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The role of violent histories and their legacies in reconciliation processes has been a central question in debates on reconciliation and nation building after conflict: whether, how, and when painful events should be remembered in post-conflict and post-transition societies. A dominant approach to this question since the 1980s has been the “reconciliation paradigm,” which views addressing violent histories as condition for reconciliation. A comparative study of the implementation in practice of this global paradigm by civil society–based memory activists in Poland and Israel–Palestine raises questions about its applicability. The findings point to two weaknesses: first, mistreatment of asymmetrical violence and power relations between the conflict sides and, second, the lack of systematic consideration of how reconciliation is perceived by local actors in practice. In light of these weaknesses, local memory activists developed alternative strategies to those of the reconciliation paradigm, while governments infused reconciliation with different meanings that impede reconciliation instead of advancing it. Cultivating a sociological approach to reconciliation theory, this article proposes new theoretical modifications that would expand the paradigm's applicability: reciprocity or mutual respect instead of mutual acknowledgments, a normative basis that transcends the liberal boundaries of reconciliation, and an agonistic memory instead of consensus about the past.

Israeli memory never ceased to be ethno-national, featuring a Zionist ideology and mythical trajectory that leads from the biblical homeland to the resettlement of the Jewish people under a Jewish ...

This article examines memory laws as a new form of social control, demonstrating the significance of cultural memory to law and society scholarship. It focuses on two Israeli laws that seek to control public debate by giving voice to one marginalized group in order to silence another. The article presents two forms of such utilization of the law: forced forgetting and the balancing of atrocities. Forced forgetting validates the memory of one group of people over another group. Balancing atrocities equates victims, pitting the suffering of one group against that of another for the purpose of dismissing the former’s claims for recognition and redress. The 2011 Nakba Law, an example of forced forgetting, dismisses the Palestinian minority’s experience to amplify the memory of the Jewish majority, while the 2014 Jewish Nakba Law creates an analogy between Palestinian redress claims and those of the Mizrahi Jews in order to balance the atrocities that these groups suffered. We show that both forms of control have limitations that create gaps between legislation and implementation, yet their political-symbolic impact is much greater.

Memory activists have recently received more scholarly and public attention, but the concept lacks conceptual clarity. In this article, we articulate an analytical framework for studying memory activists, proposing a relatively narrow definition: “Memory activists” strategically commemorate the past to challenge (or protect) dominant views on the past and the institutions that represent them. Their goal is mnemonic change or to resist change. We locate scholarship on memory activists at the intersection of memory studies and social movement studies. We introduce a typology for comparative analysis of memory activism according to activist roles, temporality, and modes of interaction with other actors in memory politics, and illustrate this with a diverse set of empirical examples. We contend that the analytical utility of the concept of the “memory activist” is premised on its value-neutrality, and in particular, its application to both pro and anti-democratic cases of activism.

The last decade and a half has seen heated public debates and controversies around a new type of national laws, popularly known as "memory laws." Broadly considered, different types of national laws address the historical record or the shared perception of the past; for example, for example, hate speech laws, laws that establish the social calendar of memorial-days, and laws that create institutions that house the historical record and collective memory, such as national museums and archives (Fronza 2006: 29; Savelsberg & King 2011; Zerubavel 2003). Yet the controversies relate to another type of laws, those that seek to shape or draw the boundaries of the public debate on the past. These memory laws are utilized with regard to difficult and violent histories and are of two central categories: one that bans and criminalizes a positive perception of an atrocious past such as genocide or mass-violence, and the other that bans a negative perception of a violent past.1 The first type seeks to maintain a negative memory of a violent history, and the second aims to fortify a positive memory of such history. The first type, which includes laws against Holocaust and genocide denial, has been addressed in scholarly work on the use of laws and trials against the denial of genocide and mass violence.2 The second type, however, has received little scholarly attention, although it has triggered great public controversies in the last decade. Laws that enforce a positive depiction of colonial or authoritative periods in France (2005) and Russia (2011) were denounced by local and international associations of historians and intellectuals and civil society groups; and a law against mourning the Palestinian displacement in the 1948 war during the Israeli Independence Day celebration (2011) initiated a heated public debate in Israel. I will center here on the less theorized (with the exceptions of Boyd 2008; Curran 2015; Fraser 2011; Miller 2010; Tremlett 2010; Wartanian 2008; Lemarchand 2006-2007; Koposov 2005) and more recent phenomena of memory laws of the second type: laws that ban a negative perception of a violent history in order to fortify a positive memory of the nation-state (from here on I use the term memory laws to refer specifically to this category, unless otherwise specified).Such laws raise tensions both domestically and in the regional or international level. On the international and regional level, memory laws that fortify a positive perspective of a nation-state's past and ban negative perceptions stand in contrast to progressive efforts of truth-seeking regarding violent histories in the past decades. International law, as well as international and regional courts such as the European and Inter-American courts, have determined the rights of victims to know the fate of their loved ones who were victims of mass violence and imprisonment, as well as the importance of commemoration and remembrance for survivors and their descendants.3 Such entities have, therefore, worked to stop nation-states from closing down the public space, limiting collective memories, and presenting only the historical narrative of state leadership. They instead sought to open up a space for different perceptions and experiences of the past, especially of surviving victims. Although nation-states' efforts to construct a dominant collective narrative for their national community have been widely researched, documented, and analyzed (Davis 2005; Nora 1996, 198421992), the growing international paradigms that call for addressing past atrocities and a "politics of regret" since the 1980s have also shaped states' perceptions and responses about their national pasts (Barkan 2000; Berg and Schaefer 2009; Cohen 2001; Olick & Coughlin 2003; Olick 2007; Torpey 2003).On the nation-state level in which memory laws are legislated, they do not guard against hate speech more than existing free speech and hate crimes laws (Savelsberg and King 2011), nor do they replace the state's education system and memorial institutions in teaching citizens about the dominant perception of the national past. …

This article examines a strategy of peace activism that gained visibility in the last decades: memory activism. Memory activists manifest a temporal shift in transnational politics: first the past, then the future. Affiliated with the globally-circulating paradigm of historical justice, memory activist groups assume that a new understanding of the past could lead to a new perception of present problems and project alternative solutions for the future. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis among memory activists of the 1948 war in Israel since 2001, the article examines the activist production of counter-memory during active conflict. Using Coy et al.’s typology of oppositional knowledge-production, the article shows how the largest group of memory activism in Israel produced ‘new’ information on the war, critically assessed the dominant historical narrative, offered an alternative shared narrative, and began to envision practical solutions for Palestinian refugees. However, the analysis raises additional concerns that reach beyond the scope of the typology, primarily regarding the unequal power relations that exist not only between the dominant and activist production of oppositional knowledge, but also among activists.

Transnational discourse, models, and tools for conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation are often transmitted from the international community of experts and state agencies to the local...

Spring 2006, when the rebuilding of Ground Zero began, was a unique moment in time — a turning point for the New York site and its publics. It signified transformation from debris to a memorial museum; a move from past catastrophe to future memories, as the nationalized narration of the events in the formal exhibit on site emphasized. Surprisingly, while the end result was already known, this moment of transformation allowed different audiences to put at halt the nationalized interpretation of the events of 9/11 and engage in personal, collected and collective, local and global, perspectives on the past, while enacting the presents and futures which seem to unfold from them. This article examines these distinct yet connected moments in order to reveal the different connections that people and governments make between pasts, presents and futures. It uses a non-linear approach to time, which explores and reworks the tension between linearity and relativity, as a sensitive lens to a political change that has proceeded well beyond the interaction on site.

The violent conflict over the Occupied Palestinian Territories has gripped world attention for decades. In recent years, the daunting image of the Separation Barrier [hence, the Wall] built by Israel, mostly on Palestinian lands, and which combines a wall, a fence and other impediments to free passage along its route (Dolphin, 2006), has stood out as an icon of enforced separation between Israelis and Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). At the same time, the nonviolent struggle against the building of the Wall, and the occupation regime more generally, launched by the Palestinians during the second Intifada (uprising) in the early 2000s, has been largely overlooked by Israeli and international mainstream media.

For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies is inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself — and the ways in which it is deployed, invoked and utilized — can potentially hinder efforts to move forward. It is the purpose of this book to challenge these assumptions by looking at how the study and practice of memory are ultimately about and for the present and future. This Janus-faced view of memory as looking to the past in order to shape the present and future is the basis for the increasingly relevant and pressing concerns and scholarship about the relationship of individual and collective memory to democratic politics; human rights and transitional justice; revenge, imposture and forgery; social movements and utopian moments; and historical facts and scientific technologies.

As any student or scholar of memory knows, defining memory is particularly challenging. Even the most cursory survey of memory research reveals that the definition and function of memory is polymorphic both within and between academic disciplines, cultural institutions, and memory practitioners. The unit of analysis, methodology, and theoretical assumptions vary greatly. Although most psychologists agree that there are three types of long-term memory systems, the survey of memory research of Roediger and Wertsch (2008) reminds us that Tulving (2007) has cataloged 256 kinds of memory mentioned in psychology journals. The difficulty of defining memory becomes even thornier when seeking similarities between synaptic changes in Aplysia (Kandel 2007) and the memory located in museums and archives, studied by architects, sociologists, and historians. As one begins to seek a common set of definitions and taxonomy, one wonders if many of the academic disciplines are studying the same thing at all. A commonly agreed-upon definition remains problematic even when specific terms are shared between disciplines. Consider the study of collective memory. Since its emergence as a distinct field of study as a result of the pioneering work of Halbwachs (1980/1925), scholars in recent decades have demonstrated an enormous interest in collective memory. Both sociologists and psychologists have adopted the term and study it largely along disciplinary lines, with little agreement or sharing of findings between the two fields (Olick 1999; Hirst and Manier 2008; Hirst and Echterhoff 2008). Given the enormous range of memory interests and methodologies used to explore them, we suspect that “memory” as the object of a field of studies will not fit neatly into a single definition. Nor would it be productive to try to construct one. However, increased attempts between scholars and students of memory to establish where various understandings of memory overlap would be a fruitful step in facilitating the emergence of a language about memory that could be more readily shared among scholars.

ispartof: The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism pages:295-299 ispartof: pages:295-299 status: published

International audience

International audience

International audience