Distributed records in the Rohingya refugee diaspora: Arweave and the R-Archive

Abstract

Purpose

This article delineates the pilot implementation of the Rohingya Archive (R-Archive). The R-Archive seeks to both confront and exploit the roles of documentation and recordkeeping in forced displacement of Rohingya people through targeted physical and bureaucratic violence in Myanmar. This grassroots activist intervention is located at the intersection of technology, rights, records, jurisdictions and economics. Using Arweave's blockweave, the R-Archive secures copies of records, such as identity documentation, land deeds and personal papers, carried into diaspora by Rohingya refugees against unauthorised alteration, deletion and loss, providing a trust infrastructure for accumulating available evidence in support of rights claims and cultural preservation.

Design/methodology/approach

Iterative development of functional requirements, data collection processes and identification of a technological solution for the community-based, post-custodial, blockchain-inspired R-Archive; design and testing of the R-Archive pilot; and analysis of trust and economic concerns arising.

Findings

A complex set of interconnecting considerations is raised by this use of emerging technologies in service to a vulnerable and diasporic community. Hostile governments and volatile cryptocurrencies are both threats to the distributed post-custodial R-Archive. However, the strength of the community bonds that form the archive and articulated in its records speak to the possibility of perdurance for a global Rohingya archive, and working through the challenges surfaced by its development offers the possibility to serve as a model that might be adaptable for other grassroots archival activist projects initiated by oppressed, marginalised and diasporic communities.

Research limitations/implications

Personal and community safety and accessibility concerns, especially in refugee camps and under Covid-19 restrictions, presented particular challenges to carrying out the research and development that are addressed in the research design and future research plans.

Practical implications

The goal of this pilot was to collect and store examples of a range of documents that demonstrate different aspects of Rohingya culture and links to the homeland as well as those that record formal evidentiary relationships between members of the Rohingya community now in diaspora and the Burmese state (e.g. acknowledgements of citizenship). The pilot was intended to demonstrate the viability of using a blockchain-inspired decentralised archival system combined with a community-driven approach to data collection and then to evaluate the results for potential to scale.

Social implications

The R-Archive is a community-centred and driven effort to identify and preserve, under as secure and trusted conditions as possible, digital copies of documents that are of juridical, cultural and personal value to the Rohingya people and also of significance as primary documentary evidence that might be used by international legal institutions in investigating genocide taking place in Burma and by academic researchers studying the history of Burma.

Originality/value

The R-Archive is novel in terms of its technological application (Arweave), the economic concerns of a vulnerable stateless population it is trying to address, and its functional complexity, in that its goal is simultaneously to serve both legal evidentiary and community archive functions. The R-Archive is also an important addition to other notable efforts in the diasporic Rohingya community that have attempted to employ the tools of technology for cultural preservation.

Citation

Sheikh, S., Gilliland, A.J., Kothe, P. and Lowry, J. (2023), "Distributed records in the Rohingya refugee diaspora: Arweave and the R-Archive", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 79 No. 4, pp. 813-829. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2022-0174