Memory as a Peace-making Strategy: The Role of Social Memory in Post-Violence Societies, Study notes of Sociology

Download Memory as a Peace-making Strategy: The Role of Social Memory in Post-Violence Societies and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Sociology of Peace Processes Lecture 10: Memory and Peace I want today to talk about the problem of remembrance and commemoration in post violence societies. You might be wondering why memory constitutes a ‘problem’ at all. I mean by this two things: first, remembrance and commemoration are difficult peace-making strategies and secondly, memory of the conflict can be an obstacle to successful post violence adjustments. Nonetheless, despite these difficulties, memory must become an object of policy management after communal violence. Let me begin by reminding you of the policy dilemma that post violence societies face with respect to memory that we discussed in an earlier lecture. Post violence societies based on negotiated peace settlements have the problem of how to remember and commemorate the conflict in such a way as to permit people to move forward. Especially when memories continue to divide people in the transition to post violence and on to the medium term, peace processes have a shadow that causes continual strain. They need to find ways of handling divided memories and to develop a ‘social memory’ that honours all people, victims and perpetrators, combatants and civilians, in ways that releases society collectively from the burden of people’s personal memory. There are two sociological issues around public memory in peace processes: what it is that is publicly remembered and forgotten; and what social practices need to be adopted to culturally reproduce these selective public memories. There is no easy policy solution to this dilemma: hence memory is problematic. docsity.com I want to do three things in this lecture: • Outline the nature of memory as a social process • Discuss the ‘problem’ of memory • Suggest some social practices by which to construct remembrance as a peace- making strategy First to memory. Sociology understands memory as having individual and social dimensions. Remembrance is something we all do as individuals all the time, and we all have our own personal set of memories, unique in its constellation to us. What goes on in people’s heads in the formation and use of individual memories is a question about individual remembrance. We might call this personal memory. What goes on in society in the formation and use of collective memory is a question of social remembrance. Sociologists in the past have called this collective memory, although Barbara Misztal employs the term ‘social memory’. There is a good reason for this change in nomenclature. Collective memories are understood as group memories, shared by a community, that help to bind that community together. Nations have collective memories as part of their narrative of nationhood, so can ethnic groups and other communities. Collective memories are thus shared images and representations of the past that assist in constructing social solidarity. Social memory as a term includes this dimension, but it also incorporates the claim that individual remembrance or personal memory is itself social. Personal memory is clearly not collective but it is still social. There are several reasons why memory is social. • People have personal and collective memories at the same time, the latter being those representations that are commonly shared by all docsity.com boundaries that mark the nation or which disrupt the formation of a common identity. They might also be any items that suggest that the members of the nation do not share a common destiny. Nations need to forget things from the past that dispute a common journeying to nationhood amongst its peoples and things that suggest a parting of the ways in the future. So closely allied are social memory and nationalism that it is no surprise that in the eighteenth and nineteenth century hey-days of nationalism in Europe, we saw the greatest expansion in building large public memorials that now adorn civic centres and in the development of national traditions and emblems that served as national memories. What’s all this got to do with communal violence? Two things really. Social memory is one of the processes that people go to war about and memories of the violence can keep the enmity going. Let’s look at both in turn. Memory is often deeply embedded in the conflict precisely because memory defines the boundaries between the included and excluded groups, it shapes the identity of one’s own group and that of the marginalised other. The state or the powerful dominant community can manipulate memories – and history generally – to create an enemy and justify violence against them. Memories help to construct racial separateness; they can divide people into separate and distinct imagined communities. Public acts of remembrance or rituals of commemoration of past wars, usually done in honour of the victor who gets to write history from their point of view, can keep alive old divisions and continually reinforce the cultural inferiority of the vanquished and docsity.com maintain some ethnic group as despised; and the vanquished can have their own ‘sad celebrations’ to keep alive their servitude and defeat. These acts of remembrance can be ‘official’, developed by the state, but also ‘unofficial’, in which members of the victorious group hammer home their dominance in more aggressive acts of remembrance: contrast the celebrations of 1690 by Loyalist gangs compared to the British state. Memories can also be used to develop a sense of vengeful justice, as Larry Ray puts it, in which some group feels ‘good cause’ to attack another to avenge some supposed or real historical affront. Indeed Ray’s article on the reading list shows how senses of the past were used in the Balkans as part of the genocide that befell the collapse of Yugoslavia because some groups had a distorted notion of themselves as having ethnically pure homelands in the past which they wished to recreate. Notions of ‘historic homelands’ often lead to contested borders and thus to violence in the name of justice, revenge, loss or restoration. For these and many other reasons, memory is implicated in war. It is implicated in peace because memories of the communal violence hamper peace processes. They can do so in innumerable ways. Divided memories can lead to renewed outbreaks of violence, perpetuate senses of grievance amongst victim groups that increase the risk of such violence locally, distort perceptions of the fairness of the settlement and discourage tolerance toward the former enemy. When the new regime that emerges from the peace settlement is weak, its legitimation crisis may encourage the perpetuation of selective social memories and unofficial practices of remembrance that reproduce the old divisions and perpetuate the conflict locally. There is also the docsity.com problem of how to commemorate the victims in such a way as not to keep them locked in the wounds of war. I’ll say no more about victimhood since this is the topic of next week’s lecture, but the horse I’m sure is flogged to death: there is a problem for peace processes in how to remember the conflict, honour people’s sacrifices, while simultaneously moving people on to a non-violent future. Social memory is implicated in peace in a second way because, despite all that’s just been said, social memory can be used as a peace strategy. Indeed, it’s precisely because social memory is socially constructed, subject to manipulation and change – albeit slow – and affected by social context and social change, that various social practices that occasion and shape memory and remembrance can be devised to garner peace, if not also reconciliation. It’s to this point that I now turn: in short, social memory can be re-constructed to become a peace strategy and to help the maintenance of the peace process. How is this possible? It involves re-visiting, and where appropriate re-constituting, the past for the purpose of peace. There are a number of dimensions to this: • Forgetting to remember that which is divisive or inconvenient to the peace agreement • Correction of the distortions of the past that once fuelled divided memories • Historical re-envisioning of the conflict itself so that the way it is remembered changes • Recovery of memories, perhaps formerly denied or avoided, that illustrate unity or peaceable co-existence in the past rather than enmity • Developing new narratives of nationhood and symbolic structures that legitimise the new post-violence regime docsity.com addressed through various social practices that assist in the reconstruction of social memory. Civil society, which we talked of earlier as a key agent of social change and foundational to peace processes, can be mobilised to achieve these policy objectives, so that there is not a sole reliance on the new state. Indeed, some of the social practices are best dealt with by community processes rather than national or governmental strategies. What might they be? Atonement strategies, such as the ‘sorry day’ in Australia earmarked as a special Day of Atonement or Day of Reflection, programmes to facilitate reflexivity amongst communities, institutions and organisations about the conflict, the provision of mechanisms for making public apologies, like formal Truth Commissions, concerted campaigns, perhaps through religious and para-church organisations to address the issue of forgiveness. Citizenship education programmes. I have dealt with this in an earlier lecture; as a reminder, the point here is to equip citizens with the skills for living in the new society by various programmes that encourage tolerance, pluralism and recognition of cultural diversity. Re-remembering strategies, such as mechanisms to capture hidden memories that are functional to peace, re-visiting the distorted memories of the past, various story- telling procedures and truth-recovery projects, changes to the school curriculum and to history textbooks and to the mass media’s cultural mediation of history, public mechanisms to garner and support new frames of meaning and sense making through re-remembering. docsity.com Re-memorialising strategies, such as museums, exhibitions, memorials that celebrate peace, either through a focus on the pain of the past enmity (Robben Island/Holocaust museums) or which point toward a new future, the development of new symbols of commemoration, such as flags, public rituals, national holidays, and new sites for memorialising such as Centres for Remembrance or Reconciliation (buildings, places, heritage centres, even forests or parks devoted to peace). None of this is easy but various peace processes have implemented examples of these strategies. I suggest you consult the Report, on the reading list, of the independent Healing Through Memory Project in Northern Ireland as one example of what’s been suggested in one case. Any questions? docsity.com