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 offers a collection of innovative methodological approaches to Memory Studies in Russia and Eastern Europe. Providing insights into the relationship between memory and identity, the twelve chapters provide multidisciplinary analysis of how history is used to reinforce, remould, and reinvent national and group identities. This analysis includes a strong emphasis on interrogating the role of the researcher and the impact of methodology, exploring the field’s most pressing challenges, such as the subjectivity of remembrance, reception versus production of discourse, and the inclusion of marginal perspectives. By focussing on countries in which the past is highly politicised, including Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, Russia and the Baltic States, the volume also analyses the diverse – and often conflicting – ways in which historical narratives emerge from these states’ efforts to create new pasts that shape their respective visions of the future, with pressing ramifications across this region and beyond.

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 internal politics of the war that divided Angola for more than a quarter-century after independence. In contrast to earlier studies, its emphasis is on Angolan people's relationship to the rival political forces that prevented the development of a united nation. Pearce's argument is based on original interviews with farmers and town dwellers, soldiers and politicians in Central Angola. He uses these to examine the ideologies about nation and state that elites deployed in pursuit of hegemony, and traces how people responded to these efforts at politicisation. The material presented here demonstrates the power of the ideas of state and nation in shaping perceptions of self-interest and determining political loyalty. Yet the book also shows how political allegiances could and did change in response to the experience of military force. In so doing, it brings the Angolan case to the centre of debates on conflict in post-colonial Africa.

This volume explores the complex interrelation between risk, identity and conflict and focuses specifically on ethnicity, culture, religion and gender as modes of identity that are often associated with conflict in the contemporary world. It draws on theoretical perspectives as well as pays special attention to analysis of diverse case studies from Africa, Middle East, Europe, East and Southeast Asia and Latin America. Using various analytical tools and methodologies, it provides unique narratives of local and regional social risk factors and security complexities. The relationship between risk and security is multidimensional and perpetually changing, and lends itself to multiple interpretations. This publication provides a new ground for theoretical and policy debates to unlock innovative understanding of risk through analyses of identity as a significant factor in conflict in the world today. At the same time, it explores ways to address such conflicts in a more people-centered, empowering and sustainable way.

Since the end of the Cold War, numerous conflicts have emerged within the Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian space which have affected international relations and highlighted the need for effective strategies for conflict resolution and management. This book presents papers delivered at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW), Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Conflict Management, held in Bratislava, Slovak Republic, in June 2015. The authors of these texts are recognized authorities within their fields of expertise. Issues raised by the conflict in Ukraine were the main focus of the workshop, as they are of this book, but it also contains valuable information about situations in other countries such as the Republic of Moldova, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Belarus. The book presents an analysis of the theoretical background of conflict management and its relevance for multilateral security institutions. It explores various approaches to conflict management, discusses possible future developments, examines new aspects of conflict resolution and outlines the role of international organizations and civil society in these processes. Providing an overview of current thought in the field, this book will be of interest to all those involved in or connected with the processes of conflict management and resolution.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain, the renationalization of eastern Europe, and the simultaneous eastward expansion of the European Union have all impacted the way the past is remembered in today’s eastern Europe. At the same time, in recent years, the Europeanization of Holocaust memory and a growing sense of the need to stage a more “self-critical” memory has significantly changed the way in which western Europe commemorates and memorializes the past. The increasing dissatisfaction among scholars with the blanket, undifferentiated use of the term “collective memory” is evolving in new directions. This volume brings the tension into focus while addressing the state of memory theory itself.

History is a powerful tool in the hands of politicians, and can be a destructive weapon, as power over the past is the power to decide who is a hero and who is a traitor. Tradition, the remembrance of ancestors, experiences of previous generations are keys that unlock the doors to citizens’ minds, and allow certain ideas, visions and political programs to flourish. However, can history be a proper political weapon during democratization processes when the past is decisively divided from the present? Are the new order and society founded on the basis of some interpretation of the past, or, rather, are they founded only with reference to the imagined future of the nation? This book explores such questions through a detailed description of the use of remembrance policies during political transformations. It discusses how interpretations of the past served the realization of transitional objectives in countries as varied as Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, South Africa and Spain. The book is a unique journey through different parts of the world, different cultures and different political systems, investigating how history was remembered and forgotten by certain democratic leaders. Individual chapters discuss how governments’ remembrance policies were used to create a new citizen, to change a political culture, and to justify a vision of society promoted by new elites. They explain why some sore topics were avoided by politicians, and why sometimes there was no transitional justice or punishment of leaders of the authoritarian state. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore policies of remembrance, democratization, and the role of memory in contemporary societies.

The Vietnam War has had many long-reaching, traumatic effects, not just on the veterans of the war, but on their children as well. In this book, Weber examines the concept of the war as a social monad, a confusing array of personal stories and public histories that disrupt traditional ways of knowing the social world for the second generation.

Since gaining independence from colonial rule, most African countries have been struggling to build democratic and peaceful states. While African multiparty politics may be viewed as a democratic system of governance, in reality it is plagued by ethnic and regional political grievances that undermine meaningful democracy. By examining post-conflict institutional reforms in several African countries, this book sheds light on the common causes of violent conflicts and how institutional design can affect the conditions for peace and democracy in Africa. Focussing on conceptual and practical questions of designing ethnically and regionally inclusive state institutions and the way institutions are perceived by the citizenry Post-Conflict Institutional Design addresses political autonomy and control over resources, issues which are often key sources of ethnic and regional grievances. Crucially, it examines the meanings of institutional reforms as well ethnic and regional representation.