Echoes of Empire: The Present of the Past

Sèbe, Berny; Nicolaïdis, Kalypso; Maas, Gabrielle

doi:10.5040/9780755624270.0005

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…The range of the burgeoning literature on the subject matter is vast, covering the links between policies of truth and justice and the process of democratization (Barahona de Brito et al 2001), memory laws (Loytomäki 2014; Belavusau and Gliszczyńska-Grabias 2017; Koposov 2017), distinct practices and institutions of transitional justice (Lind 2008;Roht-Arriaza and Mariezcurrena 2006;Buckley-Zistel et al 2013;Pettai and Pettai 2014;Lu 2017), various memory regimes (Bernhard and Kubik 2014) and memory practices (Haskins 2015), forms of accountability (Steele 2013) and memorialization (Auchter 2014;Heath-Kelly 2016), the nexus between memory and trauma (Edkins 2003;Bell 2006;Resende and Budryte 2014;Lerner 2022), states' official narratives of the past (Dixon 2018), manifold ways of coming to terms with the past (Berger 2012;Bentley 2015;David 2020), and the politics of historiography (Finney 2011). The monumental role of Holocaust remembrance at various levels of politics (Levy and Sznaider 2006;Rothberg 2009;Subotić 2019;Radonić 2021;Moses 2021) and the specific regional memory-political dynamics in different parts of Europe (Müller 2002;Lebow et al 2006;Blacker et al 2013;Nicolaïdis and Sèbe 2014;Pakier and Wawrzyniak 2016;Törnquist-Plewa 2016;Dureinović 2019;Bachleitner 2021), Russia (Etkind 2013), East Asia (Kim 2015;Saito 2017;Shin and...…”

Section: When Memory Meets Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics of memory: a conceptual introduction

Mälksoo¹

2023

Handbook on the Politics of Memory

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Memory matters, for people and polities alike. Long considered a "soft" subject in the study of international relations, memory appears increasingly consequential in contemporary world politics. Vladimir Putin's rationale for Russia's full-on invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 drew on a rich brew of twisted "lessons of history", denying Ukraine's tradition of statehood, and calling for its "denazification" and "decommunization" in the same breath (Putin 2022b, 2022a). Russia's kinetic war against Ukraine was preceded by, and has run in parallel to, an intense "memory war", probing Ukraine's political subjectivity and sovereignty at various critical juncture points in the twentieth-century past (Fedor et al. 2017). In the meantime, statues and plaques commemorating historical figures complicit in colonialism and racism are being torn down in the former Western colonial metropoles, together with contesting the rose-tinted stories of empires that are sought to be decolonized along with their symbolic and material representations in the contemporary world. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has raged through the world during the period this book has been in preparation, has created its own politically charged practices of commemoration, (mis)recognition and veneration. These range from the ritual applauding of the medics at pre-agreed evening hours across Europe in the spring of 2020 to the use of the Star of David in the anti-vaxxer demonstrations as the pandemic evolved, attempting to draw parallels between the alleged contemporary and historical state violence towards the people.What does "memory" do, who "does" memory -and what is being done by politically utilizing memory -are the central concerns for the study of memory politics. This handbook tackles the multifaceted and polyphonic politics of memory head-on. It proceeds from the basic observation that collective memory -that is, the active remembering together as a political collective, as well as a reference to a set of collective representations and interpretations of the past -is a deeply political phenomenon. Collective or social memory is politically embedded, reflecting political visions, and enacting social and political worlds. Collective memory is constructed and constructive: it is socially shaped and politically productive. Dynamic and plural by nature, social memory is standardly subject to contestation, and thus prone to instrumentalization, institutionalization, securitization and, at times, outright weaponization by the state or particular groups of interest therein. Memory is an important political resource for its emotive power to mobilize due to its pertaining to the part of the past kept alive (Subotić and Steele 2020).

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Section: When Memory Meets Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics of memory: a conceptual introduction

Mälksoo¹

2023

Handbook on the Politics of Memory

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“…The EU has for over two decades been supporting democracy in third countries. But the positive impacts from this have been increasingly dampened inter alia by others' perception that such support reflects Europeans' sense of moral superiority inherited from the colonial pasts of some EU member states – a sense that explains in part a general lack of openness to non‐Western experiences, viewpoints and analytical mindsets (Acharya, 2014; Börzel and Zürn, 2020; Hurrel, 2017; Nicolaidis, 2020; Nicolaïdis et al, 2015; Nicolaïdis and Howse, 2002; Nouwen, 2022; Youngs, 2015). Our ambition therefore is to add to the introduction's conceptual framework the increasingly prominent decolonization agenda to show its resonance in the field of democracy.…”

Section: Conceptual Foundationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reversing the Gaze: Can the EU Import Democracy from Others?

Nicolaïdis

Youngs

2023

J of Common Market Studies

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For over two decades, the EU has used a wide range of policy instruments to support democratic reform in third countries under the assumption that the rest of the world must learn from Europeans. This one‐way democracy policy is out of tune with the times as political malaise spreads within the EU and as global geopolitics calls for genuine decolonial mindsets. In this contribution, we ask what it would take for the EU to reverse the democratic gaze. We argue that the EU could do more to open itself to the democratic innovations unfolding around the world where reformers have long been grappling with anti‐democratic playbooks. We distinguish between three relevant realms, namely, that of power‐sharing arrangements, democratic backsliding and regional mechanisms. We hope to offer a significant tweak to decolonization analysis and a political, normative supplement to this Special Issue's concern with outside influences on the EU.

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“…For example, scholars evoke echoes to trace the multiple ways in which defining events shape and are imagined in the present (Ross, 2002;Salem, 2020). While echoes may be employed more generally with reference to reverberations of the past in the present (Nicolaïdis et al, 2014), we use it more specifically to account for reverberating imaginaries and affects. These reverberating imaginaries and affects can inform particular dominant recountings of events, as well as the subterranean connections through which that which has been apparently erased and forgotten lives on (e.g.…”

Section: Afterlives: the Echoes And Aftermaths Of Colonialism In Irmentioning

confidence: 99%

The afterlives of state failure: echoes and aftermaths of colonialism

Lemay-Hébert,

Jerrems

2023

European Journal of International Relations

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This article offers a new perspective on the failed states agenda, and the reconfiguration of colonial discourse buttressing it, by theorising its afterlives. The concept of afterlives has mostly been discussed as a metaphor or in passing in the IR literature. Drawing from the post- and decolonial literature, we propose to define the concept simultaneously as echoes and aftermaths of the past. This conceptualisation of afterlives aims to contribute to the study of the persistence of colonial forms beyond notions of continuity and rupture. We develop the concept of afterlives through a discussion of the failed states agenda and its iterations. We discuss four specific iterations of the agenda: the genesis of the agenda in the decolonisation period; the consolidation of the agenda during the early 1990s; the crisis of the agenda and the rise of the resilience discussion; and finally the rise of the fragile city agenda as one of the afterlives of the failed states agenda. To illustrate our argument, we discuss two specific ‘fragments’ through which we can effectively grasp the echoes and aftermaths of coloniality: the pathologisation of fragile states and cities, operated through various twin figures (civilised/barbaric; strong/dysfunctional; resilient/vulnerable) and their practical repercussions; and the visualisation, mapping and colour-coding of fragile states and cities, exemplifying the durability and contradictions of the failed states agenda.

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Echoes of Empire: The Present of the Past

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Politics of memory: a conceptual introduction

Politics of memory: a conceptual introduction

Reversing the Gaze: Can the EU Import Democracy from Others?

The afterlives of state failure: echoes and aftermaths of colonialism

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