In societies transitioning from conflict to peace, the violent past lingers on into the present. The commemoration of violent events, whether they occurred in a context of war, genocide, apartheid, colonialism or other forms of repression, is a conflictual, messy and multi-layered undertaking. The process of mourning the victims is often not just a matter for surviving relatives but is also a societal undertaking. Monuments may be erected to the victims of violence as well as to those who fought in the name of freedom, perhaps, or for the nation. Other monuments may be dismantled. Rituals and ceremonies are organised and museums built to mark the memories, while a whole range of agents engage in constructing and critiquing collective memory, based on their particular interpretations of the past: curators, politicians, grassroots activists, victim associations, international donors, artists. They recount stories in thunderous voices or quiet whispers, bringing people closer together or separating them even further. Mnemonic rituals and practices are instigated, drawing people to take part in events that may build bridges between former enemies or tear them down. Apologies are announced by heads of state – consoling to some, infuriating to others – while commemorations at memorial sites and museums, or impromptu gatherings in the streets, may bring people together or alternatively provoke them into resentful abstention. These reckonings with a difficult past may have the capacity to heal, yet also to hurt. Societies tend to remember the glory and sufferings of certain groups while deliberately forgetting shameful acts and the sufferings of other groups. Survivors may have to fight hard to achieve recognition.

Such is the nature of memory politics in societies emerging from conflict. Of course, there are many gradations between a process that brings about healing and a process that deepens divisions. The tension-laden relationships between former parties to a violent conflict are constantly renegotiated in the present, challenged or confirmed. Animosity may be maintained or there may be a movement towards a less antagonistic relationship, and even a just peace.

In a sense then, memory politics is about both change and continuity. Societies make efforts to break with a violent past, yet recognise that social cleavages and political divisions persist. It is therefore not surprising that peace research as well as transitional justice research are paying increasing attention to memory politics. It seems clear that how the past is remembered – and forgotten – influences the quality of the peace in the present. But how exactly? Are there ways to remember that are not harmful, that may even be conducive to peace? Ways that recognise the sufferings of the other without furthering divisions, that let multiple voices speak and point towards a different future? That trickle down through mundane, ordinary acts of remembering that are tolerant, inclusive, kind and empathetic rather than divisive, aggressive, hostile and hurtful? Such hopes are central to transitions from conflict to peace, yet it is not an easy task to fulfil them. It is difficult to grasp the shifting and multi-layered ways that memories are entangled in societies affected by conflict.

So far, there have been few attempts to trace systematically the connections between memory and peace. This book takes on this challenge and addresses the issue of how the politics of memory affects the quality of peace in societies transitioning from violent conflict. We propose a novel analytical framework and an approach that enables thick comparison through empirically grounded studies of salient topics. In so doing we are able to draw conclusions about the ways in which memory politics can be conducive to a just peace. We find that a type of memory politics that enables memories to be entangled in ways that allow for plurality, inclusivity and dignity is conducive to a just peace. In contrast, if memories are entangled in a way that is divisive and unacknowledged, any peace that results will be shallow.

We draw on empirical investigations carried out in five diverse settings that in many ways have become emblematic of contemporary struggles to build peace on a divisive past. Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, South Africa and Cambodia have painful histories of violence, repression, war, atrocities and genocide that deeply affect their present situation. While culturally, socially and politically diverse, they all struggle with a contentious past that is productive of politics and power in the present. We view these societies as conflict affected: there are no on-going, direct hostilities, but the continuities of violence are very much present, as the line between past and present is volatile and contention can flare up in a moment, with an instant activation of difficult memories. Recently in Bosnia and Herzegovina there were heated protests against murals glorifying convicted war criminals. With survivors demanding justice, recognition and compensation for the violence of the war, the memorialisation of perpetrators was becoming a ‘second wound’. In South Africa, likewise, there have been a number of demonstrations against statues of historically contested figures, linking the more recent phenomenon of apartheid to its deep roots in colonialism and slavery. #RhodesMustFall protests originated at the University of Cape Town in 2015, before the more global Black Lives Matter movement led to various statues of Christopher Columbus being taken down. Such statues function as icons of memory and become sites around which questions of social peace and justice are discussed. Thus, their fall, despite its apparent ephemerality, represents more than a fleeting moment.

In Rwanda, in contrast, public commemorations of the genocide of 1994 are recurring events that tend to be initiated from above. The dominant discourse of reconciliation and social cohesion post-genocide is a government narrative that plays a central role in present-day politics. It is manifested in yearly remembrance practices which people are expected to participate in en masse, with little leeway for protesting or abstaining. Likewise, reckonings with the Cambodian genocide, the commemoration of those who died in the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, is a public and ritualistic undertaking that centres on educating the next generation. At the same time, the practice of displaying human skulls and bones, as forceful reminders of the terrible past, brings fresh pain to those still living. Even in Cyprus, where the conflict is often described as frozen, the embers of the past may flare up, opening up opportunities to destabilise the bifurcal memory politics of the two opposing nationalist struggles on the island, as civil society initiatives seek to break silences and call for material restitution as well as reconciliation.

All in all, these cases cast light on the ways in which the past is connected to the present and the strong impact that politics of remembrance can have on social, political and economic configurations. Tensions around markers of the past can be found in all the societies as they attempt to reconfigure their relationship with the past. Indeed, mnemonic processes, whether in the form of tearing down monuments or putting them up, re-enacting historical events or silencing some victims’ appeals for recognition, are part and parcel of peace processes at both the everyday level and the formal level of politics.

Mnemonic formations and entangled memories: the argument in brief

The book seeks to make an original contribution to seminal debates in both Peace and Conflict Studies and Memory Studies. The two fields have closely shared interests yet tend to remain in parallel intellectual realms. The insights of previous research have often remained restricted to individual case studies on the politics of memory and there has been no sustained attempt to draw conclusions the relationship between the politics of memory and the building of peace. Moreover, we have noticed that most case studies focus on one particular aspect of memory politics, such as sites (memorials or museums, for instance), while others focus on historical narratives (such as speeches or stories), yet others on agents (for example, victim groups), and finally some on events, such as peace walks or national days of mourning (see Feindt et al., 2014). In response, this book develops an analytical framework with four conceptual entry points – sites, agents, narratives and events – and their mutual interactions making up the SANE framework. This framework enables an investigation across cases in order to understand how and why memory politics may contribute either to a just peace or to the perpetuation of conflict.

Key to this endeavour are mnemonic formations. As thematic clusters around certain particularly salient issues or phenomena in a society, they bring memory and politics together. We suggest that in order to study the impact of politics of memory on the quality of peace, mnemonic formations provide a useful starting point. Mnemonic formations are societally salient topics regarding some facet of a conflict affected society’s memoryscape. Importantly, while such formations may appear stable, they are in fact restless; they emerge and fade, congeal and fracture over time. Any analysis can thus only provide a snapshot in time. In our study, mnemonic formations are considered to be diagnostic sites from which we can draw wider conclusions on how memory politics impacts the quality of peace. In Cyprus, we investigate the lasting impact of competing nationalisms that divide the small island; in South Africa, we look at the legacy of colonialism in the shadow of apartheid remembrance; in Cambodia, we consider the productive power of the dead and the spirits that remain behind following the violence of the Khmer Rouge; in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we study the often contradictory commemoration practices around the siege of Sarajevo, showing the power of the memories of ordinary people who lived through the siege; and in Rwanda we zoom in on the memory politics around the contested role of the international community in the genocide.

By focusing our investigations on mnemonic formations rather than on more general memory politics, it becomes possible to home in on the entangled weave of memories. We draw out how memory is entangled around these salient topics and how different memories conflict, co-exist or connect with each other, and how this affects the quality of peace. The mnemonic formations are read through the SANE framework, which will be introduced in depth in the next chapter. In essence, we approach the relevant mnemonic formations from four different conceptual entry points: sites, agents, narratives and events. We focus on memory sites that often entail an abundance of material artefacts with affective consequences. At the same time, we stress the role of agents, with their various agendas in memory politics, in shaping these narratives and these sites. This provides a more nuanced understanding of agency that moves beyond the obvious political agents and their hegemonic narratives. We also take into consideration the role that narratives play in memory politics and recognise that these narratives are always emplaced: they are stories of what happened in certain places. We moreover acknowledge that the past is not only narrated through stories and discourses but is also performed through practices that agents engage in. Thus, our fourth component concerns events, defined as temporally circumscribed manifestations and practices of memory politics. It is this interaction of sites, agents, narratives and events that constitutes our analytical inroad for studying mnemonic formations, allowing us to understand the underlying dynamics within the politics of memory in transitions from war and violence to peace.

Consider, for instance, the worn Monopoly board displayed in the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo. Responding to the question ‘What was a war childhood to you?’ residents have handed in their treasured objects. They are the most ordinary things that form part of many childhoods – a game of Monopoly, a diary, a swing – each presented with a personal story told by its owner. In our analysis of the siege in Chapter 3, we note how the Monopoly board and its affective power brings forth what it was like to hide in a cellar during long hours as a child. The museum site is one node in the conflicted mnemonic formation of the siege, which is read in juxtaposition with the elite narrative constructions of ethno-nationalist, military heroism that ignore the civilian resistance and resilience against war. These are just two of the nodes in the mnemonic formation that the analysis brings forth, enabling us to tease out whether memories of the siege are entangled in ways that are conducive to peace or not. Likewise, in the analysis of South Africa’s legacy of colonialism, the colonial nostalgia expressed at the exclusive Rand Club – a symbol of past imperial glory and resource wealth – stands in stark contrast to the painful narratives about the colonial migrant-labour system that made this wealth possible, as told by the community-led Lwandle Migrant Museum. While the museum as well as other initiatives point to increasingly successful demands for recognition, the privately run Rand Club is testimony to the strong influence of private agents seeking to maintain their privileges, which also comes with a certain disregard for the dignity of the victims of colonialism.

As these examples illustrate, the mnemonic formations selected for analysis are diverse. Yet the analytical framework makes it possible to compare them with each other and generate some broad conclusions regarding the relationship between memory and peace. In this effort, we address the lack of detailed yet systematic investigations into this relationship, advancing and placing in dialogue two bodies of literature: on the one hand, bringing a comparative perspective to Memory Studies, which has been dominated by qualitative, single case studies; on the other hand, enriching the large body of quantitative and qualitative research on peace with a perspective that integrates memory politics.

This approach recognises that memory is expressed in various ways based on diverse and, at times, conflicting interpretations of the past. It has been key to understanding how multi-layered memories interlink to form ‘entanglements’ resulting from asymmetries, multiple perspectives and cross-references in memory practices (Feindt et al., 2014: 35). Conceptualising memories as entangled is a way of understanding different views of the past and their mutual interactions (Delanty, 2017; Heuman, 2014). For Conrad (2003: 86), the concept of ‘entangled memories’ relates to the production of memories as a means to cast light on ‘complex impulses in the present’. These complex impulses are instrumental in the constitution of peace in a conflict-affected society and we draw out findings pertaining to how the entanglement of memory affects the quality of peace.

In brief, the argument in this book thus runs as follows: in societies transitioning from violence there is a large variety of often diverse and at times conflicting interpretations of the past that come together and become apparent in certain mnemonic formations. Mnemonic formations can be unpacked and studied through the conceptual entry points of sites, agents, narratives and events, allowing one to analyse how memories are entangled in various ways. The way memory becomes entangled is illustrative of the quality of peace. The empirical analysis will demonstrate that if memory is entangled in a certain way – plural, inclusive and dignified – we can observe a just peace. However, if memory is entangled in a way that is divisive and without acknowledgement, peace remains shallow.

The politics of memory

Memory and peace processes are intimately connected, yet so far only limited attention has been paid to how they interrelate. This is surprising since understanding memory politics as an integral part of the (re)constitution of society has been a key topic since the early days of studies of collective and political memory (Halbwachs, 1992: 47; Renan, 2018).

To explore this interrelation we situate ourselves in an approach to Memory Studies that analyses collective memory and the political power of memory, asking ‘who wants whom to remember what, and why’ (Confino cited in Maurantonio, 2017: 219). From this perspective, power lies at the core of memory politics, with agents vying for the power to define the past so as to legitimise their position in the present and to influence the future peace.

Crucially, though, we are wary of the use of the term ‘collective memory’ as introduced by Maurice Halbwachs (1992), which stresses the cohesive and reproductive force of memory as something rather static and fixed (Rufer, 2012). In contrast to Halbwachs, we do not understand collective memory as a fairly cohesive memory ‘of’ a group because groups are rarely coherent organisms. They change and constantly negotiate who is part of this collective and who is not. We therefore agree that ‘[h]‌ow memories are reintegrated and what new narratives we form, as individuals and a society, are crucial in terms of our identity and our relationship to others and the world around us’ (Wielenga, 2012: 5; see also Buckley-Zistel, 2006c; Strömbom, 2017). A case in point is Jelena Subotic’s (2019) in-depth investigation into how Holocaust memory is ignored, appropriated and obfuscated in the making and remaking of the Serbian, Croatian and Lithuanian collective identities in the post-Second World War and post-Cold War era, challenging the Western narrative of the Holocaust and acting as a political strategy to resolve those countries’ ontological insecurities. We are interested in seeing how memory is distributed within a community, and how people who view themselves as belonging to certain groups work together when constructing a narrative about the past, thereby engaging in what has been referred to as collaborative remembering (Weldon, 2001 cited in Wertsch, 2002). In our view, collective memory is hence fluid and ever-changing. This fluidity is influenced by many contextual factors, such as political climate, opportunity structures, hopes and aspirations.

Even though often manifested in material and spatial terms, the politics of memory is never still. Salient topics can be transformed, fade into the periphery or be abruptly reinterpreted through shock or rupture; they emerge in the present and shape how the past is interpreted retrospectively. In this context, for instance, scholars working on notions of nostalgia have contributed to our understanding of practices of memory-making as illustrative of present feelings of loss, expressed as a ‘yearning for what is now not attainable’ (Pickering and Keightley, 2006: 920). We are interested in how this process changes over time, with new actors joining and older ones disappearing, with various agents forming an entanglement of memory, and how this affects the quality of peace.

In many cases, collaborative memory actions make use of material and non-material sites. These sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) comprise ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’ (Nora, 1996: xviii). They thus include places, objects and ideas that are vested with historical importance for a particular nation or community. Memorials, monuments and various activities of remembrance are perceived as sites for the telling of a stabilising, nation-building narrative for the fractured post-conflict state. These insights resonate with studies that assume a strong link between commemoration and nation-building (Blackburn, 2010; Kuzio, 2002). Sites of memory may include references to past violence, such as war memorials or commemoration events, but also national symbols, such as flags or national holidays. In cases where memory is highly disputed, memorials may be challenged by counter-memorials that publicly question the meaning of the initial memorial or serve as a comment that critiques its political stance. Frictions emerge around questions about how and what to remember, so that memory is also often contested. These frictions between remembering and remembering differently are crucial to memory politics and thus for understanding the quality of peace.

To overcome frictions, memory politics often aims at education. It is hoped that people will be sensitised through memorials and museums so that a repetition of atrocities will be avoided (Bickford, 2014: 394; Buckley-Zistel and Schäfer, 2014b) and peace may prevail. In this context, public debates about memorials may foster a dialogue about the past and help the parties to the conflict understand the experience of others. These debates, if successful, shape collective remembering by increasing the number of people who coalesce around a particular narrative or render the boundaries between communities more permeable by accepting competing narratives.

At the same time, commemorative activities may be central to the need for acknowledgement among survivors, so that truth commission reports, and more recently court rulings, recommend erecting memorials as part of reparation measures (Buckley-Zistel, 2020: 10). With the strong increase in concerns for victims over the past decades, acknowledgement of their harm and vindication of their dignity has come centre-stage and is frequently expressed in memorials. This is based on an understanding of the quality of peace that includes dignity – as will be discussed in the following chapter. Against this backdrop, victim associations have become powerful agents in many societies transitioning from violent conflict to peace.

It is important to recognise that key to the politics of memory and the construction of peace is not just how past violence and atrocities are remembered, but first of all whether they are remembered at all (Mannergren Selimovic, 2013; Temin and Dahl, 2017). Memory politics is just as much about social forgetting as it is about social remembering. Silences and voids are intrinsic to memory politics (Mannergren Selimovic, 2020a), so we also must attend to what is not commemorated, or what is actively forgotten (see Buckley-Zistel, 2006b; Chandler, 2008b). The shifting work of erasing topics from collective memory – to ‘unsee’ and ‘unhear’ – as well as the reactive labour of bringing the forgotten to public attention are of relevance for understanding the constitution of peace too. What is remembered and forgotten is at the centre of political authority. In such struggles, national governments and other political authorities often attempt to maintain power in the present by controlling the past (McDowell and Braniff, 2014). Yet silences do not necessarily stem solely from a lack of agency or political power; they may be actively chosen by certain actors as a coping strategy (Buckley-Zistel, 2006b; Mannergren Selimovic, 2020b).

In particular, we are concerned with narratives, rituals, myths, practices and so on that bring together past and present within a particular local context (Drozdzewski et al., 2019: 253). These generate symbolic capital of key interest for agents involved in transitions from war to peace. Importantly, memory politics in conflict-affected societies draws on a rich symbolic vocabulary (Brown, 2013: 497) to promote political communication. It is through commemorative activities and narrative accounts of particular events that places, groups or persons may be constructed as a form of political currency.

Victimhood, in particular, is a positionality that enables political and moral claims (Winter, 2006: 62). Identifying with a victim or perpetrator position (or both), attributing or dispelling responsibility, acknowledging or denying harm – all of this has an effect on how we see ourselves as well as how we see our (former) enemy. Advocacy groups such as victim associations may gain recognition and leverage through commemorative activities (Nettelfield, 2010), giving marginalised groups a platform from which to articulate their particular grievances and political claims for acknowledgement, compensation or simply recognition as a group.

Commemoration can thus be a site for agency for marginal or informal actors. Women’s organisations that mobilise around memory, for example, may manage to give voice to silenced memories, reclaim collective memories that have been misrepresented in official narratives and challenge gendered hierarchies (Altınay, 2019). In Cyprus, many women on both sides of the divided island have internalised the mainstream prejudice that women cannot be a source of knowledge on the issue of the Cyprus conflict, and their experiences and memories have been forgotten, silenced and marginalised. In contrast, an oral history project recalls, collects and mobilises these women’s shared memories of traumatic displacement, of daily lives and home-making disrupted, in a powerful collection that challenges gender hierarchies in memory-making while both stabilising and destabilising the mnemonic formations of nationalism (see Aliefendioğlu and Behçetoğulları, 2019). Such memory work has important repercussions for the ways in which peace is discussed and negotiated.

The quality of peace

Peace is a social phenomenon and as such it is related to the memories of communities. Peace can be either challenged or supported by commemorative practices, memory work, and various ways of remembering and forgetting.

Civil wars in the post-Cold War era most often end with a negotiated outcome and an ensuing peace accord; however, most post-war countries fail to live up to the provisions of such negotiated peace accords (Joshi and Wallensteen, 2018). The limited success rate of peace accords, and the risk of a recurrence of violence, calls for a deepened understanding of how to build peace beyond ensuring the mere absence of direct violence. In addition, peace-building missions have tended to conflate peace-building with state-building, and peace with the securing of states, institutions and rule of law, without considering local strategies for coping with violence and the making of peace (see Balthasar, 2017). An example of this is the United Nations Mission to Kosovo, where the international community in effect governed a state in the making, and where the peace-building process was contingent on meeting the standards for independent statehood. This has led peacebuilders to privilege a form of peace that tends to be empty, shallow and inherently unstable. Clearly, the ‘one size fits all’ blueprint of international peace-building has not been as successful as was hoped. A realisation has grown that peace needs to be emplaced and thus locally owned. How conflict-affected societies decide to build their peace will have different repercussions depending on the various local contexts (Loyle and Appel, 2011; Salehi and Williams, 2016).

In light of these developments, peace research has over the last decade profoundly changed our understanding of what a durable and just peace entails, raising questions such as peace for whom, by whom and in what spaces (e.g. Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017; Mac Ginty, 2010; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Paffenholz, 2015; Richmond and Mitchell, 2011; Shinko, 2008: 489). Recent developments in Peace and Conflict Studies have come to question the distinction between war and peace, as well as the assumed linear development of transitions from war to peace. The conventional understanding that peace is the opposite of war, and that where war is present, peace is absent, has been challenged (Flint, 2011; Mac Ginty, 2006). Instead, war and peace are seen to be intertwined and if there ever was a clear line between them, it has become increasingly blurred. This is expressed in the continuation of violence after the formal ending of a war, (Pain, 2015). The way in which memory politics in transitional or post-conflict societies links past violence to power struggles in the present also reflects how conflict dynamics persist once peace has been formally negotiated.

In order to challenge perceptions of peace as an abstract idea, an absent architecture or an ambiguous aspiration, a rich body of work has unpacked various components that affect peace. Some have paid attention to the link between democracy and peace (Doyle, 1983), between justice and peace (Allan and Keller, 2006) and between equality and peace (Hudson et al., 2012). Moreover, local dimensions of peace (Kappler, 2015), everyday peace (Mac Ginty, 2021; Williams, 2015) and emplaced peace (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016; Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017) have been proposed as more fruitful concepts, assuming that such peace is potentially hybrid (Mac Ginty, 2010) and produces a so-called peace dividend. Such peace anchored in the everyday can in turn strengthen the peace constituency and facilitate the crucial buy-in from the subjects of peace. Richmond (2016), for example, argues that peace processes often focus too much on the state and state institutions, thereby failing to understand the localised power dynamics that drive peace. To him, the constitution of peace is an agential practice that stems from the representation and participation of local communities, peace movements and other alliances, which cooperate in order to end violence and address social, economic and political problems (Richmond, 2016: 3–5). Others have been concerned with understanding obstacles to peace as they explore the multidimensionality of the process, the power dynamics between various agents, and the interplay between micro and macro scales, in formal as well as informal contexts (Millar, 2020; Richmond, 2022).

We are moving beyond the understanding of peace as merely negative peace, that is, an absence of direct violence, observable from the moment direct hostilities have come to an end whether through peace agreements, military defeat or international intervention. Such a negative definition may be contrasted with a positive understanding of peace as suggested by Johan Galtung (1964). A positive peace includes not only the absence of direct and organised violence but also an end to structural and cultural violence. This form of peace is utopian in the sense that it encompasses everything: social, economic and political justice, the satisfaction of basic human needs, and the recognition of identities. Positive peace is also abstract in its universal ambitions, and therefore affects people in different ways in their everyday lives. In the everyday the distinction between positive and negative peace often becomes blurred. The everyday peace, research shows, is socially produced and reproduced through everyday acts of tolerance, solidarity, hospitality, inclusion, but also of indifference, omission and tension as people go about their daily lives (Mac Ginty, 2021; Mannergren Selimovic, 2022a; Richmond, 2010; Williams, 2015). Thus, the everyday peace is intimate, tactile and real. It is emplaced among, and produced by, ordinary people, and as such is a crucial element of positive peace.

A number of approaches have tried to define positive peace by referring to certain qualities. The notion of quality peace has specifically been elaborated by Joshi and Wallensteen (2018). They view quality peace as encompassing five key factors: security, governance reforms to allow for dispute resolution, economic opportunities for marginalised groups, reconciliation promotion and a strong civil society. These five elements serve not only as indicators for quality peace, but also as policy prescriptions on how to achieve it.

The quality of peace is also often linked to democracy and is influenced by values and norms underpinning democratic societies and thus relations between liberal democracies (Doyle, 1983). The democratic peace thesis provides the logical reasoning as to why the global spread of democracy is expected to result in greater international peace, assuming that democratic political institutions make it difficult for governments to initiate war without the consent of their electorates. Cultural norms observed by democracies are understood to mean that they will favour peaceful means of resolving conflicts with one another. Yet although democracy may have pacifying effects, the process of democratisation, which often emerges as part of the peace-building process, tends to be conflictual, competitive and characterised by struggles for power (Paris, 2004).

The notion of equal peace, meanwhile, relates to the quality of peace as regards the status of women in society (Hudson et al., 2012). It compares micro-level gender violence with macro-level state peacefulness in global settings. A key argument is that gender inequality is a form of violence regardless of how invisible it may be or how normalised it may appear (Hudson et al., 2012: 5). Gender inequality, then, is understood as one type of subordination of those who are different and lacking in power and status. The main conclusion from this research is that ‘there will never be peace for our nations unless there is peace between the sexes’ (Hudson et al., 2012: 208). The concept has therefore emerged of a gender-just peace. This gendered understanding of peace diverges substantially from liberal peace, as it renders peace visible in the everyday and built from below. It brings to the fore equality, social welfare, equity and, by virtue of its emancipatory claims, it also provides for shifts in existing power and gender relations (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2016b).

This debate over the content of peace has its roots in the notion of a just peace as discussed by Allan and Keller (2006: 117–19). Just peace is understood to be locally and inter-subjectively constructed, somewhat in contrast to positive peace, which carries connotations of universality. It is, similarly, not simply about the absence of direct, visible violence, but requires underlying structures, drivers and dynamics of violence to be addressed (Allan and Keller, 2006). Just peace is an intersubjective and reflexive understanding of peace that is shared by the parties to the conflict, and relates the quality of peace to understandings of justice and equality. To cite but one example, from Bosnia and Herzegovina: many commentators on the Dayton Peace negotiations predicted that the peace agreement would not produce a just peace. It was stated that ‘the Bosnia peace agreement … is a shabby compromise’. Today, that seems not far from the reality, although as Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović claimed at the time of the signing, peace is ‘more just than continuing the war’ (quoted in New Statesman and Society, 1995: 5). Almost thirty years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord, the shortfall between the actual experiences of the internationally negotiated peace and people’s expectations of the peace challenge the idea of a just peace. Thus, for a peace to be just, a peace dividend must materialise in people’s everyday lives.

These important conceptualisations of peace have formed the background to our investigations into how memory politics affects peace. We suggest that to rethink peace is to recognise that it means different things to different people in different places and times. Thus, peace is not an abstract, mythical singular, because as such it becomes unobtainable (Dietrich and Sützl, 1997). Instead, by taking into consideration intersubjective or subjective understandings of peace it becomes possible to observe fragmented, co-existing, fleeting, plural peace(s). Such peace(s) is and are understood as constantly ‘becoming’ and are best characterised as a process rather than an outcome. By thinking of peace in its plural, that is, peace(s), we are able to recognise the different ways in which peace manifests itself in conflict-affected societies.

Our approach suggests that peace is value-laden, fleeting, contested and ever-changing (see Richmond, 2008). We view peace simultaneously as an institutionalised system, a discourse, a practice and a utopia. It can be seen as both a process and a goal, following multiple parallel paths, always unfinished, always aspired to and unlikely to converge on a single agreed understanding. Multiple processes, including memory politics, can result in a complex peace architecture, building on frictional interplays between traditional top-down and bottom-up perspectives of peace processes as well as between international and local actors.

Bridging memory politics and peace

Peace and Conflict Studies and Memory Studies have both links and tensions, and we are concerned with the processes of memory-making and the construction of just peace at the intersection between the two fields of study. As we have outlined, contemporary approaches to peace research call for more comprehensive and finely grained methods for understanding how and why transitions to peace either develop into a just peace or deteriorate into deeply divided societies (or somewhere in-between). It is thus to be expected that an analysis of how memory politics affects the quality of peace will produce insights that are more sensitive to local and dynamic developments.

Research has long had an implicit focus on dominant hegemonic narratives and their effects on the constitution of peace, often based on a rather homogenising understanding of society (Renan, 2018). It has been assumed that there is some unity in remembering – without taking into account the fact that societies are necessarily plural and diverse. There have been calls to challenge the assumed homogeneity and unity of national memory, and to open up the gaze to the different and, at times, contradictory memory dynamics of a society. In our endeavour to conceptualise the link between memory and peace, we have found the notion of entangled memory particularly (Feindt et al., 2014).

Entangled memory emphasises that remembering is always dynamic and heterogeneous; it emphasises memory plurality. A mnemonic formation is therefore always a junction of various interpretations of the past that hang together, interlace, touch yet also separate, disconnect and break away. To Feindt et al., ‘[t]‌his insight calls for the analysis of detectable entanglements, taking into account multiple perspectives, asymmetries, and cross-referential mnemonic practices’ (2014: 35, emphasis in original). It is to this approach that our study contributes.

Surprisingly, the Memory Studies literature has been remarkably silent on the connective link with peace. One important exception is Manuel Cruz’s nuanced study of memory and trauma, which ties memory to politics and defines the forms, uses and political meanings of memory and forgetting (Cruz, 2016). He develops five memory models that link memory to, respectively, values, the present, retributive justice, mourning and revelation, in order to investigate methodologically how traumatic events are remembered, and in so doing to reveal the difficulty of living together (Cruz, 2016). Another noteworthy exception is Kristian Brown’s work, which argues that by analysing memory politics one can attend to more fine-grained and dynamic assessments of peace processes than by relying on attitudinal indicators (Brown, 2013: 505). Thus, by closely studying memory work it is possible to trace on-going tensions – both between and within communities – in relation to how the peace process is developing. In this sense, the analysis of memory politics serves as a seismograph for peace. It serves to ‘uncover tensions, ambiguities, and sometimes the plainly counter-intuitive’ (Brown, 2013: 503–5), allowing for insights into social and political dynamics as relevant to understanding how memory affects the quality of peace.

Apart from this, one of very few systematic comparisons of memory politics is Bernhard and Kubik’s (2014) edited volume on how the twentieth anniversary of the revolutions of 1989–1991 were officially commemorated in seventeen post-communist states. In their volume, the politics of memory is key to the establishment of the new political regimes in the region, as well as for new national and collective identities. They present a typology of memory regimes and mnemonic actors, characterising them variously as fractured, pillarised or unified, and make some preliminary observations as to the respective impacts of these types on democracy (Kubik and Bernhard, 2014: 10–11). Their interest is focused on official actors in the transition from communism to democracy.

We, on the other hand, are above all interested in patterns of memory politics as part of the complex interactions that peace processes generate. To pursue our endeavour to bridge memory politics and peace, we employ the SANE framework, which allows us to study comparatively and in depth how the politics of memory in conflict-affected societies affects the quality of peace. As illustrated in the empirical chapters of this book and synthesised in Chapter 7, we thus argue that the quality of peace is linked to justice and manifests itself in how memory is entangled. To contribute to a just peace, this entanglement needs to display particular dimensions that show that the parties to the conflict are moving away from antagonism and towards peaceful living together. The empirical investigations of selected mnemonic formations, through the conceptual entry points of sites, agents, narratives and events, show that a just peace is inclusive (in terms of ethnicity, religion, age and gender, among other things), plural (in terms of encompassing diverse memories and commemorative practices) and contributes to embracing dignity (in terms of acknowledging the injustices committed).

Structure of the book

In Chapter 1 we introduce the analytical framework, which conceptualises the mnemonic interplay of sites, agents, narratives and events. By grounding our analysis of evolving mnemonic formations in this framework, we provide an alternative to instrumentalised readings of memory politics, to studies that only depart from material manifestation, such as a memorial, and to research that only focuses on specific agents, such as victim groups. The framework gives us access to the entanglement of memory in mnemonic formations and makes visible the fluidity of memory as well as the frictions between competing memories. We posit that research needs to take on the challenge of analysing how these intricate processes interact and unfold over time and in space if we are to understand how and why remembrance impacts on the quality of peace. We suggest that memory cannot be understood through an analysis of sites, agents, narratives or events alone, but only through looking at the complex interplay between these. In addition, we show that there is added value in studying memory politics in a cross-case way, in order to identify patterns regarding the impact of memory politics on the quality of peace.

Chapter 2 presents the first case study, exploring how the mnemonic formation of competing nationalisms in Cyprus has turned memory-making into an obstacle to peace-making. In Cyprus, contested memories of past national struggles have become a foundation for the (re)constitution of the two nations. From a Greek Cypriot perspective, nationalist memory-making relates to the colonial struggle for independence from Britain, while Turkish Cypriots’ nationalist memory-making is primarily about obtaining independence from the Greek Cypriots. We observe two oppositional tendencies. On the one hand, the process of memory-making in Cyprus is complex and multi-layered. On the other hand, this complexity has largely been overridden in public discourse by a binary process in which the memories of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have been separately institutionalised as dominant forms of remembering. The chapter suggests that a key realm for negotiating a shared, emplaced peace on the island of Cyprus is the politics of memory, so as to mediate the strong mnemonic attachments to the nation.

Chapter 3 focuses on the 1992–1996 siege of Sarajevo. Studying this mnemonic formation gives us access to a memory politics that has wider implications for the quality of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the peace has been characterised by unresolved tensions and a deeply divisive political climate. The chapter studies the clashes between everyday and elite practices of memory, demonstrating that the diverse forms of memorialisation of the siege display a lack of consensus regarding the ways in which the siege should be commemorated, by whom and in which spaces. Political elites are constantly challenged by other agents. Memory politics in the Bosnian capital is thus less consolidated than in other parts of the divided country. A close examination of the mnemonic formation of the siege allows us to see the tactics of those memory agents that challenge hegemonic memories, suggesting that a fluid memory politics can provide for a more inclusive and plural peace.

Chapter 4 focuses on the role of international actors in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. To analyse the mnemonic formation that resulted, it explores various sites related to the role of internationals during the genocide, including the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which clearly articulates the government’s official narrative, and the Murambi Genocide Memorial, which expands this official narrative with a more detailed condemnation of French complicity in the genocide. Various Rwandan and international memory agents have been key in attributing meaning to the role of the internationals in the run-up to, and during, the genocide, highlighting the preparatory role of colonialism, international inaction by the UN and the international community during genocide, and even a collaboration of the French state with Hutu extremists. Memory politics in Rwanda is hegemonically structured, and the chapter shows how these narratives can support legitimacy for the government, even at the expense of some facets of the quality of peace.

Chapter 5 investigates the memoryscape of South Africa as it is shaped by the legacy of colonialism. It argues that the mnemonic formation of colonialism has been sidelined as a result of the primary attention paid to apartheid and suggests that apartheid should be viewed as an extension of colonialism, rather than separate from it. The chapter therefore illustrates the mnemonic contestations around the ways in which colonial violence is represented and remembered, and points to two sets of divisions. First, there are social dynamics glorifying European colonial rule in South Africa as an honourable conquest which are countered by dynamics that identify colonialism as a brutal system of systematic oppression, especially of the non-white population. Second, each of these two camps has internal divisions, so that there is a multi-layered fragmentation of the mnemonic landscape pertaining to colonial rule. The complex and differentiated forms of victimhood and oppression as they have been experienced by, and are remembered from, different societal positions complicate the negotiation of the past as well as questions of acknowledgement and redress as they relate to colonial forms of violence.

Chapter 6 discusses the mnemonic formation of the dead in Cambodia, exploring how the bones and spirits of those killed by the Khmer Rouge are used in memory politics today and how this impacts peace. Government politics regarding the non-cremation of bodies in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide is based on an understanding that these remains constitute evidence of the violent past and are needed to keep the memory alive and to educate future generations. But not cremating the bones has spiritual consequences for survivors in their interactions with the spaces of memorial sites. The chapter discusses various sites of local and national memorials, focusing particularly on the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, with a discussion of how the display of skulls there is indicative of broader memory politics. The chapter reveals how the political interests that have successfully advocated the dead being preserved for display in order to bolster their own legitimacy may in fact have undermined the quality of peace in the country, as the dead are not afforded the dignity the surviving population would expect. This chapter also looks at how the resulting presence of spirits has a detrimental impact.

Chapter 7 brings together these five empirical chapters to identify overarching patterns in how the politics of memory may affect the quality of peace in conflict-affected societies. Bringing our empirical case studies into conversation with each other, we compare across cases, identifying and systematising patterns, similarities and differences. We reflect on the complex ways in which the politics of memory conditions the quality of peace, accounting for the temporal ruptures and reconnections that make the politics of the past relevant to the present. We show that where memory is configured in a way that allows for plurality, dignity and inclusivity there is a stronger chance for a durable peace; the resulting peace will embrace a larger societal base in a sustainable way, as well as enabling productive encounters with the past. Where these conditions are scarcely or only partially fulfilled, on the other hand, the emergent peace suffers from a lack of traction and remains wedded to the emergence of mutually exclusive, competing peace(s), or an overall peace that is shallow.

The book concludes with our reflections on what a just peace may look like. A just peace is, a function of entangled memory, and stresses the key importance of plurality, dignity and inclusivity. Such entangled memory is fluid and dynamic, and is constantly renegotiated, thus allowing for adaptations over time. The chapter closes by looking at new avenues for future research in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies.