Counter-Archiving as Resistance: Preserving What Might Disappear
By Nabeel Ahmad
On April 8, 2019, a 22-year-old woman named Alaa Salah climbed onto a car in Khartoum and sang protest songs in front of a crowd of thousands. Someone filmed it. That very image broke the internet, started circulating across the globe within hours, and was later called the “Woman of the Revolution“.
What most people are unaware of is that the same network of activists documenting the Sudanese revolution was simultaneously building an archive, which is not a library or a museum. It’s a free-access, verified, publicly accessible database of evidence. By the time Sudan’s civil war broke out in April 2023, the infrastructure to document atrocities was already in place. This is what counter-archiving looks like. And it is changing how people resist authoritarian destruction.
What Is a Counter-Archive?
A counter-archive is not an official institution housed in a government or university building, nor is it funded by the government. It is a community-built, politically intentional, and largely digital archive. The Archive/Counter-Archive research project at York University defines counter-archives as “political, ingenious, resistant, and community-based”, created explicitly “to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts.”
Sudan: Evidence Before It Disappears
The Sudanese Archive was launched in 2019 by Mnemonic. It is the same organization behind the Syrian, Yemen, and Ukrainian archives that systematically archives digital content, mainly images and videos from social media, to preserve potential evidence of human rights violations and international crimes for future accountability processes. Today, Mnemonic has preserved over 15 million items related to alleged human rights violations across its four country-specific databases. This is not passive preservation. It is active accountability by building a body of evidence that courts, journalists, and international bodies can use long after the conflict ends.
Palestine: Memory as the Only Map Left
In Palestine, the act of archiving predates the current war by decades. The Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA), based at the American University of Beirut, was launched in 2010, was launched to digitize and provide access to over 1,000 hours of testimonies from first-generation Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. The community working on the project is from various disciplines, including scholars, archivists, and librarians.
Since October 2023, grassroots documentation in Gaza has accelerated further. Activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens have been uploading footage, mapping demolished neighbourhoods, and recording the destruction of cultural institutions. Freelance journalist Soliman Hijjy and groups like the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Mnemonic, SJAC, Airwars, and the Accountability Archive, as they collect videos, photos, testimony, and officials’ statements, are trying to store and verify them in secure digital archives for future legal cases and historical record.
Lebanon: Archiving a Disaster
When the Beirut port explosion occurred on August 4, 2020, it killed more than 200 people, wounded 7,000, destroyed 77,000 apartments, and displaced over 300,000. The Lebanese state has still not produced an independent, transparent account of what happened or who was responsible.
In response to this, the Lebanese civil society stepped in and formed LiveLoveBeirut, a community platform, which launched a digital archive of August 4 memories with the motive that if the state does not document for accountability, the community will document for memory. Since then, it has collected personal accounts from survivors, diaspora members, and witnesses.
Why This Matters?
The counter-archive can never rebuild what is already destroyed and gone, nor is it a substitute for justice long overdue. But it creates something that formal and conventional institutions often neglect; it preserves evidence for memory before states remove it or before witnesses die. When the archive survives, the story survives. And when the story survives, accountability remains possible.