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This article examines the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia and its implications for the study of international relations. It highlights the Eurocentric bias in the field and the lack of understanding of Eastern European experiences. The war has exposed divisions between offensive realists and pacifists, both of whom fail to recognize Ukraine's agency. However, it has also empowered Central and East European states to assert their political independence and challenge Russia's denial of Ukraine's sovereignty. The article explores Ukraine's historical experience as a passive player in international relations and the neglect of Russian imperialism in postcolonial studies. It argues that the war has revealed the difficulty of acknowledging Ukraine's distinct perspective and the need to address Russia's historical memory. The text also discusses Russia's imperialistic ambitions and the need for a comprehensive program to confront its repressive past. It calls for a decolonization of the study of war and international relations, emphasizing the importance of considering the perspectives and agency of smaller states. The author concludes by emphasizing the importance of empathy and understanding for those affected by the conflict. [Extracted from the article]

Centering on a case of genocide that occurred on Jeju Island, 1947–onward, and the resulting memory politics that unfolded alongside the Jeju Truth and Reconciliation (TR) process in the 2000s, this article provides a novel critique of state-sanctioned reparatory processes in response to state violence. Adopting and revising the subimperialism framework, I challenge the prevalent teleological grammar in representing South Korean history. Rather than assuming a remedial function of the TR, I approach the TR as an epitome of subimperial and necropolitical interplay of power. Subimperialism is primary and perpetual, based upon foundational violence and is concomitant with perpetual death, physical and spiritual in form. I show, drawing from Mbembe, the perpetual operations of necropower (i.e. the destruction of the other's humanity and simultaneous construction of the imperial selfhood), killing the other physically in 1947–1954 and then killing the other in themselves in collective memory in the 2000s. In the first body section, I delineate how foundational the Jeju Genocide was for South Korean subimperialism. I illustrate the way in which necropolitical self-making (of "South" Korean peoplehood) sustained concatenated developments of disciplinary, biopolitical, and sovereign power. The right-wing faction's necropolitics was the centerpiece of the formation of "South" Korean peoplehood, preceding the state's exercise of the aforementioned forms of power. In the second body section, I show how the necropower was embodied by genocide survivors committing mnemonic self-killing in rendering their own history. Under the perpetual necropower, many of the survivors refrained from archiving their own history, despite the Jeju TR programme intended to include the Jeju Islanders' voice. Moreover, even those testifying for the TR reproduced a formulaic anticommunist taxonomy ("communist anti-nationals" versus "anticommunist patriots") that has long excruciated the Jeju Islanders themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2014, an amateur archaeological team unearthed thousands of bones and other remains from an old well in the town of Ajnala, located in the Indian state of Punjab. These remains are believed to belong to 282 Indian sepoys who were summarily executed en masse on 1 August 1857 under the orders of Deputy Commissioner Frederic Cooper, during the height of the Indian Uprising of 1857. The discovery of the bodies has not only reignited fierce debates about the violent history of the British Empire in India, but also offers an interesting glimpse into some of the ways that Indian history and national identity are currently being remade and negotiated in relation to the colonial past. This article is about the contested historical narrations, memories, and ongoing efforts to commemorate the Ajnala Massacre. It reveals how the history and public memory of colonial violence remain poorly understood, and the ways that calls for the recognition of previously forgotten, absent, or erased memories can prompt difficult and highly politicized discussions about the meaning of history, identity, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how photographs displayed online preserve, mediate, and circulate memories of the Gukurahundi "genocide." The Gukurahundi denotes mass killings of more than 20,000 predominantly Ndebele-speaking people in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces orchestrated by the Zimbabwean government between 1983 and 1987. Many of the victims consider this to be a genocide, but their memories are subject to repression under the current regime. In this context, online news sites serve as alternative spaces in which knowledge of this traumatic past is transmitted through photographs. Anchored in an understanding that photographs constitute a "mirror with a memory," this article uses critical discourse analysis to analyse selected images from Bulawayo24.com news website. It finds that Bulawayo24.com serves as an arena for preserving and circulating Gukurahundi memories by enabling audiences to bear witness to their experience-as-genocide. The images reinforce human rights discourses, contributing to the growing calls for justice, commemoration, and memorialization of Gukurahundi victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The republican historian Ernest Lavisse (1842-1922) played a considerable role in this national education by writing history textbooks - known as "little Lavisse - for children aged seven to nine."[6] A History syllabus used throughout the country was supposed to create an emotional attachment to the nation by recalling great events and evoking heroes, such as Clovis, Charlemagne, Saint Louis, Joan of Arc, Louis XIV and Napoleon. According to Dimitri Casali, the new schoolbooks "are trying to make people forget that France is the eldest daughter of the Church, they want to erase France's Christian roots."[30] The victory of the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron in the presidential race in 2017 has introduced an ambiguous narrative that combines patriotic history with the recognition of crimes. The history taught of the nation was first of all a patriotic history until the 1960s: France must be loved by learning about its glorious events and heroes because the historical destiny of this nation for centuries has been to accomplish universal human progress. Since the end of the nineteenth century and the definitive establishment of a republican regime in France, the school institution has been invested with a major civic role: educating all young people to become French citizens. [Extracted from the article]

Rediscovery of State "Roots" As Anthony Smith explains, claiming antiquity, or an early, first, and uninterrupted continuous presence in the area inhabited by members of the nation is one of the key components of nationhood myths.[7] In the post-Yugoslav region, this largely meant "rediscovering" an ancient past, along with emphasising the "golden era" of the nation. Our analysis below thus focuses primarily on nationalizing memory at the official (state) level, though we also comment on the role of non-state actors and international processes in supporting or opposing state memory politics, as well as their manifestation in popular culture. While the role of the state is still most important in establishing hegemonic narratives of the nation, other non-state actors actively participate in promoting or opposing these narratives, while international processes such as Europeanisation and the ICTY proceedings importantly affect state memory politics. The post-Yugoslav region is frequently taken as a textbook example of how states can harness the past as a tool for the needs of the present. [Extracted from the article]

Instead, nostalgia for the Soviet past was purposefully spread by state-controlled television and other media.[8] In the Baltic States, by way of contrast, the post-communist democratic transition was initiated and sustained not only in memoirs but also through the vigorous exercise of newly established institutions of transitional and retrospective justice.[9] The Baltic States emerged as leaders in the region on the question of prosecuting communist-era crimes. 4 Lauri Mälksoo, I Illegal Annexation and State Continuity: The Case of the Incorporation of the Baltic States by the USSR: A Study of the Tension between Normativity and Power in International Law i (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2003). When independence was restored in 1991, three Lithuanian legations (in Washington, London, and the Vatican), one Latvian (in Washington) and one Estonian legation (in New York) returned to the Baltics physically to transfer relicts of the pre-1940 constitutional order to the newly established constitutional bodies.[55] Conclusion Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014 had a profound impact on the societies of the Baltic States, triggering a rise in paramilitarism and the securitization of memory. Indeed, this approach is a continuation of a process that began earlier, when in 1999 the Lithuanian parliament enacted into law a document signed by anti-Soviet partisan leaders in 1949, which declared that the Council of the Movement of the Struggle for Freedom of Lithuania "constituted the supreme political and military structure ... and was the sole legal authority within the territory of occupied Lithuania."[36] Commemoration of the post-war struggle became more prevalent in 2009, a year after Russia invaded Georgia and seized some of its territory. [Extracted from the article]

First, by supporting the United Community of Hungarian Israelites, a small, orthodox organization with a large international network, the government created an authentic, unquestionably Jewish looking representation of Jews in Hungary: men with long beards, black coats, and hats where the large majority of Jews, opposing the government's policies are assimilated. Therefore, the Holocaust narrative did not move from the position that there is one and only truth and did not acknowledge that "truth continue(s) to be a social process that is theoretically mediated."[22] How did the previous truth regime contribute to the post-truth of illiberal memory politics? In addition, the government's politics of memory incorporated a new victim group in the Holocaust narrative: the Romani. In June 2021, the mayor of the small Hungarian village of Hajdúbagos unveiled the statue of Admiral Horthy, praising him as a democrat who "fought equally against communism and fascism.". [Extracted from the article]

In November 2006, a special law approved the status of the Holodomor as a genocide against the Ukrainian people and public denial of the Holodomor was deemed illegal.[12] Since then, the legislature has undertaken thirteen attempts to criminalize public denial of Holodomor as such or as a genocide[13] (all of them failed, however). The Great Famine of 1932-33 (called Holodomor or "murder by hunger") and the Holocaust both occurred on the territory of contemporary Ukraine in the 1930s-40s. Holodomor and the Holocaust on the Ukrainian Memory Map Since the mid-1980s, Holodomor has evolved from a taboo topic to an all-national sacral symbol and one of the constituting national historical myths. Needless to say, the recognition of Holodomor as genocide by Israel is a matter of special importance - while Israeli politicians and statespersons, readily recognize Holodomor as a tragedy and crime against humanity, they also see these claims as a challenge to the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. [Extracted from the article]

In Hungary, as Andrea Pet"o relates, the liberal Central European University was driven out (now in Vienna) and the Academy of Sciences brought under state control. Even more dramatically, as Seda Altug and Tanika Sarkar show, Turkish academics have been arrested or fled abroad, while in India universities are gradually succumbing to state influence, if not control, by the politicization of leadership appointments. Even in Germany, state education ministries interfere in professorial appointments if the candidates are suspected of supporting the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which the Federal parliament proscribed with a resolution in 2019, turning the persecution of Palestine advocacy into a state ideology. [Extracted from the article]

This reflection article scrutinizes the mnemonic confluence and entanglements of the triple victimhood- the Holocaust, the crimes of colonialism, and Stalinist terror- on a global scale. The thaw of frozen memories in the post-Cold War era released the oppressed memories of Stalinist terror and Nazi collaboration in Eastern Europe. In the tri-continent of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the fall of communism also signalled the release of suppressed memories of the atrocities perpetrated by colonial powers. The mnemonic confluence of the triple victimhood, often with the Holocaust as a memory template, merged the divided memory space of the bipolar Cold War system into a single global memory formation. This essay will place the temporal focus on the post-Cold War era with its spatial dimension of the global memory space. Against the model of the cosmopolitanization of the Holocaust, Jie-Hyun Lim argues for the non-hierarchical comparability of the triple vicimhood, exploring global memory formation from the postcolonial perspective. He concludes this essay by suggesting the "critical relativization" and "radical juxtaposition" as ways of both de-hegemonizing and de-territorializing historical memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Suharto New Order regime and Indonesia’s transition to democracy in 1998, the country has struggled to address past serious human rights violations, in particular the 1965–66 anti-communist violence. Half a million members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) and its mass organizations were killed and hundreds of thousands were detained, most without trial. Although these individuals seem to have the clearest claims to victimhood, they still cannot easily gain such recognition, facing opposition from the military and representatives of civilian organizations implicated in the violence. The contested nature of the status of victim, and in particular how to accommodate claims from those who were less central to the experience of political persecution but who nonetheless suffered as part of the government and military’s anti-communist strategy, is the subject of this article. Drawing on scholarly literature on victims, victimhood and collective memory, I analyse a case study of a group of villagers in south Blitar, East Java and how their being implicated in providing support for leftist fugitives in that area in 1966–68 has influenced how they are perceived by society. Representations of this group of villagers by the military and government have resulted in the rise of a collective victimhood across generations, but a victimhood that nonetheless remains striated by victim hierarchies and difficulties in identifying as victim. As a result of these factors, this complex victim group has, by and large, been excluded by mainstream transitional justice processes, except for limited efforts by two small non-government organizations in the local area, discussed in this article. The resurgence of anti-communism since the election of President Joko Widodo, however, creates new difficulties for the victims and these organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I explore the slow development of a national debate in Canada about genocide in the Indian residential schools, which I compare to earlier ‘history wars’ in Australia and the United States. In the first section I begin with a brief introduction to the history of the IRS system and some of its legacies, as well as attempts at redress. These include financial compensation through the 2006 IRS Settlement Agreement, an official apology and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which has been a nodal point for articulating claims of genocide. I follow this in the second section with an analysis of the history wars in the United States and Australia over indigenous genocide, before engaging in the third section with debates about genocide in Canada. Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2009, the Romanian government unveiled a $7.4 million Holocaust memorial to commemorate over 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma who died as victims of the Ion Antonescu regime. Located in central Bucharest, the monument is part of a national agenda, outlined by an international commission, to study the crimes of the Holocaust in Romania and to help the country come to terms with historical atrocities. Under communism and in the early post-communist period, the Romanian state denied its role in the Holocaust. In this article, we explore the representation of the Holocaust and, in particular, Roma victims in the dominant historical narrative and the Holocaust memorial. We delve into discourses around this monument, which feed into a larger dialogue of victim recognition and contested national narratives about the Holocaust. We highlight the construction and contestation of the Holocaust memorial, considering in particular the paradox of Roma victims and suggesting that Roma are simultaneously represented, unrepresented and misrepresented in the historical story and memorial of the Holocaust in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Valley of the Fallen in Spain as both a site of memory and dismemory. The monument at Cuelgamuros was constructed as a burial site for the Francoist fallen and the commemoration of their victory between 1940 and 1958 with the help of forced labour, consisting of thousands of Republican prisoners. Not only did many of these prisoners suffer serious injuries or death, but, in addition, thousands of Republican remains were exhumed from mass graves throughout the country, transferred and anonymously interred at the Valley in 1959 over and above the authorized burial of Francoist bodies. The destruction of the mass graves in the process, as well as the transfer of the bodies, was instrumental in disguising committed atrocities, and must be viewed as an attempted ‘mnemocide’ of the Republicans. The interment of dictator Francisco Franco's remains in 1975 at the basilica of the Valley certainly highlights the contested nature of this memory site. In this discussion, it will be argued that the Valley of the Fallen represents a site with blurred distinctions between a mass grave, a monument and an unacknowledged site of suffering for Republican prisoners, whose memories and stories continue to be silenced and unacknowledged at the site. The article will focus on the ‘dissonant heritage’ of the Valley, which has become a focal point of controversies and debates in recent years. It will further be argued that the unacknowledged ‘heritage of violence’ of the Valley has transformed the site into a contestedlieu de mémoire, and that debates about and clashes at the Valley of the Fallen reflect conflicts rooted in the past dictatorship and still existing in contemporary Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Britain is a post-genocidal state, although it (not surprisingly) has no official means for the memorialization of its colonial genocides. Britain cannot, however, be simply considered amnesiac about its genocidal past, which it has informally memorialized across various cultural genres. This article explores this observation through a case study of the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous Tasmanians has been remembered and indeed memorialized. Accounts of the genocide of Indigenous Tasmanians have been a consistent feature of British museum, literary and academic culture since the 1830s. As such, British engagement with genocide in Tasmania offers an interesting example of how genocide can be incorporated into national narratives that rely on neither victimhood nor denial. This is a particularly appropriate case study because Indigenous Tasmanians were universally represented as victims of a British ‘extermination’ in the metropole from the outset. Travellers wrote home with tales of violence from the 1820s, and Indigenous Tasmanian communities were constructed as a memory of the stone age from this point onwards. The decline of the Indigenous population appeared in diverse media: in fine art, in parliament and in print, often as a means to celebrate British sophistication and humanity. This article will offer an analysis of all of these colonial discourses, and argue that these enduring memories speak to a stable imperial identity in Britain which was, and continues to be, strengthened rather than undermined or disrupted by the allegation of genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses many topics that appear in this issue of the Journal of Genocide Research. It concentrates on the issues of colonial violence, the killings during the decolonization war and on the memories of violence in Indonesia and the Netherlands. It emphasizes the genocidal quality of colonial murderousness. It is argued that many colonial wars had strong genocidal overtones. The colonial situation was favourable to the deployment of extreme violence against indigenous people. Despite emerging humanitarian concerns in Western societies, colonial violence remained by and large free of their influence. This stretched as far as the war of decolonization, an extremely violent episode that defies clear characterization, but which fomented genocidal and other kinds of extreme violence from various contenders. Lastly, the article argues that the neglect of colonial violence in postwar memories in Indonesia and the Netherlands was stimulated by the special character of colonial cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article addresses cultural memory in the Netherlands and Indonesia about mass violence committed during Dutch colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In both cases it questions the conception, expressed by various observers of both countries, that colonial violence has been forgotten in the sense that there are no traces of it left in the public sphere. In the case of the Netherlands, it is argued that colonial violence is again and again experienced as ‘absent’ because of issues with what I will call its ‘memorability’: the degree to which a past is memorable, easy to remember within certain frames of remembrance. Using Ann Laura Stoler's notion of ‘cultural aphasia’, which indicates a lack of language in a culture to address certain issues, I argue that traces of colonial violence are widely present in the Netherlands, but that there is a difficulty to give them a meaning within a national framework. With this analysis, I depart from an intentionalist perspective on cultural memory in which there are specific groups in society that through conspiracies create a cover-up of colonialism, and I want to show that in fact the victims of Dutch colonialism are not memorable within the mnemonic community of the Netherlands because dominant discourses do not produce them as belonging to Dutch national history. In the Indonesian case, with a special focus on Aceh, it is argued that far from being absent, memory of colonial violence is highly contested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]