Landscape after genocide

Abstract

The March of Peace (Marš mira) is a 63-mile, 3-day walk through eastern Bosnia organised in memory of the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and traces in reverse a death march. Marchers take a trail from Nezuk, stopping at mass graves found along the way, arriving at the memorial cemetery in Potočari a day prior to the annual mass funeral for victims who have been recently exhumed. This article charts the journey from the death march to the peace march and asks the reader to assess the efficacy of embodied memory-work and the ethical responsibility to undertake – and responsibilities when undertaking – alternative memory-work in post-genocide landscapes and sites of mass murder, through a series of rhetorical shifts. A number of frames are enacted to challenge other more linear and conventional approaches, allowing the sociological and political productivity of engaging with post-genocide landscapes in a post-conflict state to emerge, referencing dissident forms of remembrance through the method of walking-with others while traversing this post-genocide landscape on foot. Travelling-with around 8,000 mourners, some of whom were survivors of the death march, the aim here is not to simply describe what is taking place; rather, the journey is undertaken in order to activate a space – a space within which I might engage with issues of landscape, conflict and memory in the context of their current discussion within cultural and political geography, genocide studies and memory studies, and more importantly to speak of genocide and a post-genocide landscape.

Remaining with the Khmer Rouge: Contemporary Cambodian Performances Addressing Genocide in a Post-genocide Era

“…The works analysed above appear at a threshold, where the past finally, perhaps, is loosening its grip, and expression can be about more than seeing individual lives as micro-historical documents of the Killing Fields. In suggesting this, I argue, as others have done, that we are never 'post-genocide' (Riding 2020), for the past is always present, behind and before us, but this selection of works points to a moment where the next generation perhaps takes not another step away, but a step sideways, not to deny history, but to express and create new, parallel histories for the future.…”

“…Such discussions circle around questions of absence and presence, on the need to tell, to evidence, to presence the violent past, with the impossibility of so doing. In these narratives even absences can 'speak' and work as an ethical form of response (Willis 2014;Larasati 2017;Riding 2020). However, the performances I discuss here consistently emphasise presence and persistence as a mode of the past remaining (both of the experience of the Khmer Rouge and of dance itself) but in ways that do not necessarily resort to the testimony-witnessing dialectic, rather "they contain something of the thing itself, but which are not the thing itself" (Reason 2006: 232 in Willis 2014.…”

The geographies of colonial infrastructures: Mobility, im/materiality, and politics on walking trails in the Middle East

“…For instance, John Wylie's (2005) oft‐cited account of walking a single day on the South West Coast Path to engage with conceptualisations of self and landscape was critiqued in a published exchange with Mark Blacksell for its lack of consideration of the ‘real‐politik of walking’ and a focus that ‘seems overly self‐centred and introspective’ (2005, p. 518). Since then, walking has been increasingly engaged with to explore politics, security, (post)colonialism, and militarism (Mason, 2020; Murphy, 2011; Paasche & Sidaway, 2021; Riding, 2020; Sidaway, 2009) and this includes attention to the infrastructures that accompany the walk. The politics of walking is also its ability to critically explore everyday spaces, how it is experienced differently because of class, gender, race, ethnicity, dis(ability) mobility, and its use as a narrative tool to understand issues of place, identity, and belonging (Middleton, 2010; O'Neill & Hubbard, 2010; Rose, 2020; Stanley, 2020).…”

Decolonising spaces of knowledge production: Mpala research centre in Laikipia County, Kenya

“…To expand: while the materiality of law (i.e. tenure) and fences effects control, so too do the ways that the land is conceived as landscapeor land as it is culturally rendered (Cosgrove, 1985;Riding, 2020) where the 20,000 hectares of Mpala become primarily (or even solely) a habitat of 'significant biodiversity'. As habitatfor charismatic fauna and 100s of species of birdsthe land-as-landscape can be figured as, to use Mpala's founding ethos, a 'living laboratory' 15 that provides 'a hub for experimental and manipulative research by visiting scientists and students … without the restrictions of a national park, allowing scientists to manipulate the environment and conduct landscape-level, controlled experiments'.…”