Transitional Justice And Memory Politics In Contemporary Ethiopia

Ethiopia’s successive regimes have encountered challenges of implementing transitional justice mechanisms in post transitional periods. Tracing implementation of transitional justice mechanisms, how such attempts shaped memory politics and by reviewing the country’s contemporary history, the article shows that justice has mostly transpired in the form of punishing a political ideology than holding individuals accountable. The recording of history and understanding of the past events and memories also lack consensus. Moreover, entrenched ethnic politics has also made implementation of justice mechanisms and addressing issues of memory politics extremely challenging. Taking these into account, the article concludes that institutional ineffectiveness and entrenched ethnic politics have affected transitional justice processes and issues of memory politics in Ethiopia’s context

Memory Politics of the Far Right in Europe

In recent years, we have seen a significant increase of memory politics among far-right political actors. In public spheres across Europe, discursive repertoires and historical tropes that mythologize the past have been (re)articulated by far-right actors who construe themselves as the true heirs and bearers of national historical traditions and values. This special issue, comprising six research articles on French, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Serbian and German cases, adds to new scholarship on memory politics among the far right in Europe: empirically, by presenting a wide range of geographically and culturally distinct case studies, and conceptually, by shedding new light on the role of memory politics and the use of historical legacies as factors and context variables in various far-right mobilizations today. In particular, this new research shows how supply and demand-side dimensions of far-right memory politics are mediated through discursive performance by parties, leaders, protest movements and social media. Methodologically, these studies demonstrate how mixed-methods approaches can yield remarkable and sometimes counterintuitive findings. They point to aggressive new far-right instrumentalizations and weaponizations of the past which ultimately seek to rehabilitate nostalgic ethno-nationalism as part of a politically articulated authoritarian revolt against liberal democracies and cosmopolitan social change in Europe

The Quilombo as a Regime of Conviviality: Sentipensando Memory Politics with Beatriz Nascimento

Aiming at (re)thinking memory politics in contexts of ongoing total violence against non-white bodies, I propose, in this working paper, to engage with Maria Beatriz Nascimento’s multifaceted notion of quilombo. Once understood as alternative regimes of conviviality that entail existential (beyond material) aspects, Nascimento’s notion of quilombo enables critical access to the onto-epistemological basis on which memory politics generally takes place. After primary considerations about violence and the archives, I highlight three main aspects of Nascimento’s notion of quilombo to (re)think memory politics: (1) the introduction of a temporality that displaces underlying analytical assumptions of a linear, progressive and sequential time; (2) the idea of paz quilombola, which allows analytical space for “opacity” in the generation of knowledge; (3) the link between personal and collective intergenerational memory that, for Nascimento, requires the fostering of spaces of body encounters

Chad Elias, Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2018, 264 pages, paperback, ISBN 9780822347668, $25.95.

This book review examines Chad Elias' Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon

A Pragma-Dialectical Approach to Memory Politics: Spanish Contemporary Memory Politics, Populism Studies, and Argumentative Dialectics

This paper establishes a dialogue between populism studies, typologies of reconstruction of the past, and argumentative dialectics. The paper analyzes what types of argumentative strategies are employed in the context of the discussions regarding Spanish memory politics and how those strategies can be associated with typologies of re-elaboration of the past (Caramani and Manucci 2019). Building from argumentative dialectics (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004), the paper studies argumentation structures uttered after the endorsement of the 2007 Spanish Historical Memory Law and the proposal of the 2021 Draft Democratic Memory Law. Departing from the distinction between diverse strategies of re-elaboration of the past, namely, heroization and cancellation (Caramani and Manucci 2019), the paper questions if Spanish decision-makers’ rhetorical strategies and political decisions in the field of memory politics disclose the adoption of particular types of populist behavior. The paper claims that the argumentative tactics used, in the domain of memory politics, by Spanish left-wing leaders reveal the adoption of a heroization strategy. In contrast, the rhetoric of Spanish right-wing leaders favors a strategy of cancellation. The paper also claims that, in the Spanish case, mainly from 2018 onwards, the adoption by Spanish left-wing leaders of a heroization strategy had two consequences. First, it did not reduce the cultural opportunity structure for right-wing populism. Second, it fostered a cultural opportunity structure for the affirmation of left-wing populism. The paper selected argumentative dialectics as a methodological framework (Van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004). The paper discusses the scientific significance of analyzing memory politics through the lenses of populism studies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

National Socialism, Colonialism and Antifascist Memory Politics in Postwar Dutch–South African Exchanges

This contribution addresses the dynamics of Dutch memory politics in the Dutch–South African exchanges between 1948 and 1975. The 1948 election victory of the Nationalist Party and their Apartheid policies brought about painful memories of Nazi attrocities, antisemitic persecurtion and anti-fascist struggle in the Netherlands. Soon, however, the Dutch government acquired an interest in highlighting a different history in relation to South Africa when referring to the notion of stamverwantschap. This implied an ethnic–racial identification of the Dutch with White, Nationalist South Africans on the basis of an alleged shared history of Dutchness. These memory politics changed after ‘Sharpeville’ in the 1960s. Once more memories of racist exclusion during National Socialism were revived in relation to the Apartheid regime. These memories facilitated and were strengthened by a growing anti-Apartheid movement. Yet, in their effort to be ‘on the right side of history’, the grassroots memory politics of the anti-Apartheid movement ignored the Dutch colonial implementation of racial inequality and its effects, not only on the Apartheid policies but also in contemporary Dutch society. This article aims to explore spaces for a synergy between narratives of historical catastrophe such as colonialism and Nazism, both with deep historical and intellectual roots in many parts of the world

Staging the ‘Forgotten Genocide’ in the Aftermath of the Dirty War: Una bestia en la luna by Richard Kalinoski

The most recent Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983) and the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923) share legacies of state-sanctioned denial and impunity, which have left survivors and subsequent generations grappling with issues of memory and mourning. The intersection of these two collective memories in Argentina, home to a sizable Armenian population, offers a glimpse into how post-dictatorial and post-genocidal memory politics have borrowed from and shaped each other. This article examines the positive reception in Argentina of Una bestia en la luna by the U.S. playwright Richard Kalinoski. While the work treats the struggles of two survivors of the Armenian Genocide and sets its dramatic action in the U.S., Kalinoski’s use of photography to warn against the dangers of silencing memory engages non-Armenian spectators in postdictatorial Argentina

Towards a resonant theory of memory politics

It is argued that Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance provides memory activists (those actors engaged in memory politics) with both a normative justification and qualitative metric by which sites of memory may be compared and evaluated. Resonance is a plausible candidate for an assessing concept on the grounds that there is overlap between Rosa’s sociological approach and the implicit appeal to resonance in the memory studies literature

“Christian Stalin” – The Paradox of Contemporary Georgian Politics

The following study sets as the starting point of analysis the paradox which one can observe in contemporary Georgian public space. Religious discourse refers to Stalin as a believer and even talks of his contribution to the revival of Christianity in the Soviet Union, despite the vast historical evidence suggesting otherwise. A considerable part of the Georgian population expresses respect or sympathy towards this historical figure. In this research, it is argued that explanations stemming from memory politics, nationalism or from the attempts of turning the image of Stalin into a commodity, fail to substantially address the puzzle and shed light on the phenomenon. Hence, the following study proposes a chain of signification developed within the discourse theory as a theoretical and methodological tool for looking at these developments. The discourse on national identity with Orthodox Christianity as a nodal point explains the possibility of such an image, religious Stalin, coming into existence