Testimony as Evidence: Documenting War, the Fate of Testimony, and the "Fact"

The mass documentation of war and the focus on potential violations of international humanitarian law give rise to a unique type of archive, in which a source is viewed from the outset not merely as testimony, but as potential evidence. While the humanities have focused in recent decades on experience, memory, and subjective perspectives, Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine and the emphasis on justice embedded in documentation initiatives have once again brought the issue of "fact" to the forefront—not as a claim to objectivity, but as a methodological and ethical necessity. Testimony takes on the dimensions of evidence: structure, metadata, verification, and standardized description. The logic of lived experience and the logic of evidence do not merely coexist here; they mutually shape one another.

During the Urban Seminar, Roman Koval will present the initial findings of his research on how practices of documenting war crimes organize this relationship, how the requirement for evidentiary value influences the structure of the source, and what this means for understanding the facts and for future historical writing.

Urban Seminar will be held in a workshop format. Researchers are invited to discuss scholarly projects, research at various stages of development, and completed research that is being prepared for publication.

Participation in the Urban Seminar requires preliminary reading and discussion of the researcher's text. If you would like to join the Seminar, please email Anastasiia Fabirovska (a.fabirovska@lvivcenter.org), and we will send you the materials in advance.

Credits

Cover Image: photo by Olha Klymuk, 2022 / Visual Documentation of War collection / Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History