The Second Conference of the Swiss Network on Law and Society took place at the University of Bern, from February 10th to 12th, 2025. CDHM’s co-director Grégoire Mallard organised two panels in which members of the CDHM and others presented papers on the ‘Institutional Archives and Counter-Archives of the Transnational: Perspectives from the anthropology of law and socio-legal studies’.

In the first panel, Monique Beerli (CDHM) and Julie Billaud (CDHM) presented papers on the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), showing how research on these archives can contribute to recent efforts in the fields of international relations, history, and law to critique, decenter, and decolonize the historiography of international humanitarian law. They emphasised the potential that the digitisation of journals and memoirs of ICRC delegates hold for writing a more granular history of the ICRC through the daily practices of its practitioners sent abroad. 

In the second panel, Özlem Lakatos (UNIGE), Maya Avis (CDHM), Nataliya Tchermalykh (UNIGE) and Grégoire Mallard (CDHM) discussed institutional archival practices in international organisations as well as citizen-driven and evidence-making practices aimed at creating visual and textual evidentiary archives of state conduct and state violence, thereby questioning the notion of ‘counter-archival practices’ that was at the heart of this conference. Further information about the conference and panels is available at: https://lawandsociety.ch/2nd-conference/