On Thursday 11 June, UNPO Secretary-General Mercè Monjé Cano was a featured speaker at the webinar “Self-Determination and the Recognition of Non-Sovereign Peoples’ Archives”, organised by the International Council on Archives (ICA) as part of International Archives Week 2026.
The webinar brought together archivists, researchers, and advocates to explore what archives mean for communities excluded from international decision-making and why protecting them is a political as much as a professional question.
Archives as claims on the future
In her presentation, the Secretary-General drew on UNPO’s 35 years of work with unrepresented nations and peoples to argue that archives, for these communities, are not simply a repository of the past, but also, importantly, they are claims on the future.
For UNPO members the question of whether their archives exist, who controls them, and whether they are accessible is directly connected to whether those communities will continue to exist as peoples at all.
The Secretary-General identified four key functions archives serve for unrepresented communities. First, they evidence peoplehood by demonstrating historical continuity and distinct identity, the essential foundation for collective rights including self-determination. Second, they preserve culture and collective memory, particularly for diaspora communities scattered by displacement, for whom digital archival projects can reconnect generations. Third, they build counter-narratives in the face of state-driven disinformation campaigns that seek to erase or distort communities’ histories. Fourth, they support advocacy, legal claims, and the documentation of human rights abuses by providing the evidentiary base for UN submissions, legal proceedings, and accountability processes.
The Secretary-General also spoke with concern about the current global context, with the large majority of humanity now living under authoritarian rule. The deliberate destruction of evidence and manipulation of historical narrative has become a strategy of impunity. In this context human rights defenders are especially vulnerable, often being the very people who build and maintain community archives. Attacking human rights defenders and destroying archives, she argued, are often the same operation: silencing the witness, erasing the evidence, and making it impossible for a community to prove what happened, or that it exists as a distinct people. She highlighted the cases of several UNPO member peoples to illustrate this dynamic, including the Khmer Krom, Uyghurs, Kabyle people, and Assyrians.
The Secretary-General closed with a direct invitation to the archival community, stating that what unrepresented peoples need from the profession is not only technical expertise but active solidarity. She called for three concrete steps: pathways for non-sovereign communities to participate in the archival profession as full members rather than special cases, guidance specifically for archiving under state threat, and an emergency response function for archives facing immediate danger.
Dr. Alex Manby on the Naga Archives
The Secretary-General’s presentation was followed by that of Dr. Alex Manby, Research Associate in Human Geography at King’s College London, who has collaborated with UNPO on several occasions. Dr. Manby drew on his doctoral research on Naga self-determination to explore how archives function as political tools for unrepresented communities.
In his speech, Dr. Manby traced how Naga activists mobilise historical documents as evidence of peoplehood and of the historical basis of their claims to self-determination. He also examined the political stakes of archival dispossession, including the long-running controversy surrounding the papers of Angami Zapu Phizo, widely regarded as the father of Naga nationalism. In addition, he highlighted the Naga Archive and Research Centre (NARC) in Dimapur. Founded in the 1950s under conditions of active repression, the archive today holds approximately 40,000 files and plays a significant role in materialising the idea of a Naga political community while providing an institutional foundation for future Naga political aspirations.
In his research with Professor Fiona McConnell (University of Oxford) and Dr. Jake Hodder (University of Nottingham), Dr. Manby developed a broader framework for understanding the political utility of archives for unrepresented communities, organising it around three lenses: evidence, expertise, and place. For these communities, he argued, archives are political institutions that shape how communities understand their past, make claims in the present, and imagine possible futures.
Dr. Manby has also written for the UNPO Academy in collaboration with Professor McConnell on documenting peoplehood and archival support for self-determination claims, and is participating in the ongoing project to digitise UNPO’s institutional archives.
Watch the recording here:
