Redressing violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

Politics of memory: a conceptual introduction

“…Ever since the "memory boom" hit the study of Politics and International Relations in the 2000s, a number of edited volumes, monographs and advanced general readers have been published on the productive meeting points between memory and politics. 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...…”