When repression silences voices, how do communities make sure their stories survive? When protests erupt, who decides what gets remembered and what is erased? These were the urgent questions shaping our conversations at DRAPAC25, the Digital Rights Assembly in Asia-Pacific, organized by EngageMedia.
Archiving is never a neutral exercise, it is an act of resistance against the truth being erased or thwarted. Nowhere is this clearer than in Bangladesh, West Papua, Indonesia, Nepal, and other parts of Asia-Pacific, where testimonies, videos, and memories are not just evidence but lifelines of justice, standing against silence and erasure. With this urgency, WITNESS and Activate Rights co-organized three sessions at DRAPAC25 on archiving, memory, and digital threats—creating a collective space to share challenges, tools, practices, and visions for how communities ensure their stories endure.
WITNESS and Activate Rights sessions at DRAPAC25 spotlight community-led archiving and digital threats in Bangladesh and West Papua.
Archiving as Resistance in Bangladesh, West Papua, and Beyond
During the closed session at DRAPAC25, participants reflected on how community-led documentation is being used across the region as a tool to challenge repression and preserve memory. In Bangladesh, the Bangladesh Protest Archive was born from the urgency to preserve videos and testimonies during the July 2024 student uprisings and crackdowns in Dhaka. While in West Papua, communities and archiving collectives such as Papuan Voices and Papuan Behind Bars are keeping stories alive in the face of decades of military repression and systemic erasure.
Elsewhere in the region, recent uprisings show the urgent need to strengthen similar efforts. In Indonesia, mass demonstrations against corruption and government excess in August 2025 triggered violent crackdowns, arrests, and internet disruptions, revealing how evidence can be easily lost without systematic documentation practices. In Nepal, student and community-led protests have recently been met with surveillance and restrictions, with fears of internet shutdowns looming. And in the Philippines, activists continue to face red-tagging, disinformation, and harassment, showing how vital documentation is to defend truth and demand justice.
The Bangladesh Protest Archive, featured in The Daily Star, documents more than 1,500 videos and photos from the July protests.
Tools and Tactics
Practical sessions grounded these reflections in hands-on tactics. Tools for preserving metadata, secure storage, and decentralized community archives were explored. But the focus was never just on technology—it was about power. Who controls the archive? Who can access it? How can metadata and storage practices strengthen rather than weaken communities?
Alongside Activate Rights, we referenced the WITNESS’s Community Verification Guide and explored new approaches for community-led investigations, learning from the Bangladesh Protest Archive. One of our sessions reimagined the investigation process by involving communities from the very beginning and collaborating with investigative media outlets to create spaces for co-sharing and learning that amplify voices, maximize impact, and reaffirm that communities must remain at the center of our work.
An investigation by Netra News, supported by the Bangladesh Protest Archive, reconstructs the killing of Taim during the July protests.
Challenges and Lessons
Once the backbone of human rights work, documentation is now in crisis. Formal investigations, curated archives, and legal evidence are losing ground amid shifting approaches to philanthropy, NGO precarity, and shrinking civic spaces – Benedict “Bono” Salazar Olgado, in Human rights documentation is dead. Long live human rights documentation!
This statement resonated strongly with our closed roundtable at DRAPAC25, where participants shared recurring challenges around archiving and documentation. Safety and security remain pressing concerns: oral histories, testimonies, and documents about social movements or abuses are often gathered under difficult conditions, and even when names are removed, new analytical methods can re-identify contributors. In hostile environments, weak and underfunded IT infrastructure exposes sensitive collections to surveillance and sabotage.
Another overlooked dimension is the psychological strain on those doing the work. Archivists and community documenters are regularly exposed to traumatic testimonies, violent imagery, and the constant fear of surveillance or reprisal. Without mental health support and collective care practices, this sustained exposure can lead to burnout and secondary trauma, threatening the continuity of archives.
Sustainability and long-term commitment emerged as a critical gap, with many initiatives dependent on short-term grants and volunteers, leaving archives vulnerable to lapses in security and continuity. Without stable funding, skilled personnel, and attention to the well-being of those involved, even the best system can fail. So the question becomes: How can we create archives that protect not only data but also the people and communities behind it?
Moving Forward
As protests continue across the region, archiving remains urgent—not just to preserve the truth, but to protect voices, reclaim narratives, and build solidarity. Archives such as the Arkib Filem Rakyat in Malaysia remind us that archives can also preserve stories of struggle and hard-fought positive change, showing that memory is not only about documenting harm but also about sustaining hope. From DRAPAC25 we learned that moving forward often requires looking back, using the past to understand present needs. Archiving in Asia-Pacific has long had a deep impact, but shrinking spaces now demand renewed commitment.
So the question we leave with is this: What kind of archives do we want to build for the future? Archives that only record harm, or archives that also carry hope, solidarity, and the imagination of justice?