THE "DUTY TO REMEMBER" AND THE "RIGHT TO MEMORY" Memory Politics and Neoliberal Logic (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Duty to Remember? Politcs and Morality of Remembering Past Atrocities
International Political Anthropology Vol. 5 (2012) No. 1
An allusion to a "duty to remember" the dark episodes of history is a common occurrence in today's politics and popular discourse. The vision behind the call never to forget genocides, massacres and wars is noble and praiseworthy. However, the way in which such events are formulated and used is so embedded in the present as to raise serious questions about the morality and political agendas of those who selectively undertake projects to enshrine past atrocities. This essay seeks not only to decode the socio-political process for handling the past but also to challenge the conventional belief that remembering the past will prevent future crimes and heal countries. It goes on to argue for a balanced, realistic and ethical relationship between the past and present.
History, Memory and Forgetting: Political Implications*
RCCS Annual Review, 2009
Researchers have raised questions about recovering traumatic situations such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam war or the fratricidal massacres in Yugoslavia. Although some classic studies have identified important aspects relating to history and memory, there are several ways of dealing with the past, all of which involve interests, power and exclusion. The politics of just memory with regard to crimes committed in the past, a debate in which various academic areas as well as society in general have been involved, depends on processes of selection and also on elements which extend beyond the scope of human reason. It is necessary to find a balance between an obsession with the past and attempts to impose forgetting. Our aim, therefore, is to extend our understanding of history, memory and forgetting, emphasizing their limits as well as their ethical and moral implications.
The (Re)collection of Memory after Mass Atrocity and the Dilemma for Transitional Justice
NYU Journal of International Law & Politics
When a government engages in the mass killing of its own citizens, how can the nation ever recover? These atrocities destroy the moral fabric which binds a nation. To recover, this fabric must be remade. Many social scientists and legal scholars believe that developing collective memory – an enduring and shared memory of the events that help to heal the wounds of a tattered national conscience and prevent the recurrence of mass atrocities – is essential to such reconstruction. However, the preservation of collective memory is in tension with another impulse after mass atrocity: the desire for justice. Because notions of individualism and autonomy heavily influence legal institutions worldwide, they risk the destruction of collective memory. This friction constitutes a central dilemma in facilitating transitional justice. In this article, I urge a fundamental reconceptualization of the law’s preference for individual memory in the context of transitional justice. I argue that the inclusion of collective memory will facilitate a better understanding of the collective harms that characterize mass atrocities and will serve the distinct goals of transitional justice, including reconciliation, the creation of a historical record, nation-building, and legal reform. I further argue that human rights lawyers should act as preservers and promoters of collective memory. In doing so, they may be able to help heal wounds outside traditional justice tribunals – while at the same time providing essential assistance to these tribunals if and when legal proceedings do finally occur.
Social memory and historical justice: Introduction
Memory Studies, 2010
The articles in this volume-all written by PhD students and early career researchers-are a tiny sample of the postgraduate research on the social and (trans)cultural dimensions of memory currently undertaken across and in-between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. To feature the work of postgraduates in Memory Studies both acknowledges this research as a genuine force in the field and reminds us of the need for new voices in memory scholarship. The work presented in this volume does not claim to represent any particular themes or overarching preoccupations in the postgraduate scholarship, except perhaps in being propelled by a nail-biting urgency that many students of memory bring to their research. However, the contributors to this issue have been steered away from any need to provide to ritualistic surveys of the field or dutiful summations of their findings. Instead they were asked to consider what they would write about if there were no hoops to jump through and no one was breathing down their neck; to turn their words to what, in their research on memory, felt the most powerful, the most haunting, the most troubling and the most in need of being said. This issue has been conceived as a safe haven for the articulation of ideas, sensibilities and narratives that can, sadly, remain thwarted by some of the expectations and protocols that dominate the professional lives of postgraduate students and early career researchers, and are only compounded by junior researchers' frequently vulnerable and uncertain status in academia. By positioning this issue against an academic apprenticeship model we think that the work here has much to offer. 'Memory studies is simultaneously still in its charismatic phase, though it no longer has a right to be', writes sociologist Jeffrey Olick, 'as well as highly resistant to efforts to escape from it, though it clearly needs to do so.' (Olick, 2009: 251) What Olick identifies as 'a charismatic phase'the way so much of research on frames, affects, media and political economy of remembrance continues to be enthralled by the particular parent figures-sometimes extracts a heavy toll on the work of younger scholars (younger in academic if not necessarily in human years: many of the contributors to this special issue, for instance, are mature-aged). Postgraduate students in particular have been frequently compelled to subscribe preemptively to particular modes of comportment in Memory Studies 4(1) 3-12
Practices of Memory in Transitional Justice
This report sheds light on the critical relationship between transitional justice and memory. I examine how memorization processes within the context of transitional justice are presented as a healing mechanism for victims. I assess how these processes are often politicized, I examined how this politicization may occur in two instances: firstly, when memorization is practiced by the state for the purposes of building a national collective narrative through practices such as commemoration and creation of truth commissions or memory laws; new regimes use these practices to regain its authority in the public sphere and to give a sense of legitimization to their official narratives. Secondly, politicization may occur through the acts of civil society, their memorization turns into revolutionary conduct to oppose the official narrative of the new regime, hence their processes turn into a continuation to refuse and oppose forms of power, or either to demand an acknowledgment in the official institutions. I observe how politicizing these processes; whether by highlighting certain versions or ignoring others, affect the process of constructing a national and collective memory, and how it affect victims and their rights to truth and memory, which risks the idea of being re-victimized again in the process.
The Intersection of Memory, & Memorialization in Transitional Justice Mechanisms
.."justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done" -Lord Heart, R v Sussex ex part McCarthy [1924] Transitional Justice mechanisms post-conflict focus heavily on memorial, and historic inquiry. The group construct of memory and it's fallibility play enormous roles in the construct of the post-conflict narrative and shaping of the post-conflict societal relationship with justice and legal remedy. This paper explores the intersection of the problems of memory, and memorialization as Transitional Justice processes. Collective memory is contested memory. It is always in juxtaposition to an “other” narrative. Because memory is individually experienced, and those experiences are shaped by inputs that are fallible, and shared by outputs that are inadequate, our ability to assess another’s experience of traumatic memory is also handicapped.
Latin American Journal of Studies of Bodies, Emotions and Society, 2023
Many communities today continue to be haunted by conscious and unconscious memories of past atrocities as they struggle to live with the legacies of brutality and related trauma. These dehumanising events are not just recent wars, violent intercommunal conflicts, genocides, apartheid, and forced displacement, but also more distant outrages, including the occupation of indigenous lands, enslavement, and colonialism. So the trauma was transmitted from one generation to the next, and the effects of dehumanisation are kept alive in our collective memory. In this context, this article explores remembering as beyond the cognition and beyond language. It draws on the normative theory of collective memory and pays attention to remembering as the embodied and the emotional, including the ways that potent sensations and sentiments might encapsulate the unspeakable and in-articulatable experiences of loss, grief and injustice. This allows a further investigation into how remembering the past brutality can transmit and reinforce our identity, relational orientations and actions. As what we remember and how we should remember the past can determine our experience of our dignity and well-being, this article proposes that it requires the ethics of remembering aimed at enriching the healing and transformative potential of collective memory, and inspiring our responsibilities for co-creating a just and humane world.