In its contemporary history, Afghanistan has gone through cyclical conflict, and today the country grapples with one of the deadliest phases of the conflict. Despite initial efforts, the transitional justice process has stalled. Power holders are unwilling to document or to prosecute war crimes and even promote memorialisation that calls attention to the conflict’s victims.

The work done by AHRDO (the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation) addresses the gap in the Afghan public memory by creating “memory boxes” consisting of material objects and belongings of individual war victims, retracing their life stories and collecting oral histories of their survivors left behind.

Photo credit: Sophia Milosevic Bijleveld