formalised processes that designate certain materials as ‘archival’ and others not. This conceptual blurring is exacerbated by digital shifts; as Manoff (2004, 2019) argues, new forms of information technology often collapse the distinctions between archives, libraries, and museums, despite their fundamentally different evidentiary and legal statuses. In this context, the role of archival expertise in accrediting the trustworthiness of material becomes more important, not less. By invoking ‘the archive’ as an all-encompassing trope, discussions of absence and partiality necessarily predominate over the more immediate, practical concerns of archival security and standards that frequently preoccupy archivists and activists alike.

Likewise, the second trend risks overextending the archive’s accrediting power by conflating informal collections with the authority derived from formal standards. Without rigorous approaches to security, stewardship and evidentiary integrity, a collection – regardless of its historical or cultural value – risks being dismissed as informal material rather than an authoritative source base capable of supporting legal or political claims of the type that marginalised communities disproportionately rely upon. While digital tools have democratised collecting, many web-based archiving projects (e.g. those hosted on WordPress sites) often lack the formalised appraisal, stewardship, or security processes required to imbue documents with jurisdictional force. In the rights sphere, the challenge frequently faced by marginalised groups seeking legitimacy is not merely the labour of curation but ensuring that community-held documents are recognised as authoritative and trustworthy by national and international bodies. As Manby (2025) suggests, this ‘aspirational politics’ often requires communities to navigate the formal archiving processes of the state to secure the legitimacy needed to contest that same state’s narrative.

In the remainder of the paper, we examine how addressing these professional concerns offers an important corrective to geographers’ relative neglect of professional archival labour and training, whilst providing a lens through which to interrogate the complex relationship between archival exclusion and authority. If the prevailing politics of archives rests on their silencing and exclusionary properties, we offer an alternative reading that foregrounds the entanglement of records with marginalised groups’ claims to existence and self-determination. Moving beyond the well-documented silencing power of state archives, we now turn to examine how archival materials become evidence for rights claims, before considering how the politics of expertise and the place of collections shape their epistemic authority.

Evidence

‘Archives are a unique and irreplaceable heritage passed from one generation to another… They are authoritative sources of information underpinning accountable and transparent administrative actions… Open access to archives enriches our knowledge of human society, promotes democracy, protects citizens rights…’

Preamble to the ICA’s Universal Declaration on Archives (2011)

Adopted by UNESCO in 2011, the International Council on Archives’ 'Universal Declaration on Archives' (UDA) formally establishes the importance of archives for supporting human rights and preserving collective memory (ICA, 2011). In its endorsement of the Declaration, UNESCO linked the UDA to Article 19 of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights', which affirms the right to ‘seek, receive and impart information’ (Roberto et al., 2021: 38). As a normative framework, the UDA reinforces the power of archives to legitimise political authority. Building on this recognition, this section investigates how marginalised communities strategically harness this institutional legitimacy for claims-making. Consequently, we analyse the implications of this for critical geopolitics – specifically regarding agency and subjecthood – and legal geography’s engagement with the politics of evidence.

While the creation of community archives is often motivated by a desire to address archival absence and preserve cultural memory (e.g. Gilliland and Flinn, 2013; Hochberg, 2021), for many marginalised communities archiving serves an explicit geopolitical agenda. In these contexts, the preservation of materials is not merely a cultural imperative but a strategic means of building an evidence base that documents past injustices and demonstrates historical continuity (e.g. UNPO, 2025). This evidence is vital in diplomatic fora, where the recognition of peoplehood – and thus eligibility for collective rights like self-determination – often hinges on proving a longstanding diplomatic presence and distinct cultural identity (Corntassel, 2003; Holm et al., 2003). At the international scale, digital archive platforms such as the ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Centre for Documentation, Research and Information’ (DOCIP) and ‘Minority Forum Info’ have emerged to meet this need by curating records of international participation, including submissions to the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly resolutions. As Orsier et al. (2020) observe, DOCIP’s evidentiary authority stems largely from its perceived political independence. By offering documentation that can verify or contest state-produced narratives, such archives contribute to the development of UN standards and bolster communities’ ongoing rights claims. We might understand this as a form of archival translation, where community records are transformed into diplomatic currency.

Parallel initiatives have emerged at the national scale to provide extensive documentary evidence of diplomatic actorness and legal subjecthood. Examples from the United States, such as the American Indian Treaties Portal (hosted by the University of Nebraska Lincoln, 2025) the Indigenous Law Web Archive (hosted by the Library of Congress, 2025) and the Indigenous Digital Archive Treaties Explorer (hosted by the US National Archives in collaboration with the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Santa Fe, 2025), directly support contemporary legal and political claims-making by documenting long-standing sovereign and state-like relationships (see also Johnson, 2016 on the use of Indigenous treaties in legal claims-making in Canada).

For the Nagas in Northeast India, the collation of official memorandums and speeches is consistently used to demonstrate the historical basis of nationhood. Here, the institutional power of a prospective national archive lies in its ‘ability to imbue particular documentary collections with political and epistemic authority’ as well as its ‘status as a paradigmatic state institution’ (Manby, 2025: 55). Similarly, Palestinian activists utilise archive-building to ‘bestow legitimacy on historical narratives’ in support of their claims to peoplehood (Irfan and Kelcey, 2025: 2). Comparable efforts are evident among the Kurds (Centre for Kurdish Studies, University of Exeter), Crimean Tatars (Ukrainian Institute initiative to compile materials related to Crimea held in the Ottoman Archives), and Hmong community (Hmong Archives, 2025). The strategic utility of these efforts is underscored by South Sudan, where politicians began building national archives decades before achieving UN recognition to support later claims to autonomy (Selter and Jok, 2023).

The use of archives to bolster political authority necessitates a critical reconsideration of the geographies of geopolitical subjectivity and the role archives play in shaping agency (Bellier, 2013; Kuus, 2008, 2019; Wheatley, 2017). By unsettling traditional binaries – such as ‘foreign and domestic, political and non-political, state and non-state’ (Dodds et al., 2013: 7) – critical geopolitics questions how non-state polities gain recognition as geopolitical actors (Jackson, 2018; McConnell, 2017). The cases above illustrate how archiving is deeply implicated in these processes, serving as a foundation for the construction and articulation of peoplehood (Brölmann et al., 1993; Meijknecht, 2001) and broader geographies of legitimacy (Jeffrey et al., 2015). Further research is needed to investigate how archives are strategically employed to articulate claims to self-determination (Constantinou et al., 2025; Loong et al., 2023), Indigeneity, or nationhood (Closs Stephens, 2013), as well as their function in forms of ‘worldmaking’ and ‘institution-building’ (Hodder and Krishnan, 2025) that support the geopolitical projects and the long-term viability of non-state actors.

Likewise, focusing on the role of archives in legal claims-making provides critical insights for legal geography scholarship on the politics of evidence. In aligning these fields, we respond to legal geographers’ calls to take questions about the past more seriously; as McGeachan (2017: 357) observes, there is an ‘increasing critical presence’ of law within historical geography (see also Braverman et al., 2014; Graham and Bartel, 2016). Archival materials have been extensively used as evidence in legal and humanitarian settings, including truth and reconciliation commissions (Kolia, 2018; McEwan, 2003), refugee claims (Gilliland and Lowry, 2019), immigration enforcement (Hughes and Martin, 2022), international criminal tribunals (Adami and Hunt, 2005; Redwood, 2020), and restorative justice initiatives (Elkins, 2015; Viebach et al., 2021). As Harris (2002a: 162) observes, institutions like South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commissions functioned as a powerful ‘archon’, exercising a ‘hermeneutic right’ to ‘validate’ a truth that was already widely known but required the status of an official record to become legitimate. Conversely, the destruction of records – such as ‘systematic sanitisation’ of memory by the South African apartheid state (Harris, 2002b) or the destruction of the National Archives of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge (Caswell, 2010) – was designed to frustrate future legal and judicial scrutiny (also see Zgonjanin, 2005).

Despite this, archives remain largely absent from legal geography’s burgeoning literature on the politics and culture of evidence gathering (Faria et al., 2020; Jeffrey, 2021; Klosterkamp and Jeffrey, 2025). While legal geographers engage with archives as sources, they have often lacked a systematic framework for analysing the archival process that converts records into legally admissible evidence. Legal scholarship emphasises the relational nature of evidence, with truths frequently established through the ‘circulation of archival materials’ (Viebach et al., 2021: 383; Wood et al., 2014; Jeffrey, 2021). This suggests that ‘archival truth’ is not simply an inherent feature of a given document, or even the custodial expertise surrounding it, but is tied to the mobilisation of particular materials within specific sites. While scholars like Viebach et al. (2021: 381) have noted the lack of ‘systematic knowledge about the underlying processes of record creation, archive production and preservation or the usage of archives within transitional justice’, this observation also applies to other legal contexts. This oversight is significant because, as Jeffrey (2021: 911) and Ogborn (2010) argue, converting speech and matter into evidence is not mere ‘technical adjudication’ but rather a process that reflects ‘enduring landscapes of power shaped by colonial and patriarchal histories’.

A political and legal geography of archives, then, must attend both to the mobilisation of existing archives in legal proceedings – given that documentary materials are typically privileged over oral or lay testimony – and to how legal processes themselves generate new archives for future claims-making (e.g., Godden, 2019; Montenegro, 2019). The privileging of documentary materials in legal settings is rooted in what Viebach et al. (2021: 388) call ‘the paradigm of archive neutrality’ (see also Millar, 2006) where the evidentiary weight of a record is tied to the perceived independence and professional standards (i.e. practices of acquisition, appraisal, preservation, and contextualisation) of the repository housing it (Orsier et al., 2020). This Western-centric emphasis often ignores that archives are never politically neutral (Jeffrey, 2021; Redwood, 2020). Consequently, marginalised communities frequently find themselves working with or through archival structures they know to be structurally biased, making a strategic calculation that a flawed or exclusionary evidence base is more politically useful than one lacking formal state-accreditation.

These trade-offs are revealed most acutely in archives of historical violence. As Fuentes (2016) demonstrates of colonial archives, these collections, that often treat enslaved subjects as objects of commerce, can act as sites of ongoing epistemic violence. Likewise, Montenegro (2019: 120) notes how in US federal recognition procedures tribal nations must ‘prove their “authenticity” by having to rely predominantly on settler colonial documentary evidence… as opposed to tribal forms of documentary realities such as oral histories and traditional knowledge’. Similar dynamics have been documented in other settler-colonial contexts, such as Australia (Godden, 2019), Canada and New Zealand (Johnson, 2016). Consequently, tribal nations, Indigenous communities and unrepresented peoples frequently must navigate an archival ‘double bind’ where the evidence needed to prove existence is found within the bureaucracies that facilitated their dispossession. As Donlon (2021) notes, this is a direct result of the fact that marginalised communities’ materials have often been devalued, discarded, or rendered inaccessible to the communities who created them.

Archives and legal evidence share a dynamic, recursive relationship: archives are brought into law to substantiate claims, and the legal process, in turn, validates those archives as authoritative evidence for future claims-making. Johnson (2016) examines this dynamic through a 1973 legal case brought by Dene leaders in Canada. Seeking to assert their land rights, Dene leaders created an unofficial ‘treaty archive’ that combined official documents with original oral history interviews conducted with community elders. This archive was presented as evidence to the court, where elders also testified and were cross-examined. Crucially, Johnson (2016: 211–212) argues that the interrogation of the materials within ‘the site of law’ endowed the archive with a juridical authority it had not previously held. This process proved vital for the state’s eventual recognition of Indigenous claims and for legitimating a ‘sense of collective Dene peoplehood’ recorded in the court’s official proceedings which, were themselves subsequently archived.

Similar dynamics have been identified elsewhere. Godden (2019: 130) examines how archival materials gained evidentiary meaning through performative enactment of ‘Connection to Country’ in Australian ‘Native Title’ claims. Likewise, McEwan (2003) has shown how archives produced by South Africa’s truth and reconciliation proceedings became the basis for new claims to nationhood amongst previously marginalised groups, particularly women, who sought to translate their testimonies into formal recognition of citizenship. Across these cases, the focus shifts from simply using geographical knowledge as evidence (e.g. Brodsky, 2003) to the mobilisation of archives themselves in political and territorial claims-making, central to which is the intersection between archival notions of documentation and legal frameworks of precedenct. This strategic reliance on formal accreditation, however, hinges on the very technical and professional processes that imbue records with authority. This, in turn, shifts the focus toward the specific geographies of expertise that mediate the translation of community records into ‘archival truths’, to which we now turn.

Expertise

If the political utility of archives depends on their evidentiary status, then archival expertise is the mechanism through which that status is achieved. Yet, as with the reliance on archives in general, this presents a paradox: the professional expertise and standards required to accredit documents are often rooted in knowledge cultures and institutions that have historically silenced marginalised groups. This tension is particularly acute in cultural archives and heritage bodies where, as members of Museum Detox (2025) – a network for Global Majority heritage professionals – argue, the white curator gaze often produces narratives that prioritise institutional comfort over cultural accuracy. Such critiques mirror the findings of the London-based Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage (2005), which highlighted how ‘institutional resistance’ relegated race equality to the margins of strategic planning. These examples illustrate that archival expertise is a site of boundary work that determines which histories are granted the authority of a formal record.

These tensions persist in even well-intentioned initiatives. The aspirational language of the ICA’s declaration, for example, frames archives as ‘authoritative sources’ but leaves ambiguous the question of who holds the power to define ‘authoritative’. Even seemingly innocuous technical standards can be politically charged; Ghaddar (2025) demonstrates how ISO metadata rules often preclude the use of the label ‘Palestine’, while mandates for open access (mentioned in the ICA preamble) can endanger marginalised groups whose activism requires strategic secrecy to evade state repression. In response, many archivists are reflecting on the need to decolonise their profession by challenging the ‘historically Eurocentric nature’ of its seemingly technical processes (Hughes-Watkins, 2018: 6), resonating with parallel efforts within geography (Murrey and Daley, 2023; Radcliffe, 2022). By centring the contributions of Black curators like Arthur Schomburg to the field, archival studies scholars increasingly interrogate how ‘standards’ represent ideological frameworks that dictate, not only whose lives are deemed record-worthy, but the evidentiary hierarchy ascribed to collections (Ishmael, 2018).

These critiques have underpinned a wider shift in archival scholarship toward facilitator models that recognise source communities as possessing a unique form of expertise that archive professionals – by virtue of their institutional positioning – may lack (Caswell, 2014; Ghaddar and Caswell, 2019). For example, the Mayor’s Commission (2005) observed that archival interpretations frequently remain ‘safe’ and ‘unimaginative’ to stay within established professional comfort zones. This transition towards facilitator models of archiving is supported by Van Zyl (2002: 39), who argues that a ‘science of the archive’ must trouble professional neutrality to account for the archivist’s subjective agency and ‘symptomatic’ positioning as an expert in the translation of knowledge into evidence. Building on calls for a ‘participatory historical geography’ (DeLyser, 2014) recent work – such as Zavala Guillén’s (2023) mapping of Marronage – seeks to ‘feel/think’ the archive through collaborative practice. Such collaborative practices can also be seen in recent geographical engagements with the London-based Black Cultural Archives (Fairless Nicholson et al., 2025), Black and Asian Studies Association (Bressey, 2014) or climate resilience projects (McDonagh et al., 2023).

The spatial sensibilities of geography offer a unique vantage point for analysing contestations over expertise. While postcolonial development geography has long challenged the creation of ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ (e.g. Kothari, 2005; Laurie et al., 2005), more recent work in digital geography has examined contested expertise claims on social media (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2013; Young, 2019). However, less attention has been paid to the specific professional practices – such as appraisal, description, and digitisation – that constitute archival expertise. As Datta and Muthama (2024: 4) observe, ‘the voice of the archivist is muted’ in recent geographical scholarship which prioritises affective and embodied approaches over the ‘labour that goes into the creation and maintenance’ of collections. Ironically, in seeking to critique archival power structures, scholars frequently ignore the actual, and often poorly paid, day-to-day work that sustains them (Lingel, 2018). Recent work seeks to rectify this by highlighting the methodological complexities inherent when geographers engage directly with the technical workflows of archival production (Swab, 2025).

Central to our concern here is Kothari’s (2001) observation that the very notion of expertise is socially, culturally, and geographically contingent. In the case of archives, distinct histories and geographies can be discerned. While the modern archive was codified in Western Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries along key principles such as respect des fonds, these were selectively applied and adapted, so much so that no single archival tradition is identifiable; instead, a diversity of ‘national, regional, or local archival cultures’ (Ketelaar in Gilliland et al., 2016: 39) emerged. Elsewhere, American archival traditions developed through a rejection of centralised control and a strong philanthropic culture (see Hodder, 2025), while the Chinese tradition was shaped for centuries by Confucianism and later by the Soviet concept of a ‘State Archival Fonds’ (Gilliland et al., 2016). Attending to this plurality of archival norms, as well as international efforts to standardise and codify them, allows geographers to trouble the legal authority granted to certain archival traditions over others.

Likewise, expertise is not an intrinsic or singular entity but a relational performance built on authority, trust, and coalitions (Brinks and Donner, 2025; see also Kuus, 2014, 2021; Brigstocke et al., 2025). This authority is never neutral; legitimacy is built through the boundary work that constructs and reproduces individuals as experts (Jeffrey et al., 2025). Understanding expertise as connected to the professions that ‘produce, codify, and validate it’ (Kuus, 2021: 1340) allows us to examine the ‘places, spatial networks, and travels of ideas that shape these professions and the expertise created therein’ (Kuus, 2021: 1339) and that functionally differentiate one field from another (Dingwall, 1999; Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2012). This ‘flexible professionalism’ (Constantinou et al., 2017: 2) is increasingly tested as archivists negotiate institutional constraints alongside the needs of marginalised groups. In many instances, the gap between professional standards and community needs is filled by voluntary or activist labour, creating a tension between the immediate political need for a ‘usable past’ (see Griffin, 2018: 501) and the technical requirements of evidentiary integrity rooted in archivists’ formal training. Ultimately, it is the perception of the archivist’s professional commitment to preserving complex, often ambivalent historical evidence – rather than engaging in overt advocacy – that secures the evidentiary authority of archive materials within formal legal and political settings.

This tension underpins the participatory paradox for marginalised communities. While community-based counter-archives may reject traditional models of expertise to assert autonomy, they risk ceding the very political utility – the admissibility in state or legal fora – that formal archives provide. Because cultural acceptance of archival expertise is rooted in professional norms that prioritise evidence over advocacy, even well-intentioned co-production can reinforce existing hierarchies if the final ‘archival truth’ is still measured against Western, state-centric benchmarks. This puts archivists in a difficult position, situating them within a nexus of diverse traditions, international standards, and everyday institutional realities where they must negotiate these dynamics. Some scholars of archival studies, such as Andrew Flinn, urge archivists to engage in ‘social movement archival activism’ to foster ‘more democratised and diverse’ historical collections (2011: 5; see also Jimerson, 2009; Flinn and Alexander, 2015), while others have sought to persuade their profession to adopt overtly political standpoints in the context of archiving human rights violations (Hughes-Watkins, 2018).

Yet, archival authority is intimately tied to the perceived ‘neutrality’ of archival expertise. The greater a community’s involvement in co-curation, the more subjective – and thus potentially less powerful – those records risk becoming as evidence. While the paradigm of neutrality, that is ‘the neutrality of the custodian in the face of the political, social or other interests of the user’ (Viebach et al., 2021: 388), is an ideal never truly met, it nonetheless holds political currency and profoundly shapes the work that records do in the world (Ketelaar, 1992; Millar, 2006). As Jeffrey and colleagues (2025: 6) observe in a related context, archivists can leverage their position to act as ‘interlocutors... translating scientific knowledge into legally useful evidence’. Drawing on geographers’ scholar-activist work, this mediating role involves navigating the political complexities and ‘shape-shifting’ identities that define such engagements (Brickell et al., 2024: 414). Such a focus allows us to view the meticulous, often technical work of archiving – the appraisal, description, and digitisation – as a distinct and powerful mode of political-geographical action. However, this work is never a placeless abstraction; the authority derived from archival expertise remains fundamentally anchored in the specific sites where it is performed – the focus of our final section.

Place

Having established how archival holdings serve as claims-making tools for marginalised communities and how expertise functions as the mechanism to activate them, we now turn to the ‘place’ of the archive as a central determinant of its political and epistemic authority. To unpack this relationship, we propose a threefold spatiality: archives as place, archives of place, and archives in place. By examining how digitisation reconfigures these dynamics, we argue that an archive’s siting – whether in a state repository, a community collection, or a digital platform – constitutes a ‘political architecture’ that embodies varying degrees of legitimacy, legality, access, and security.

The foundational archival precept of archives as place traces its genealogy to the classical world, where archives were defined as specific sites of preservation under the jurisdiction of a public authority. As Duranti (1996: 243–244) observes, in Roman law a record was authenticated as evidence only by crossing a physical ‘archival threshold’ (archii limes). The secure and isolated location of the archive was considered essential for imbuing documents with evidentiary force, shielding them from ‘possible sources of contamination or corruption’ (Duranti, 1996: 244). Critically, this isolation was never politically neutral; it served to concentrate the power of authentication within a centralised state authority, creating a spatial barrier that historically excluded non-state or marginalised forms of knowledge. As Linebaugh and Lowry (2021: 286) argue, this historical ‘connection between authority, custodianship and trustworthiness was recited and reified in subsequent archival regimes’. Today, it continues to underpin the modern custodial approach, where the archivist’s physical and legal control of a repository ensures an undisrupted chain of custody – a spatial requirement that remains central to a record’s status as a legitimate source of truth.

The authenticating function of the archive as a physical site is further reinforced by its distinctive architectural dimension. Duranti, for instance, describes the imposing Roman record office, strategically situated at the city’s heart to reflect its status as the ‘beating heart of the res publica’. Such architecture served as a visible reminder to ‘whom allegiance is owed’, housing ‘evidence… of the people for the people’ (Duranti, 1996: 244) within a structure designed to project permanence and power; a relationship which continues to give archives their distinct duality as both collections of documentary evidence and active organs of statehood. Similar relationships between built form, physical location, and claims to authority have been observed across modern states (Ballantyne, 2008; Milligan, 2007), empires (Haines, 2019; Mitchell et al., 2019), and international organisations (Hodder et al., 2021; Redwood, 2021). Crucially, this architectural logic is also increasingly central to the geopolitical claims of non-state actors, who use the formal establishment of archival institutions to perform state-like functions and assert their own political legitimacy (Hodder, 2025; Manby, 2025).

Beyond its physical form, an archive also functions to authorise specific claims to place – a role of heightened significance for displaced communities or those whose homelands are contested. The strength of this approach lies in its ability to transform abstract cultural memory into epistemic authority; archival records are often the primary evidence used by Indigenous communities, for example, to substantiate legal and political claims to territory (e.g. Godden, 2019; Johnson, 2016). Yet, this function extends beyond land claims to the geopolitical production of space itself. As Craggs (2008: 48) notes in her work on the Royal Empire Society, ‘imaginative geographies of the British Empire’ were not merely reflected in the archive but produced through the professional ‘practices and technologies of assembling, classifying, cataloguing, and display’. This is vividly illustrated by the 1875 reorganisation of the India Office records, analysed by Mitchell et al. (2019). Following the 1858 Government of India Act, which transferred sovereign control of India to the British Crown, imperial technocrats used the archive to invent a narrative of imperial continuity. By cataloguing early modern mercantile records alongside 19th-century administrative files, they transformed the East India Company from a trading body into a ‘socio-geographical agent’ of the British state. In this context, the archive functioned as a technology of government designed to fix British rule within a legally authorised historical narrative. Central to this was George Birdwood’s concept of the ‘muniment’ – a fortified stronghold where legal authority, political precedence, and archival enclosure intersected to secure the state’s geopolitical command. The authority of both collections was further reinforced by their physical location within the colonial metropole which established them, in Latourian terms, as ‘centres of calculation’ for imperial knowledge at the heart of Empire.

The connection between an archive’s location and the geographical imaginaries it authorises makes its physical placement a frequent site of contestation (Lowry, 2017, 2021). This is particularly evident in the scholarship on ‘displaced archives’ – collections removed from their place of creation, often during territorial disputes or decolonisation. Shepard’s (2015) work on the dispute between France and Algeria is paradigmatic; he demonstrates how, for both countries, control of the archive of former French Algeria is inextricably entwined with fundamental questions of national sovereignty following decolonisation. Similar dynamics are visible in the ‘seized archives of Indonesia’, which provide a lens for tracing the postcolonial relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands as the former seeks to reclaim its ‘displaced history’ (Karabinos, 2003: 394). Perhaps most notorious is ‘Operation Legacy’, where the British government systematically destroyed or secretively ‘migrated’ colonial records from territories such as Kenya to the UK. This was a deliberate spatial strategy to prevent evidence of colonial administration from informing future legal or political claims, reinforcing a hierarchy of access and authority that persists today (Sato, 2017).

The political implications of archival location are further clarified by archival disputes within international law, such as those surrounding the archive of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). As Redwood (2021) documents, the disagreement over the archive’s ultimate siting revealed a fundamental clash between Rwanda and the United Nations (UN) over the very purpose of the collection. The Rwandan government argued that the archive was national heritage – produced ‘by Rwandan witnesses, and supposedly for Rwanda’ – and should be housed in-country to serve as a resource for national memory and reconciliation (Redwood, 2021: 294). In contrast, the UN maintained that the records were primarily legal and bureaucratic instruments that must remain in Arusha, Tanzania, to support international legal procedures. By denying Rwanda physical custody, the UN effectively maintained the archive as a site of international legal procedure rather than one of national memory, a decision that entrenched the hierarchical relationship that was evident throughout the ICTR’s proceedings. This decision, in turn, reinforces a hierarchical geography of archives where the Global South provides the source material – often born of systemic violence – while institutions in the Global North, or those under international jurisdiction, retain the ‘expert’ authority to house and interpret it.

To return to where we began: Few cases better exemplify the relationship between archival location, geographical imaginaries and political agency than Palestine. Amidst the systematic destruction of documentary heritage by Israeli forces – and even the pre-emptive destruction of records by Palestinians themselves to prevent their falling into hostile hands – digital technologies have emerged as essential tools for self-production and survival (Irfan and Kelcey, 2025). These platforms do more than merely ‘safeguard Palestinian knowledges and histories’ beyond the Israeli state’s ‘locus of control’ (Moon, 2023: 37); they provide a means to unify materials previously ‘fragmented across various geographical locations’ (Moon, 2023: 46). By recombining colonial and indigenous records, these digital projects reconstruct Palestine as both a contested physical site and a ‘transnational entity that is accessible and knowable’ (Moon, 2023: 48) regardless of territorial displacement. For diasporic communities, whose records are as geographically scattered as their people, the digital archive thus becomes a vital site of political and historical continuity (Lowry, 2017, 2021; Punzalan, 2014).

While digital tools may offer a reprieve from physical destruction, they are no panacea. Instead, digitisation produces ‘new geographical configurations’, with political implications for ‘what gets digitised, where it is viewed, and who has access’ (Hodder and Beckingham, 2022: 1299). The siting of digital archives remains a key strategic consideration, with projects such as the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, Palestinian Nexus, and the Palestinian Oral History Archive hosted on servers in various jurisdictions – the West Bank, USA, and Lebanon, respectively – to mitigate the risks of digital repression. However, these initiatives must still navigate territorially bounded infrastructures, including not only servers but also legal regimes that reproduce existing geopolitical hierarchies. For example, the Palestine Poster Project Archives (PPPA), based in the United States, poses critical questions of hosting materials in a foreign jurisdiction given growing political repression against pro-Palestinian activists (Gruber and Considine, 2025; also see Forensic Architecture, 2025) and the fact that digital platforms are frequently targeted by internet shutdowns, content moderation, and state reprisals (McConnell and Manby, 2024).

Notable here is that digitisation introduces profound challenges to the evidentiary authority of archives. If historically this authority relied on records being kept free from ‘contamination’, digital information can be so readily altered and duplicated that the very concept of an ‘original’ document is destabilised. As Rosenzweig (2003: 743) notes, digital files ‘cannot be authenticated as physical documents and objects can’, which complicates the ‘post-custodial’ promise whereby communities retain physical records while sharing digital surrogates. While this model challenges colonial notions of ‘singular provenance, sovereignty, inalienable ownership and physical custody’ (Gilliland, 2017: 180), it risks what Linebaugh and Lowry (2021: 5) call an ‘archival colour line’. This manifests as ‘digital recolonisation’, where Western institutions in the Global North retain sovereignty over the digital lives of materials such that physical displacement (records moved to a metropole) is replaced by epistemic displacement (digital access controlled by actors in the North). When the digital surrogate becomes the primary point of access, the institution hosting the server effectively becomes the new ‘centre of calculation’, exerting epistemic control over how Indigenous or colonised histories are globally searched and viewed.

Likewise, digitisation is no silver bullet for security or preservation. Unlike physical records, digital loss can be instant and irreparable, stemming from format obsolescence, data corruption, or server failure. These technical vulnerabilities are increasingly exacerbated by sophisticated security threats, including hacks, data breaches, and denial-of-service attacks. The 2023 cyberattack that crippled the British Library serves as a stark reminder of the risks inherent in digital preservation and the growing capacity of hostile actors to sabotage archival resources (see also Donaldson and Bell, 2018; Moyana and Chuma, 2023). Without the protective infrastructure of sovereign states, non-state actors are both sharply exposed to and frequently targeted by emergent forms of digital repression (e.g. Moss, 2018; UNPO, 2020). Moreover, state-led misinformation campaigns create multiple, competing ‘truths’ designed to rewrite the narratives of marginalised communities (e.g. CIVICUS, 2025; Llorca-Asensi et al., 2021; UNPO, 2025).

This problem is intrinsic to digital platforms where full-text search functions can lead users toward ‘authoritative’ evidence that merely reinforces pre-existing biases. As Underwood (2014: 66) notes, a database of millions of sentences allows one to find ‘twenty examples of practically anything’. Ultimately, digitisation reconfigures, rather than circumvents, the political-geographical questions of archival trustworthiness. These challenges necessitate a deeper dialogue between digital geography and archival science. By extending geography’s empirical gaze ‘beyond the geotag’ (Crampton et al., 2013: 130), we can better account for how digital technologies mediate the geopolitical agency and subjectivities of marginalised political actors.

Conclusion

This paper has examined the political and legal geographies of archives, foregrounding their role as crucial claims-making tools for marginalised communities. While existing scholarship emphasises structural critiques of state-led archival exclusion and the rise of emancipatory, community-based alternatives, we have highlighted how many marginalised groups must often navigate between these two extremes. Doing so presents a strategic paradox: the necessity of pursuing legitimacy through the very archiving practices and structures that have historically excluded them. By focusing on how these processes are strategically mobilised as a basis for claims to authority and recognition, we offer a corrective to the conceptual dematerialisation of ‘the archive’ in broader geographical scholarship and the relative neglect of professional archival labour. Ultimately, the paper proposes a new research framework for studying archives in geography that sits at the intersection of political, legal, historical and digital geographies and archival science.

Advancing this research agenda requires treating the three lenses proposed in this paper – evidence, expertise, and place – not as isolated themes, but as a recursive and interconnected system. Examining archives as evidence for geopolitical subjectivity reveals how their effectiveness is fundamentally shaped by the expertise that authenticates them and the place of their enactment. Similarly, the construction of archival expertise is both motivated by the search for credible evidence and constrained by the specific geographical and institutional sites from which that expertise is exercised. Interrogating the place of the archive reveals how its siting (physical or digital) dictates its political potency and determines which forms of expertise are granted the power to translate materials into legally admissible evidence. What emerges, then, is an entangled political and legal geography of archives, in which geopolitical evidentiary regimes interlock with contested notions of archival ‘truth’. The legal force of a record is as much a product of where it is housed and the technical labour that authenticates it as anything inherent in the document itself.

Realising this agenda requires more sustained dialogue between geography and archival science, both as an academic field and as a professional practice. Approaches such as ‘archival ethnography’ offer models for how geographers might engage more directly with the professional environments where records are managed (Gracy, 2004; Trace, 2002). Yet, as Schein (2006) suggests, this remains an inherently situated practice: a process of ‘digging in your own backyard’ where the place of the archive and the researcher’s own positionality intersect. At stake in this work is the opportunity to more closely align geography with the commitments of archivists themselves, who are increasingly calling for more equitable practices, the decolonisation of archival holdings, and the mobilisation of archives to support human rights agendas (Janssen, 2023). The institutionalisation of archiving as a professional practice – exemplified by the International Council on Archives (ICA) and its ‘Universal Declaration on Archives' (UDA) – provides concrete mechanisms through which such transformations can be advanced. While geographical engagements with archives have traditionally been framed as methodological reflections, this paper has demonstrated that a substantive engagement with the nature of archives is a vital political task – one that is essential in an era where the very notions of evidence, expertise, and even truth itself are fundamentally under threat.