Memory Politics After Conflict
The Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI) invites you to a seminar on memory, power and reconciliation after conflict. In societies emerging from conflict, political actors as well as ordinary citizens face the question of how the violent past is to be remembered.
Memory politics is used to both legitimate and contest claims to power. What we choose to remember and what to forget determines how we understand the present and how we form decisions for the future. What narratives are public? What is silenced? Can commemoration strengthen peace and reconciliation?
The seminar will highlight:
- South Africa’s struggle with its apartheid past and the question of how the commemoration of violence can do justice to all its victims.
- How the rememberance of Japan’s aggressive war in Asia influences the relationship between Japan and China.
- How remembrance practices in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda are highly gendered, as men and women’s experiences of war crimes are remembered differently.
Participants:
Stefanie Kappler, Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies, Liverpool Hope University, U.K.
Karl Gustafsson, Research Fellow at UI
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, Research Fellow at UI
Hans Ruin, Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Director of the multidisciplinary research program on Time, Memory and Representation
Welcome!