1st Edition

Localising Memory in Transitional Justice The Dynamics and Informal Practices of Memorialisation after Mass Violence and Dictatorship

    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    This collection adds to the critical transitional justice scholarship that calls for “transitional justice from below” and that makes visible the complex and oftentimes troubled entanglements between justice endeavours, locality, and memory-making. Broadening this perspective, it explores informal memory practices across various contexts with a focus on their individual and collective dynamics and their intersections, reaching also beyond a conceptualisation of memory as mere symbolic reparation and politics of memory.

    It seeks to highlight the hidden, unwritten, and multifaceted in today’s memory boom by focusing on the memorialisation practices of communities, activists, families, and survivors. Organising its analytical focal point around the localisation of memory, it offers valuable and new insights on how and under what conditions localised memory practices may contribute to recognition and social transformation, as well as how they may at best be inclusive, or exclusive, of dynamic and diverse memories.

    Drawing on inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches, this book brings an in-depth and nuanced understanding of local memory practices and the dynamics attached to these in transitional justice contexts. It will be of much interest to students and scholars of memory and genocide studies, peace and conflict studies, transitional justice, sociology, and anthropology.

    General introduction

    Mina Rauschenbach, Julia Viebach and Stephan Parmentier  

    PART I Memory and transitional justice

    International memory entrepreneurs’ prescriptions for the remembrance of the Srebrenica genocide: What implications for local understandings of collective victimhood?

    Mina Rauschenbach

    Transitional justice principles versus survivors’ experience: Conflicting interpretations in Kosovo case study involving missing persons and their memorialisation

    Melanie Klinkner and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers  

    PART II Memory dynamics in transitional justice

    The micro-politics of remembering “the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi” in Rwanda: On the anonymous dead in Karongi district, western Rwanda

    Erin Jessee

    Bottom-up and thought-provoking sites of memory

    Anita Ferrara

    Informal commemoration in post-war Burundi: Exploring the usefulness and the limits of the concept

    Andrea Purdeková

    The struggle to remember: Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa

    Ingrid Samset 

    PART III Localised memory in transitional justice

    Place-bound proximity at Rwanda’s genocide memorials: On coming home to the dead and the affective force of their remains

    Julia Viebach

    Missing people and missing stories in the aftermath of genocide: Reclaiming local memories at the places of suffering

    Hariz Halilovich

    Music, testimony, and emotional engagement in alternative memorial ceremonies in Palestine-Israel

    Luisa Gandolfo

    Epilogue: Localising memory and reinventing the present

    Brandon Hamber

     

    Biography

    Mina Rauschenbach is associated with KU Leuven.

    Julia Viebach is based at the University of Bristol.

    Stephan Parmentier is based at KU Leuven.