Despite their proliferation within contemporary art discourse, the archive and historiography have remained firmly concerned with object-based, Western archival practices. By extension, within sites of civil war, occupation and revolution, archives therein are especially susceptible to conditions of political control and suppression. Through the work of Santiago Sierra, Walid Raad and Kader Attia, this thesis identifies a rise in alternative models of performative archival practice that both critique and make explicit the current conditions of power under which the archive within these sites operate. In turn, these performative archives function to promote historiographical discontinuity, so as to avoid political recuperation.