This thesis examines if and how the dark web and Tor-based onion services can be understood as a potential gap in contemporary preservation efforts in relation to the archival mandate to promote inclusive historiography, access to cultural heritage, and the durability and development of democratic society. The investigation is grounded in postmodern archival theory, drawing on Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook’s account of the archive as a place of power/knowledge and on their account of archival practice as performative and situated.

The study applies a thematic analysis to a material consisting of interviews, a crawl of more than 13 500 onion addresses condensed to 726 categorized entries, and a review of peer-reviewed studies alongside the Swedish official inquiry SOU 2019:58. The results confirm that provenance must be reframed as relational, that appraisal is already enacted within the environment by non-archival actors, and that institutional passivity is itself a performative act shaping collective memory. The findings depicts the dark web as a meaning-bearing, censorship-resistant and communicatively organised environment, though the dominant framing of illicit content persists as a structurally accepted preconception. Preservation, integrity, authenticity, accessability and legitimacy are shown to shift rather than translate unchanged. The dark web thereby emerges as a possible gap in the preservation of contemporary, socially significant and cultural-bearing communication.