What insights can we gain from the social sciences about the role memory plays in creating or re-creating the many conflicts threatening global peace in the twenty-first century? Indeed, can knowledge about the relationship between memory and conflict help resolve intergroup conflicts and heal individual hurts? This book presents a series of essays both theoretical and empirical that approach these questions from a variety of disciplines that will highlight a much-neglected aspect of one of the major problems facing the world today.

This book focuses on the methodology of research on historical memory and contributes to theoretical discussions concerning the use of historical memory as a variable to explain political action and social movement. The chapters of the book conceptualize the relationship between historical memory and national identity formation, perceptions, and policy-making. The author particularly analyses how contested memory and the related social discourse can lead to nationalism and international conflict. Based on theories and research from multiple fields of studies, this book proposes a series of analytic frameworks for the purpose of conceptualizing the functions of historical memory. These analytic frameworks can help categorize, measure, and subsequently demonstrate the effects of historical memory. This book also discusses how to use public opinion polls, textbooks, important texts and documents, monuments and memory sites for conducting research to examine the functions of historical memory.

This book examines the legacy of Lebanon’s civil war and how the population, and the youth in particular, are dealing with their national past. Drawing on extensive qualitative research and social observation, the author explores the efforts of those who wish to remember, so as not to repeat past mistakes, and those who wish to forget. In considering how the Lebanese youth are negotiating this collective memory, Larkin addresses issues of: Lebanese post-war amnesia and the gradual emergence of new memory discourses and public debates Lebanese nationalism and historical memory visual memory and mnemonic landscapes oral memory and post-war narratives war memory as an agent of ethnic conflict and a tool for reconciliation and peace-building. trans-generational trauma or postmemory. Shedding new light on trauma and the persistence of ethnic and religious hostility, this book offers a unique insight into Lebanon’s recurring communal tensions and a fresh perspective on the issue of war memory. As such, this is an essential addition to the existing literature on Lebanon and will be relevant for scholars of sociology, Middle East studies, anthropology, politics and history.

How do schools protect young people and call on the youngest citizens to respond to violent conflict and division operating outside, and sometimes within, school walls? What kinds of curricular representations of conflict contribute to the construction of national identity, and what kinds of encounters challenge presumed boundaries between us and them? Through contemporary and historical case studies—drawn from Cambodia, Egypt, Northern Ireland, Peru, and Rwanda, among others—this collection explores how societies experiencing armed conflict and its aftermath imagine education as a space for forging collective identity, peace and stability, and national citizenship. In some contexts, the erasure of conflict and the homogenization of difference are central to shaping national identities and attitudes. In other cases, collective memory of conflict functions as a central organizing frame through which citizenship and national identity are (re)constructed, with embedded messages about who belongs and how social belonging is achieved. The essays in this volume illuminate varied and complex inter-relationships between education, conflict, and national identity, while accounting for ways in which policymakers, teachers, youth, and community members replicate, resist, and transform conflict through everyday interactions in educational spaces.

This book examines the online memory wars in post-Soviet states – where political conflicts take the shape of heated debates about the recent past, and especially World War II and Soviet socialism. To this day, former socialist states face the challenge of constructing national identities, producing national memories, and relating to the Soviet legacy. Their pasts are principally intertwined: changing readings of history in one country generate fierce reactions in others. In this transnational memory war, digital media form a pivotal discursive space – one that provides speakers with radically new commemorative tools. Uniting contributions by leading scholars in the field, Memory, Conflict and New Media is the first book-length publication to analyse how new media serve as a site of political and national identity building in post-socialist states. The book also examines how the construction of online identity is irreversibly affected by thinking about the past in this geopolitical domain. By highlighting post-socialist memory’s digital mediations and digital memory’s transcultural scope, the volume succeeds in a twofold aim: to deepen and refine both (post-socialist) memory theory and digital-memory studies. This book will be of much interest to students of media studies, post-Soviet studies, Eastern European Politics, memory studies and International Relations in general.

This interdisciplinary edited collection establishes a new dialogue between translation, conflict and memory studies focusing on fictional texts, reports from war zones and audiovisual representations of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship. It explores the significant role of translation in transmitting a recent past that continues to resonate within current debates on how to memorialize this inconclusive historical episode. The volume combines a detailed analysis of well-known authors such as Langston Hughes and John Dos Passos, with an investigation into the challenges found in translating novels such as The Group by Mary McCarthy (considered a threat to the policies established by the dictatorial regime), and includes more recent works such as El tiempo entre costuras by María Dueñas. Further, it examines the reception of the translations and whether the narratives cross over effectively in various contexts. In doing so it provides an analysis of the landscape of the Spanish conflict and dictatorship in translation that allows for an intergenerational and transcultural dialogue. It will appeal to students and scholars of translation, history, literature and cultural studies.

This book bridges theoretical gaps that exist between the meta-concepts of memory, place and identity by positioning its lens on the emplaced practices of commemoration and the remembrance of war and conflict. This book examines how diverse publics relate to their wartime histories through engagements with everyday collective memories, in differing places. Specifically addressing questions of place-making, displacement and identity, contributions shed new light on the processes of commemoration of war in everyday urban façades and within generations of families and national communities. Contributions seek to clarify how we connect with memories and places of war and conflict. The spatial and narrative manifestations of attempts to contextualise wartime memories of loss, trauma, conflict, victory and suffering are refracted through the roles played by emotion and identity construction in the shaping of post-war remembrances. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective, with insights from history, memory studies, social psychology, cultural and urban geography, to contextualise memories of war and their ‘use’ by national governments, perpetrators, victims and in family histories.