From the ashes of history: collective trauma and the making of international politics

Abstract

Adam Lerner's timely and insightful work, From the ashes of history, has ventured into a relatively new and exciting area of International Relations (IR) that links international politics and social psychology. Lerner has targeted a gap that exists within the IR literature on the political interpretations of collective trauma, bridging rationalist and critical scholarship in IR. This way, Lerner makes critical inroads into the subject, explaining how national elites narrate individual traumas and how they affect collective identities, thereby influencing international politics. With an interdisciplinary approach that relies on political sociology, IR, social psychology and history, the book explores collective trauma as a ‘multilevel crisis in representation’ with the ability to ‘inspire extreme emotions’ and ‘challenge trust’ (pp. 11 and 87). While drawing on the classical conceptualization of collective trauma as a cultural form, the author does not shy away from incorporating psycho-social manifestations of trauma. This framework informs Lerner's ‘narrative identity approach’, emphasizing how various powerful narratives of trauma shape and transform identities (see Jeffrey C. Alexander's Trauma: a social theory, Cambridge: Polity, 2012).