Never Again? The Role of Memory in Reconciliation

This presentation will address the tensions related to the role of memory in processes of reconciliation between previously hostile groups. It will be argued that both memory and reconciliation are collective phenomena and that the relationship between them is deeply ambivalent. On one hand, a memory can be evoked in order to create a barrier to reconciliation, with the argument that the past was so difficult that no prospect of reconciliation seems feasible. On the other hand, the same memory can be presented as an inspiration for reconciliation, with suggestions that, without reconciliation, the horrors of the past could easily be repeated. While in the first sense memory is understood as a way to preserve the past (against reconciliation), in the second sense it is seen as a way to secure a brighter future (through reconciliation). This duality illustrates not only the diachronic character of memory, which involves both reconstruction of the past and imagination of a possible future, but also the complexities related to its moral and ethical aspects. This presentation will thus focus on memory as an inherently group-phenomenon that always presupposes a certain community in which memory is constructed and lived. Memory and reconciliation, in addition to being social processes, are further understood in the religious domain as spiritual values of profound importance. Therefore, the relationship between memory and reconciliation also requires special religious hermeneutics. The presentation will emphasize some of the complex relationships between socio-political and religious aspects of memory and reconciliation using examples from a field-study with religious leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina conducted in 2015 and 2016