New constellations of mnemonic wars: An introduction

Abstract

This special issue titled Mnemonic Wars: New Constellations has two objectives. First, it maps some of the current memory conflicts in different parts of the world, focusing on their topics and novel political, cultural and social constellations. Second, the issue problematizes how the different currents of revitalized national politics and globalization processes influence and sometimes even trigger memory wars. Who are the contemporary memory agents fostering confrontational memory politics? What tools, media and practices do they use to promote their interpretations of the past? How are these memory wars being played out internationally? In what ways do global developments, such as the spread of social media, the emergence of transnational memory politics or the establishment of transnational networks of memory activists, influence today’s memory conflicts? Finally, how do these discursive struggles translate into real-life conflicts? In their introductory article, the guest editors discern between the older and more recent approaches to research on memory conflicts and set the conceptual agenda for the entire issue.

Mnemonic conflicts have been among the central issues of memory studies ever since the emergence of our discipline. Their class, gender, generational, ethnic and national dimensions have been thoroughly described. And yet, despite the countless publications about conflicted, contested, competitive or counter memories, many questions are still open. As memory scholars, we continue our research on the topic; we identify new sources of mnemonic wars, describe their content, deconstruct their mechanisms and try to predict their consequences. The task seems endless because ‘the result of memory conflicts is not less memory but more’, as Michael Rothberg (2011: 523) states. Analysing mnemonic wars, as we observe them today, turns out to be an even greater challenge due to their new frameworks: current mnemonic wars take place on a global stage and circulate by means of digital media, which spreads information enormously fast. This unprecedented transnational acceleration was clearly visible in the course of the #MeToo debates that exposed similar patterns of gendered memories in many countries (Altınay and Pető, 2018). Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in the United States, resulted in the contestation of ‘toxic monuments’ (Rigney, 2022) all over the globe. We have discussed those issues at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association, ‘Convergences’ (Warsaw, July 2021), organized in a virtual space due to the covid pandemic. This special issue draws on that meeting but also addresses the terrible events of the following months.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine on 24 February 2022 showed once again that mnemonic wars reach beyond the symbolic sphere and may result in physical violence and military conflicts. A quote from Vladimir Putin’s (2022) 21 February TV address makes the connection clear:

So, I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia. This process started practically right after the 1917 revolution, and Lenin and his associates did it in a way that was extremely harsh on Russia – by separating, severing what is historically Russian land. Nobody asked the millions of people living there what they thought.

Putin denied Ukraine the right to national sovereignty, using fabricated historical arguments to try to justify and legitimize the planned aggression. What his speech demonstrates in a nutshell is characteristic not only of Russian politics but also of many other populist and right-wing movements all over the world. Populist actors wage mnemonic wars in order to strengthen national identity and unite societies vis-á-vis internal or external foes – as in the case of the president of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, who presents his political opponents, the protesters from 2020 to 2021, as heirs of former Belarussian Nazi-collaborators. Researchers had already observed this dangerous trend some years ago. However, only a few, including Timothy Snyder (2018) with his concept of the ‘politics of eternity’, seem to have fully realized the devastating impact of the evolving mnemonic conflicts.

At first glance, it may seem as if many of the mnemonic warmongers are reverting to old interpretative patterns. What we observe, though, is not a simple revival of nineteenth- and twentieth-century national(ist) historical narratives. New geopolitical and global constellations have a significant impact on how social memory evolves worldwide. These new constellations are affected by regional (re)integration processes, international and transnational political organizations, a globalized economy and accelerated human mobility. Transnational or inter-governmental organizations and international networks, such as the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) or the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), influence national memory cultures by promoting selected topics and forms of commemoration, and also by setting heritage protection or exhibition standards. However, while on a declarative level, local memory agents try to comply with transnational memory policies, at the same time they often pursue their particularistic agendas (Kroh, 2006; Wóycicka, 2022). This is also true for legal norms. As Danielle Lucksted argues in this issue, lawmakers often refer to international models when introducing new memory laws, but the actual aims of these legal regulations are nationally framed. Mass migration in combination with the activity of transnational organizations and international non-governmental organizations has also led to local conflicts being played out on the global stage, as described by Sachiyo Tsukamoto, among others, in this volume.

Mass tourism has been at least partly responsible for the transnational alignment of local narratives. Museums and memorials worldwide use a similar exhibition language to make their displays communicative to the international public (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2019; Sodaro, 2018; Williams, 2007). However, as observed by Lijliana Radonić (2021), the resemblance is often misleading as the actual content and message of their narratives may be very different. Sometimes the memory wars preceding the military conflicts are played out directly in museum spaces. This was the case, for instance, with the German–Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, where Putin’s increasingly aggressive memory politics hindered the work of the bilaterally composed Academic Advisory Committee and significantly influenced the final shape of the 2013 revised new permanent exhibition (Clarke and Wóycicka, 2019). Thus, what was originally conceived as a place of dialogue and reconciliation becomes yet another battleground.

Finally, digital media are among the crucial factors that differentiate current mnemonic wars from those fought previously (De Bruyn, 2010; Hoskins, 2017). Not only does the very structure of the World Wide Web and the networks of social media contribute to the transnational character of mnemonic wars, but they also add new mnemonic actors. Algorithms of digital platforms unfold their agency when it comes to prioritizing particular narratives and images of the past (Makhortykh and Bastian, 2022). On the one hand, digital media brings new opportunities for mass-scale education and the engagement of civil society; on the other hand, they are susceptible to manipulation and falsification – factors that contribute to the intensification of conflicts. As Ellen Rutten and Vera Zvereva state regarding web wars in post-socialist countries, ‘social-media discourse is influenced by old conflicts, whose memories are actualized and politically exploited in the present’ (Rutten and Zvereva, 2015: 5). Due to all these factors, research on mnemonic wars requires approaches that reach beyond national frames and at the same time remain sensitive to revitalized national conflicts.

The embattled field of memory

Particularly in the second wave of memory studies, scholars engaged in research on mnemonic conflicts in their national and ethnic frameworks (Cairns and Roe, 2003). In his monumental Les Lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora included a whole section about conflicts and divisions that were essential for the shaping of the French nation. What had been part of volume 3 in the original edition was shifted to the beginning of volume 1 in the English edition (Nora and Kritzman, 1996–1998), becoming thus constitutional for the understanding of the ‘realms of memory’. This scholarly interest in contested national memories came along with the collapse of the authoritarian regimes in Latin America, Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe, and the end of the Cold War – a process that opened space for discussing conflicts beyond the bipolar global division. Despite the prognosticated demise of nations, Jeffrey K. Olick (1998) stresses that national identities played a central role in mnemonic conflicts because ‘memory and the nation [had] a peculiar synergy’ (Olick, 1998: 378). In the second wave of memory studies, for which Nora’s work was pathbreaking, the nation was often considered the most important mnemonic community and collective memory was seen as the key concept explaining national identity.

Simultaneously with Olick but in a different geopolitical context, the Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki (1999) reflected on ‘inflamed historical reminiscences’ from the 1990s, specifically the then ‘hot’ debates taking place in conflicted post-Yugoslavian states and Northern Ireland. Jedlicki claims that different collective memories were not only articulations of ongoing conflicts but also their sources. Just one year later, the debate about Jan Tomasz Gross’ (2000) book Neighbours, about Catholic Poles murdering their Jewish neighbours in the town of Jedwabne in July 1941, broke out. It turned out to be the most durable conflict in post-1989 Poland. Just as Jedlicki had predicted, the different views on the role of the Poles during the Holocaust were more than just an expression of contradictory memories; they triggered further conflicts, many of which are still ongoing (Kończal, 2022). Almost 25 years later, we still observe struggles that arise from different views on national identities, but they do so – as we stated above – in an increasingly global context, often preceding and even triggering physical violence and military conflicts – a phenomenon observed not only in contemporary Ukraine but also in Israel and Palestine, former Yugoslavia, or East Africa, among many other places.

Research on ‘mnemonic conflicts’ and ‘contested memories’ has continued in the twenty-first century, most intensively during the last decade. Although general definitions of ‘conflicted’ or ‘contested’ memories are hardly available, scholars tend to focus on divergent interpretations of the past articulated in contradictory narratives, rhetorics, representations and policies. The majority of mnemonic conflicts that have been analysed so far took place in mediatized spaces, be it political debates, journalistic discussions, museum galleries, artistic actions, legal disputes or even trials. Using the example of a ‘discursive struggle’ for the foundation of the Leistikowstraße Memorial in Potsdam, the former prison of the Soviet secret service in Germany, David Clarke argues that memory conflicts may be considered a specific form of ‘competing sets of interests’ (Clarke, 2017: 65) rooted in historical contexts. Innumerable research outputs are devoted to past-related conflicts within or between particular states, for instance, the French disputes about the Franco-Algerian war (McCormack, 2011), the legal trials of the supporters of the former dictatorship in Argentina (Kaiser, 2015), or the contested memories of the civil war in Spain (Faber, 2018). Most recently, much attention has been paid to the tensions within Ukrainian memory (Kassianov, 2022a) and those between Ukraine and Russia (Kassianov, 2022b). Another mnemonic conflict between states that has been internationally discussed in the recent years is that between Japan and China (Matteo, 2017), for example. Obviously, there are also conflicts which cannot be clearly positioned as internally national or international, as shown by, for instance, Kevin Platt’s (2020) work on Baltic–Russian memory conflicts in Latvia, or the burgeoning research on the conflicting Western and Eastern European realms of memory (e.g. Droit, 2007; Mälksoo, 2010, 2021).

Some authors go even further by using militant language. Yael Zerubavel speaks of ‘mnemonic battles (. . .) fought over the “correct” way to interpret the past’ (Zerubavel, 1996: 295). Jan Kubik and Michael Bernhard (2014) discuss fractured memory regimes shaped by ‘mnemonic warriors’ who, as they claim, draw a sharp distinction between ‘us’, ‘the guardians of the “true” version of the past, and ‘them’ – the prevaricators or opportunists who do not know or care about “proper” shape of collective memory’ (p. 17). They further argue that the different memory regimes ‘have different ramifications for the quality of democracy’ (Kubik and Bernhard, 2014: 28). Numerous other scholars rely on the play of words between ‘memory wars’ and ‘memory of war’ and the conflicts which they describe often relate to the interpretations of the history of World War II and the Holocaust (Mälksoo 2013; Stone, 2012). Recently, Dirk Moses (2022) approached the East European memory wars by employing another militant notion, namely ‘partisan history’ in which ‘contemporary nationalists imagine themselves to be partisans, weaponizing memory in fighting yesterday’s battles today’ (Moses, 2022: 104). This kind of language results in two understandings of conflicted memories. Either memory appears as a ‘battlefield’ itself (Cherviatsova, 2021) or it is used as a weapon in other battles: breaking the silence, usually to recollect past violence, fuels new struggles for and against various interpretations of the past. This mechanism turns out to be quite universal around the globe, as, for example, Victor Igreja’s study on memory conflicts in post-civil war Mozambique has shown (Igreja, 2008). This notwithstanding, our focus on ‘mnemonic wars’ in this special issue does not aim at promoting the metaphor. Quite the contrary, we want to avoid abstraction and make clear that mnemonic conflicts often trigger and serve as a justification for physical violence and military aggression. It is not the term itself that we emphasize, but the gravity of the phenomenon.

Mnemonic wars in the global age

To understand the mechanisms and consequences of contemporary mnemonic wars, we need multidisciplinary approaches addressing the convergences of national contents and transnational dimensions. Astrid Erll famously propounded the opening of the ‘third phase of memory studies’ and called for turning attention away from studying national historical narratives and ‘towards mnemonic processes unfolding across and beyond cultures’ (Erll, 2011: 9). This ‘transcultural lens’ would also enhance ‘a better understanding of our own globalizing age, in which memory travels at high speed across, and increasingly beyond, boundaries’ (Erll, 2011: 16). Already a decade earlier, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2001, 2006) observed the emergence of a new ‘cosmopolitan memory’ in relation to the Holocaust and the recollection of other war crimes and crimes against humanity. This reflexive mode of remembering was rooted in the human rights discourse and rejected the old heroic narratives in favour of a more self-critical image of one’s community, in which attitudes towards persecuted minority groups became the ultimate measure of good and evil. Levy and Sznaider were among the first to highlight the influence of globalization processes on collective remembering. A few years later, Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (2010) wrote that ‘memory and the global have to be studied together, as it has become impossible to understand the trajectories of memory without a global frame of reference’ (p. 2). This linkage is now generally recognized (Bond et al., 2018; De Cesari and Rigney, 2014b; Jarausch and Lindenberger, 2011; Kończal and Moses, 2022; Lewis et al., 2022; Lim and Rosenhaft, 2021; Phillips and Reyes, 2011; Rothberg, 2009; Wüstenberg and Sierp, 2020).

Over the last years, researchers also looked for a more detailed examination of the actual impact of globalization on the processes of remembrance. Some consider the thesis of The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age as too optimistic and claim that the book was more programatic than analytical (Berger and Kansteiner, 2021; Macdonald, 2013). The researchers of the heritage and museum sector express their doubts about the homogenizing effect of globalization on cultural memory. Sharon Macdonald (2013) observed in Europe ‘a dynamic of potentially cosmopolitan developments that are sometimes appropriated to other ends or bump up against limits and other agendas in practice’ (p. 215). In their programme article, inspired by Chantal Mouffe (2012), Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen (2016) argue that the cosmopolitan mode of remembering ‘far from having superseded the antagonistic mode associated with “first modernity” in the European context, has proved unable to prevent the rise of, and is being increasingly challenged by, new antagonistic collective memories constructed by populist neo-nationalist movements’ (pp. 390–391, see also: Cento Bull et al., 2021). In many cases, the confrontation with transnational discourses reinforces nationalistic master narratives rather than undermines them (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014a: 6; Eder, 2017: 12). Nonetheless, it is clear that ‘even where they advance a national(ist) agenda, memory politics tend to be intrinsically globally oriented’ (Bond et al., 2018: 4).

Memory scholars postulate that beyond looking at how specific historical themes and tropes ‘travel’ through different countries and across different media, researchers should take a closer look at how memory is being construed internationally and analyse the ‘transnational structures, agents and practices that shape local, national or transnational “realms of memory”’ (Sierp and Wüstenberg, 2015: 223). Overall, while memory scholars do not yet fully understand the outcomes of the interplay between the global and the local, they tend to emphasize their complexities and agree that recent changes have not led to an overall alignment of local narratives. As already formulated by Erll (2011),

[. . .] not every worldwide available object of remembrance will be turned into a cosmopolitan, an ethical, or an empathetic memory. [. . .] The global circulation of mnemonic media, such as movies, may indeed effect a change of perspective in viewers from other parts of the world, lead to empathy, and trans-ethnic solidarity. But there is of course also the option of misuses, the hijacking, or distortion of transcultural memory [. . .]. (p. 15)

Further research on those issues is needed, especially with regard to the processes leading to the emergence of new memory wars. Thus, the aim of this special issue of Memory Studies is first, to map some of the current mnemonic wars in different parts of the world, focusing on their topics and novel political, cultural and social constellations. Second, the special issue problematizes how the different currents of the globalization process influence and sometimes even trigger these dangerous developments. Who are the contemporary memory agents fostering confrontational memory politics? What tools, media and practices do they use to promote their interpretations of the past? How are these memory wars being played out internationally? In what ways do global developments, such as the spread of mass and social media, the emergence of transnational memory politics or the establishment of global networks of memory activists, influence today’s memory conflicts? Finally, how do these discursive struggles translate into real-life conflicts?

The overview of the issue

The FORUM on the mnemonic consequences of the Russian aggression against Ukraine sets the tone of this special issue. Six scholars with profound expertise in post-Soviet memory studies point to the conceptual challenges and ethical risks of the current situation that conflates cultural and real wars. Even though the perspectives of Nelly Bekus, Mikhal Dekel, Gueorgui Kassianov, Bartłomiej Krzysztan, Boris Noordenbos and Roma Sendyka differ when it comes to conceptualizing the reverberations of the war for memory studies, they all signal the gravity of this turning point for regional and global history and memory.

PART ONE of the issue presents the GLOBAL HOTSPOTS of current mnemonic wars. They take place in different parts of the world, in real and virtual space; they are shaped by diverse actors and by various media. And yet, they all represent grand themes of memory studies: genocide, colonialism, sexual violence, Nazism/Fascism and Communism. Five articles in this section offer fresh insights on how those topics feature in new mnemonic constellations. Michael Rothberg’s opening essay gives an account of the public intellectuals’ debate (Historikerstreit 2.0), in which the author has been personally involved. The discussion alludes to the German historians’ debate from the mid- and late 1980s. At the time, conservative historians, including Ernst Nolte, argued against the unique character of the Holocaust by comparing it to Soviet crimes and depicting Nazi crimes as a response to Stalinist atrocities. In his response, philosopher Jürgen Habermas, supported by several key liberal historians, accused Nolte of historical revisionism and of whitewashing German guilt. The 1980s debate contributed to the grounding of the concept that the Holocaust had been a ‘rupture’ in German history. The Historikerstreit organized thus the German public memory, and by extension the global cosmopolitan memory, around the Holocaust as a unique event. However, in recent years, the view on the singularity of the Holocaust has been challenged by a new generation of liberally and left-leaning historians and public intellectuals who are well-versed in global colonial history and memory studies. By analysing the migrant engagement with the Holocaust in today’s Germany, Rothberg offers a perspective that neither contradicts the specificity of the Holocaust nor elevates it to the status of a non-relational event.

Another central memory event reappearing in novel constellations is the Holodomor, the famine that killed several millions of inhabitants of Ukraine in 1932–1933. Mykola Makhortykh, Aleksandra Urman and Roberto Ulloa enumerate key disagreements around the Holodomor: the number of victims, its comparability with other atrocities and its interpretation (whether it was ‘only’ a crime inspired by the Soviet leadership, a genocide, or a ‘Western lie’, as some denialists in Russia claim). Taking these disputes as a point of departure, they ask how various Internet search engines contribute to the circulation of those tropes and how they shape the Holodomor’s memory today. By emphasizing the Internet browsers’ agency in mnemonic wars and demonstrating how they fuel further these conflicts, the conclusion of this study offers a lesson reaching far beyond the wars around the Holodomor.

The denialist aspect of today’s memory wars is discussed by Sachiyo Tsukamoto in her article on the strategies of negation of sexual exploitation of enslaved Korean and Chinese women by Japanese military during World War II. The case of ‘comfort women’ has become the global lieu de mémoire of sexual violence. This commemorative process initiated by the network of memory activists has been recently challenged by ‘the counter-boomerang effect of transnational revisionism’. From the Japanese government to Japanese diaspora, various agents try to silence the memories of ‘comfort women’ on both the national and global stage, or depict them as voluntary prostitutes rather than the victims of war crime. Tsukamoto uncovers the range of strategies that the denialists use. Not only do they refuse to acknowledge the crimes in their ‘un-accountability politics’, but they turn the tables in their ‘counter-symbolic politics’ by accusing pro-comfort women side of ‘anti-Japanese racism’, and target various institutions to prevent them from disseminating unwanted comfort women memories. This well-documented case study might serve as a blueprint for research on the strategies of other networks of denalists across the globe.

The agency of the far-right is also a topic of the contribution by Ned Richardson-Little, Samuel Merrill and Leah Arlaud. The authors show how the German far-right party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) has skilfully used social media, and particularly Twitter, in its memory politics challenging Germany’s democratic consensus on commemorating the country’s Nazi past. Recent AfD campaigns have revolved around the 1953 Uprising in the German Democratic Republic that was crushed by Soviet military force, the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), the fall of the Wall (1989) and Germany’s reunification (1990). By referring to these events, the AfD overshadows the crimes of the Nazi regime and the narrative of the German guilt with the story of the German national suffering and glory. The article not only shows that the AfD uses social media to radically revise the country’s mnemonic regime, but it more broadly points to the general relevance of Twitter as a medium of contemporary memory wars.

In the final article of this section, Amy Sodaro discusses one of the newest memorial museums and educational centres in the United States. Greenwood Rising tells the story of the 1921 massacre of several hundred African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the hands of their white neighbours. By reflecting on the connections between the past and present racism in the United States, the centre contributes to undermining the ‘triumphalist narratives of racial progress that suggest violence and oppression are a thing of the past’. Sodaro draws attention to the fact that the display is in line with global trends of presenting racism and slavery in memorial museums. And yet despite its well-done exhibition and critical narrative challenging the American myths, Greenwood Rising has been controversial among Tulsa’s African American residents. The museum is seen as a symbolic gesture and an elite project insulated from the actual needs of the Black community. By relating the unsatisfied demands for material reparations from victims of the massacre and their descendants, the case study demonstrates the limits of museal ways of confronting historical crimes, racism and their legacies in the form of structural violence in the present.

PART TWO of the special issue is devoted to NOVEL APPROACHES that have emerged from recent attempts to de-centre memory studies after decades of the hegemony of English, French and German topics and theories. This research movement empowers the variety of emic, local and regional ways of conceptualizing, narrating and representing memory phenomena (e.g. Collins et al., 2020; Kończal and Wawrzyniak, 2018; Lim, 2022). Three articles in this section add to this trend by proposing theoretical approaches to mnemonic wars that stem from their authors’ expertise in the Caribbean, Middle East, South Africa and Eastern European memories.

Stefan Norgaard and Miranda Meyer introduce the concept of ‘mnemonic land wars’ as a way of playing out past and current ethnic, religious or social conflicts in space. As examples of such mnemonic wars on the ground, they discuss the case of the ‘bantustans’ (denoting colonial political and territorial segregation originating in the apartheid South Africa) and the case of the ‘Lebanonization’ (spatial division along ethnosectarian lines). They conceive both terms as chronotopes organizing time and space in political discourses. Norgaard and Meyer describe how the ongoing conflicts and inequalities shape the landscape of both countries and how their inhabitants try to challenge them by spatial interventions. Though the two cases each have their specifics, the frequent references made to ‘bantustans’ and ‘Lebanonization’ elsewhere show that this ‘spatial mode of mnemonic war in which struggles over the past are also struggles over land’ has wider relevance and can be traced in other historical and geographical contexts as well.

In their article on the memory wars and parallel polis, Adam Kola, Agata Domachowska, Łukasz Gemziak and Francesco Trupia advocate the use of the notion of ‘anti-politics’ pioneered by Eastern European anti-communist democratic dissidents in the 1980s. Under authoritarian constraints of corrupt regimes, anti-politics was conceived as a weapon by nonconformist intellectuals who narrated its meanings in the terms of civil society, engagement, responsibility and the common good. From the perspective of ‘anti-politics’ and its sister term, ‘parallel polis’, the authors discuss current memory wars around gender and minorities in Eastern Europe. They illustrate their point with two case studies. The first one shows a parallel polis organized around a monument dedicated to thousands of Kosovo Albanian women who were victims of mass rape under Slobodan Milošević’s regime and during the 1998–1999 Kosovo War. The other shows the commemoration of the victims of the Roma genocide parallel to the official commemorations of the Holocaust in the Czech Republic and draws connections with the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Finally, Jarula Wegner proposes a critical perspective on memory constellations inspired by a close reading of Michael Anthony’s novella King of the Masquerade, which illustrates the memory of the steelpan and oblivion of other musical instruments in Trinidad and Tobago. Wegner’s case study demonstrates the making of postcolonial nationalist memory that suppresses the histories of social diversity and transcultural relations in the past. Using the steelpan as an example, the author develops the notion of ‘memory constellations’ as a tool for bottom-up tracing of the construction of cultural memories within their wider historical and contemporary contexts. By combining the ideas of literature as a medium of memory and of literature as a representation of memory, Wegner reveals further a critique of particular mnemonic formations.

The authors of the articles in PART THREE of this issue focus on POLITICAL DISCOURSES of memory as key tools of both conflict and reconciliation on national and transnational scale. The contributions in this part draw new connections between the policy dimension of memory wars, law-making, transitional justice and economy. Sarah Dybris McQuaid discusses the phenomena of ‘policyscapes’ and ‘memoryscapes’ to show their interconnections and how their ongoing dynamics reshape the ways of interpreting terrorism and victimhood in the United Kingdom. McQuaid illustrates her point with an example of unionist politicians from Northern Ireland intervening in the debates on the Libyan Asset Freeze Bill in the UK Houses of Parliament. She points out that by integrating different policies and memory narratives, unionists are able to seize the opportunity and overcome the limitations of the Peace Agreement (1998) to put forward a particular interpretation of conflict in Northern Ireland. This enables them to reframe the history of Northern Ireland in relation to the contemporary war on terrorism in transnational space. Overall, the case study documents how the convergence of memoryscape and policyscape recontextualizessome of the elements of the past conflicts by reorganizing their temporalities and geographies of reference.

The circulation, dissemination and reorganization of legal norms in memory laws across Europe is the focus of Danielle Lucksted’s contribution. The author uses the lens of the sociological theory of isomorphism to show that the expanding memory laws allude to a shared global norm of protection of the dignity of victims and prevention of future crimes, but they are also shaped by the specificities of memory politics of nation-states. Lucksted proposes three categories of diffusion of memory laws: mimetic isomorphism across the states, normative isomorphism to comply with international norms and maintain legitimate standing, and coercive isomorphism in direct response to external pressure. In this light, she discusses the recent legal cases from Poland and Russia to exemplify her point of how the Holocaust memory and generally cosmopolitan paradigm of human rights and victim protection become manipulated in nationalist narratives.

The last two contributions of this section deal with memory conflicts entangled in violent political transitions in Southeastern Europe and Latin America. Both articles discuss authoritarian and neoliberal settings in which those transitions took place. Gal Kirn’s argument is predominantly theoretical. He revisits post-socialist transformation studies, nationalism studies and memory studies with Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. He argues that against the ruins of the post-Yugoslavian state economy, public sector, social infrastructure and the dispossession of the working class, the accumulation of assets by crony capitalism was facilitated by the primitive accumulation of nationalist memory. The article shows how an ethnocentric mnemonic war has negated the socialist and antifascist interpretation of history and how seemingly peaceful narratives of ‘national reconciliation’ relating to the memory of World War II have rehabilitated fascism and contributed to the framing of the ethnic wars of the 1990s. In turn, María Eugenia Ulfe and Ximena Málaga Sabogal provide a thoroughly documented ethnographic study of the ambiguities of transitional justice and social programmes of assistance to victims of mass violence in Peru. They reveal how such programmes become entangled in political struggles and how they are blind to certain categories of victims. The article recapitulates a traumatic life story of an orphaned daughter of one of the leaders of Shining Path, a terrorist communist guerilla, whose parents, grandparents and other relatives were killed in revenge for brutal acts of violence by the Shining Path. The article adds to the burgeoning literature on how redress and reparation programmes remain incomplete tools for settling accounts with the past.

PART FOUR discusses the connections between VERNACULAR MEMORIES and mnemonic wars. The social psychologists Adrian Wójcik and Maria Lewicka present the results of their research based on a series of surveys conducted in different locations in Poland. On this basis, they describe what they call ‘lay theories of history’, namely the ways in which common people understand history and conceptualize the difference between history and memory. The authors discern three divergent views of history: realistic, instrumental and relativistic. While the realistic theory is positively correlated with patriotism and openness to criticism of one’s own group’s history, the instrumental perception of history is positively related to nationalistic and narcissistic group identity. Wójcik and Lewicka argue that the instrumental approach to history is a particularly good breeding ground for populist movements which use the past as a tool for mobilizing political support by bolstering national pride and unifying societies against alleged foes. Considering the crucial role history plays in populist, right-wing, and nationalistic policy it may seem paradoxical that proponents of the instrumental theory show the least interest in the past and are the most focused on the present and future.

Next, cultural memory scholars Fedja Wierød Borčak and Tea Sindbæk Andersen discuss the reception of Bosnian émigré war literature in Sarajevo and Banja Luka where they have organized focus group discussions with lay readers of literary texts. Although reactions to these texts differed between the inhabitants of the two cities, the study reveals some commonalities in the reflection on war literature. It shows that regardless of their national identities, readers tend to sympathize with the human rights aspects of the war such as the fate of children, families or migrants. Thus, the authors argue for the existence of a ‘memorial grey zone’ that transcends the conflicts in the memory politics in Bosnia and where ‘alternative memory positions’ can be articulated.

Finally, new media scholar Martin Tschiggerl discusses conflicts among digital games players on how to represent the past. He argues that digital conflicts become particularly intense when they are filtered by current memory struggles. The games’ interactivity and immersive character makes them a particularly interesting medium of struggles for mnemonic hegemony, regardless of the historical events under discussion. Games set in the Middle Ages, modernity or the twentieth century may trigger similarly heated discussions. What they have in common are allusions to current discourses. Tschiggerl shows, among others, that gender and race are among key factors in mnemonic wars fought by the players, even if the games’ narratives do not necessarily suggest these topics. The discourses from the players’ realities frame, thus, the interpretations of history as suggested in the games.

Digital vernacular memory is also the topic of the last article in the issue, authored by Taylor Annabell, the winner of the MSA Best Paper Award 2021. Similar to Tschiggerl’s contribution, the paper deals with discussions triggered by digital contents. Annabell focuses on the conceptualization of memory by young and female Instagram users who often refer to it as ‘memz’. Memory turns out to be a highly performative and future-oriented concept. For Annabell’s interviewees, memory is personal, affective and experience-oriented – elements that were already associated with memory in pre-digital times. What is new in the digital environment, however, is the conscious shaping of mnemonic moments for others rather than for the remembering individuals themselves.

Conclusion

When we as editors conceived this Special Issue in late summer 2021, our general impression – based on the programme of the Fifth Annual MSA Conference Warsaw – was that the issue of memory conflicts and their new global constellations has emerged as one of the central topics of memory studies. However, not even in our worst nightmares would we have imagined how vital this issue would become in the coming months. Although the current war in Ukraine, its victims, the suffering and destruction it causes and its broader geopolitical implications force us to focus more on the present than the past, we think that in the long run a deeper reflection on the interrelation between mnemonic conflicts, physical violence and military aggression can help us to better face future challenges. In putting together this issue we tried not only to cover a widegeographical and thematic scope but also to present different perspectives and methodological approaches to ‘mnemonic wars’. The final selection is by no means complete, but we hope that this issue at least demonstrates what a broad and relevant topic it is today.