Localising Memory in Transitional Justice

This book addresses the relationship between micro-level memory processes and their relationship to formalised transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions, official commemoration, national and international trials and reparation programmes.

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.

Contenu

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