Remembering genocide
7 April marked twenty years since the genocide in Rwanda. Commemorations will be held over the next hundred days, not only in Rwanda but also around the globe. In a recent article published in the journal Peacebuilding, Johanna Mannergren Selimovic examines commemoration practices at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda, as well as the Srebrenica-Potocˇari genocide memorial in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Memorials, as part of remembrance practices, have become increasingly important in coming to terms with the past in post-conflict societies. Research indicates that victims of violence believe that memorialisation is the second most valuable form of state reparations after financial compensation. Monuments, memorials and museums are seen as a visible and tangible type of redress and are often produced in a post-war space.
For influential politicians at national level, museums and monuments are important symbols that consolidate a new collective narrative. External actors involved in interventions for peacebuilding and transitional justice have embrased memorialisation as yet another object for engagement, and policymakers and experts in the post-conflict peacebuilding field stress the role commemoration practices play for social cohesion.
While external involvement is driven by a desire not to forget about the violent past, it is increasingly recognised that memorials are considered sites focus on the present, and the future; used both for mourning and for making politics. As Mannergren Selimovic analysis shows, rather than focusing on the past, memorials are enactments and embodiments of hegemonic power struggles at the convergence of memory and politics.
To understand how memorials may contribute to the building of sustainable peace and reconciliation means asking questions around why, how and by whom these sites of remembrance are used.
The article is available in full:
Making peace, making memory: peacebuilding and politics of remembrance at memorials of mass atrocities