Past Violence Research Articles

Remembering and dealing with violent past: diasporic experiences and transnational dimensions

ABSTRACTMuch of the world's migration today is driven by civil wars, armed conflicts, genocide and other forms of large-scale violence. These experiences have long-lasting effects on individuals who are forced to migrate and rebuild their lives in new contexts, while coming to terms with the violence they have experienced. The papers in this special issue explore the transnational and transgenerational effects of the violent conflict, focusing on how diasporic communities deal with the memories and legacies of the violent past; how these legacies shape the processes of their integration into new contexts of residence and other dimensions of diasporic existence; and how they affect generations after. The introduction to the special issue discusses some of the findings, highlighting common patterns and themes that emerge from the eight papers and discussing them in the context of scholarship on diaspora, transnational migration, conflict, intergenerational transmission, and memory.

Memories of violence in the Rwandan diaspora: intergenerational transmission and conflict transportation

ABSTRACTHow are memories of a violent past in the country of origin reproduced, contested and reinterpreted by younger diasporic generations? And what consequences do processes of memory transmission of a violent past have on younger generations’ identities and patterns of mobilisation? Based on an exploration of the transmission of memories of the 1994 genocide in the Rwandan diaspora in Belgium, this article demonstrates that the intergenerational transmission of conflict memories shapes the mobilisation of second-generation diasporans in significant ways, and largely explains patterns of conflict transportation in the country of residence. However, a reframing of issues related to Rwanda’s past, as well as a reorganisation and rethinking of diaspora cleavages and/or solidarities, from one generation to the next can also be observed. Such patterns can be explained by the need to translate memories of a painful past so that they can make sense and resonate in the country of residence.

“The Truthfulness Lies in the Process, Not the Outcome” Using Artistic Practices to Further Truth-Telling and Memorialization in the Philippines

The Philippines have never known a unified state-sanctioned narrative about the violence that happened during the Marcos dictatorship. In order to resist ongoing disinformation campaigns that seek to erase evidence and memories of past violence, various institutional and civil society actors are currently initiating interventions in the domain of truth and memorialization. Notably, artists, curators, and creative professionals are engaging in various kinds of so-called ‘narrative documentation’ and ‘narrative change-making’. Several of these initiatives mobilize spatial dynamics and co-created processes to facilitate more complex forms of truth-telling and memorialization, which foreground complexity and ambiguity, and which prompt more engaged forms of truth-listening. This article zooms in on a specific project that mobilizes traditional artisan and artistic techniques and forms to revisit women’s experiences of historical and ongoing violence by crafting layered and ambiguous narratives about harm. In doing so, the Weaving Women’s Words on Wounds of War project seeks to further memorialization, truth-telling, and truth-listening about gendered violence. Through an analysis embedded in scholarship on memory, truth, and artistic practice, I argue that it is the generation of ambiguous and complex narratives that invites an active and relational type of engagement and listening. This holds potential for resisting the erasure of complex forms of violence, both in the context of the Philippines, as well as in other contexts where truth or memorialization initiatives may be incapable of capturing the gravity of lived experiences of violence or of facilitating genuine listening.

Discerning risk-takers from avoiders: Which teachers are more likely to support teaching about the violent past in Ambon, Indonesia?

In 2005, Kitson and McCully introduced the ‘risk-taking’ continuum, representing the multiple ways in which teachers in post-conflict societies deal with the history of conflict in the classroom. ‘Avoiders’, at one extreme, refrain from teaching the violent past, while at the other extreme ‘risk-takers’ analyse multiple perspectives on what happened and why. Since their seminal study, scholars have increasingly studied the challenges and opportunities related to teaching the violent past. Yet, so far no study has empirically tested and applied the continuum. Drawing on a survey of 558 secondary school teachers in post-conflict Ambon, Indonesia, we analyse the proportion and characteristics of ‘risk-takers’ as compared to ‘avoiders’. Our results show that ‘risk-takers’ represent a slim majority. While ‘risk-taking’ is associated with political interest and higher levels of education, teachers who suffered much harm during the conflict, whose students belong to a religious group other than theirs and/or those who think conflict causes have been addressed are less supportive of conflict history teaching.

Rising above the ashes: Sustainable development goals and the intersections of peace education amid a violent past.

For the sake of promoting peaceful and inclusive societies and building accountable and inclusive institutions, what can peace leadership educators do in the Here and Now to implement equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities? This question is raised within the context of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of several former Indian Residential Schools across Canada. Emerging from the responses to the question raised, the authors offer a peace education model that includes four distinct yet interconnected aspects for college student leadership educators (i) be principle-centered; (ii) be courageous in challenging questions asked, (iii) be purposeful by enabling safe spaces where learners' stories can be told and heard, and (iv) be imaginative by choosing hope rather than despair.

Remembering through possessed treasures? Landscapes and memories of societal violence in contemporary Turkey

ABSTRACT May narratives of treasures be interrelated to remembrances of past societal violence? Attending to imaginations of and hunts for treasures across seemingly natural interfaces, this article explores these practices not simply as quests for material riches but as occasions through which past societal violence is recounted in the present across human and non-human assemblages. The article engages with two interrelated domains of scholarly debates. The first is the emergent field of scholarly discussions and presumptions about the ways in which past conviviality, displacement, and violence (both by civilian groups and state forces) are remembered by ordinary people who identify as part of the Turkish-Muslim majority in contemporary Turkey. The second, and much wider, scholarly debate the article aims to contribute to focuses on the way non-human entities exert a forceful (psychosocial and political) effect on social relations, which, in turn, invites us to rethink the interrelationship between humans and non-human entities.

(Un)Earthing violence: Ecologies of remembering, forgetting and reckoning

ABSTRACT This article and the special issue it introduces contribute to existing debates on forgetting, remembering, and reckoning with past violence by bringing them up to date with violence's materially and spatially expansive workings that recent scholarship on sovereignty and ecology has highlighted. Thinking with scholars who have considered organized violence as the maker of ‘weathers', ‘atmospheres' and ‘ecologies', we engage critically with how the Earth in all its relationally constituted expansiveness has become central to remembering, forgetting and reckoning with violent histories. We conceptualize practices that evidence this centrality as ‘(un)earthing'. The concept has both empirical and methodological implications. It obliges us to reconsider longstanding methodological tendencies to privilege either the earthly (i.e., the secular, the positivist and the rational) or the unearthly (i.e., the spiritual, the supernatural and the irrational) over the other. We reconsider these tendencies critically by using the concept of (un)earthing to interweave empirical analyses of magic, haunting and ufology with those of farming, exhumation and burial. The special issue spans various contemporary contexts where practices of ‘(un)earthing’ address – whether directly or indirectly – the legacy of political (especially colonial and racial) violence, ranging from the United States, Colombia and Chile to South Africa, Turkey and Austria.

Legacies of Survival: Historical Violence and Ethnic Minority Behavior

How is the electoral behavior of minorities shaped by past violence? Recent studies found that displacement increases hostility between perpetrators and displaced individuals, but there has been paltry research on members of surviving communities. We argue that the latter exhibit the opposite pattern because of their different condition. Violence will cause cross-generational vulnerability, fear and risk-aversion—leading the surviving communities to seek protection and avoid conflict by signalling loyalty and rejecting nationalist movements. In their situation as an excluded minority in the perpetrators’ state, they will be more likely to vote for out-group parties. Exploiting exogenous battlefield dynamics that created inter-regional variation in the Palestinian exodus (1947–1949), microlevel measurements that capture the damage of violence, and an original longitudinal data set, we show that Palestinian villages in Israel more severely impacted by the 1948 war have a much higher vote share to Jewish parties even 70 years later. Survey evidence further supports our theory, revealing that this pattern exists only for members of the surviving communities, and not among displaced individuals. The findings shed new light on the complex social relations that guide political decision-making in post-war settings and divided societies that suffer from protracted conflicts.

Facing protests in Serbia: patterns of new competitive authoritarianism

ABSTRACT Recent literature suggests that the competitive authoritarian regimes emerging in the twenty-first century are more subtle and nuanced in comparison to the old regimes of the 1990s. Aiming to understand these differences in greater depth, this article explores how new competitive authoritarian regimes react to mass protests. The article focuses on the case of Serbia, a country where protests have been widespread both during the old regime of the 1990s and the current regime. Analysing five protests waves in the past decade, we were able to identify three dominant strategic interactions of the regime with the protests, all of which contrast significantly with those employed by the old regime. First, in contrast to protest bans and oppression mechanisms used by the old regime, the new regime tends to allow, and strategically ignore protests. Second, while in the past police violence was widespread, there is an apparent police absence from the protests nowadays. Finally, there is a clear difference in the ways the two regimes portray the “Others”. While in the 1990s the international enemies were clearly identified and explicitly evoked, the new regime tends to make vague and contradictory claims about diverse but unspecific international and regional enemies behind protests.

The Perpetrator's Allegory: Historical Memories and the Killings of 1965

Abstract: Joshua Oppenheimer's diptych on the legacy of the 1965 anti-communist killings in Indonesia provides scholars and researchers with insights into the lives of the victims and the so-called perpetrators. Several publications and academic volumes have sprung forth from this but remain still ham-strung as that their analysis remains tied to that of Oppenheimer's production. I propose to build on these discussions by asking: how do these perpetrators remember the killings of 1965? From a preliminary analysis of data available, I posit that there is a certain level of 'ambivalence' over the roles they have played in the killings. As such, I posit that these supposedly 'evil-doers' suffer from a form of trauma and therefore complicates our categories of perpetrator, victim and bystander. In my paper, I also state that we can also glean from investigating perpetrator narratives, Indonesia's troubled path in dealing with a violent past. This paper will rely on oral interviews as well as media clippings from various sources in Indonesian. Perpetrators of the 1965 killings in Indonesia violated fundamental religious and social norms. In this article I explore their memories of those events, as revealed in their narratives and oral statements many years later.

Alterable Geographies

Like plantation slavery, Indigenous servitude on Bolivian haciendas raises crucial questions about the afterlives of colonial subjection. Engaging questions of colonialism, unfreedom, and emancipation across the Americas, this article examines how Quechua Bolivians remake landscapes defined by continued material traces of subjection and abiding racial inequalities. Rather than inhabiting this landscape as one of passive historical repetition, Quechua Bolivians use narratives and spatial practices to alter landscapes—including elderberry trees where kin were whipped, high mountain lakes constructed by forced laboring kin, and ravines and valley crevices that offered routes of escape from indentured labor and political violence. Such practices point to a politics of lo abigarrado (the motley), a term used to describe people whose labor itineraries and affective attachments have not been constrained by the frames of Mestizo citizenship and timeless Indigenous rootedness to place. Through this spatial poetics, Quechua families thwart nationalist paradigms of propertied redress to forge alternate plotlines of emancipation based on keeping time, and places, open to the demands of a violent past.

Envisioning Pre-service English teacher education in Colombia as political action

This reflective article explores the need to revise the education of pre-service English teachers to place critical and political dimensions as central components in the education of future teachers. The author presents a brief critical overview of some key historical events in Colombia that have taken place mainly during the last sixty years. Two national educational proposals that aim to promote peaceful human relations and knowledge of the country’s historically violent past (Cátedra para la Paz and Estándares de Competencias Ciudadanas) are also described. Two complementary approaches to English teacher education are discussed as possible alternatives to enacting teacher education from a political and critical stance (Teacher Education for Social Justice and Critical Teacher Education). Finally, three trends in English teaching and research in Colombia are described as a way to illustrate some of the ways in which different scholars have enacted English teaching as part of a political and critical endeavor. The author concludes that in order to contribute to a more just, equitable, and peaceful country, pre-service English teacher programs must prepare prospective teachers committed to a process of social, cultural, and political transformation of the local realities of Colombia.

Naming and framing victims: Identity, ‘usable’ victimhood, and the spectral turn in transitional justice

Drawing from the literature on victimology, memory studies, and transitional justice, this article critically examines how representations of victimhood in post-conflict memory activism are rooted in contemporaneous claims-making. Using the collective remembrance of the events of August 1969 in Belfast as an empirical case study, it argues that memory activism centres on ‘usable’ victims whose victimhood can be seamlessly mapped onto preferred interpretations of the past in furtherance of post-conflict claims-making. Acknowledging the recent ‘spectral turn’ in transitional justice, the article explores how selective remembering and forgetting and the instrumentalization of selected identities through memory activism can transform otherwise problematic spectral figures into ‘usable’ victims. Once they have become ‘usable’, these victims become embedded in grassroots memory activism because they speak to claims-making over post-conflict truth and justice, the causes and consequences of past violence, and the post-conflict treatment of certain constituencies.

Justice Now and Later: How Measures Taken to Address Wrongdoings during Armed Conflict Affect Postconflict Justice

ABSTRACT∞ Transitional justice has become a default response when rebuilding postconflict societies. Indeed, to reconcile and move forward, it is argued that societies need to confront the violence of the past. But what factors influence when and how past violence will be addressed? We argue that judicial and quasi-judicial processes initiated while armed conflict is ongoing have a substantial impact on the judicial policies pursued once conflict has ended. Through an analysis of during- and postconflict justice in Colombia since 2000, we demonstrate that a history of addressing human rights violations makes it more likely that transitional justice will be adopted given three mechanisms: policy precedent, institutional repertories and public expectations. We analyse this relationship through global patterns of during- and postconflict justice since 1946. Our findings confirm the expectation that justice polices pursued (or not pursued) during conflict are a strong factor in understanding how the past will be addressed post conflict.

Addressing psychosocial trauma in post-conflict peacebuilding: Emotions in narrative and arts-based approaches

Drawing on contemporary research on the nature and treatment of trauma in psychology, neuroscience and the emerging field of art therapy, this article adopts a psychosocial approach to examine the role that the arts may play in assisting individuals and societies to recover from the trauma of violent conflict and contribute to the establishment of sustainable peace. Taking a broad understanding of the arts to include a range of creative endeavours, it primarily focuses on non-verbal art forms, including but not restricted to music, painting, sculpture, drawing and dance, as well as traditional arts and crafts. It demonstrates that many art forms have the potential to make specific contributions to the amelioration of conflict-related trauma by addressing pervasive non-verbal memories that typically stand outside the remit of more conventional psychosocial practices, such as truth-telling and storytelling. They do so, it argues, by providing a means of expressing, evoking, regulating and transforming the emotions in ways that allow individuals and societies to confront and acknowledge their violent pasts, develop supportive relationships in the present and draw on their creativity to imagine a better future.

Early warnings and slow deaths: A sociology of outbreak and overdose.

In this paper, we offer a sociological analysis of early warning and outbreak in the field of drug policy, focusing on opioid overdose. We trace how 'outbreak' is enacted as a rupturing event which enables rapid reflex responses of precautionary control, based largely on short-term and proximal early warning indicators. We make the case for an alternative view of early warning and outbreak. We argue that practices of detection and projection that help to materialise drug-related outbreaks are too focused on the proximal and short-term. Engaging with epidemiological and sociological work investigating epidemics of opioid overdose, we show how the short-termism and rapid reflex response of outbreak fails to appreciate the slow violent pasts of epidemics indicative of an ongoing need and care for structural and societal change. Accordingly, we gather together ideas of 'slow emergency' (Ben Anderson), 'slow death' (Lauren Berlant) and 'slow violence' (Rob Nixon), to re-assemble outbreaks in 'long view'. This locates opioid overdose in long-term attritional processes of deindustrialisation, pharmaceuticalisation, and other forms of structural violence, including the criminalisation and problematisation of people who use drugs. Outbreaks evolve in relation to their slow violent pasts. To ignore this can perpetuate harm. Attending to the social conditions that create the possibilities for outbreak invites early warning that goes 'beyond outbreak' and 'beyond epidemic' as generally configured.

Statute of Limitation on Civil Actionfor Child Sexual Abuse in the United States

In the case of sexual infringement against a minor, even if the victim muster up the courage to face the memory of past sexual violence and try to heal the wounds through legal remedies after becoming an adult, the civil statute of limitations has expired since the sexual infringement occurred long time ago. There is a problem of not being able to file a lawsuit due to the statute of limitation. In particular, in the case of sexual infringement against minors, in many cases, the perpetrator is a family member, teacher, religious person, etc. The victim, a minor, is economically and emotionally dependent on the perpetrator, so they do not easily think of filing civil lawsuits even as adults. Fortunately, South Korea established Article 766, Paragraph 3 of the Civil Act in 2020, and legislative improvements have been made so that the statute of limitations does not proceed until a minor becomes an adult in the case of sexual infringement. However, despite these good intentions, there are still limits to the relief, so this article will examine the US system. First of all, in the United States, state and federal laws operate different statute of limitations, and since the 1980s, the discovery rule has been applied so that victims can file lawsuits even after a considerable amount of time has elapsed after they become adults. For example, if the victim of a sexual assault is a minor and the victim has not yet discovered the injury after reaching adulthood, from the time he or she discovers the injury and the causal relationship between the injury and the sexual assault Legislative examples such as the requirement to file a claim for damages within four years reflect the discovery principle. However, despite these laws, there are many cases where the requirements are not met, and the relief of victims has not been smoothly carried out. Thus, California and New York State further extended the statute of limitations, and furthermore, through window legislation, even if the statute of limitations had expired, a period of one or two years was allowed to file a civil lawsuit. This legislation provides an opportunity to sue the victims of Jeffrey Epstein's decades of sexual exploitation of minors. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the Windows Act is not unconstitutional. While retroactive legislation is “an identifiable injustice”, civil actions based on sexual abuse of minors are rather reasonable in light of the injustice done to the victims. Under these retroactive legislation, some religious organizations are actively raising their own funds for the relief of victims, and are paying settlements on the condition that they do not file a lawsuit against the religious organizations. The basis for such retroactive legislation is that if society has previously borne the cost of damages incurred to the victim, the perpetrator must bear the cost.

Haunted by the Past: Understanding History and the Aftermath of War in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Abstract This article explores the spectral presence of the past in the form of skulls and emotional trauma in a story about a country ravaged by a protracted war. It analyzes Anil’s Ghost (2000), a novel by Michael Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan Canadian writer renowned for constructing revisionist and fictional historiographic narratives. The novel speaks about a phase of the ethno-nationalist civil war in contemporary Sri Lanka, and the article expounds on the deconstruction and understanding of war and history as represented in this piece of fiction. In deprecating a unilateral and cohesive representation of history, the novel presents multiple voices and subverts the notion of a single truth, thereby challenging the unity and logic of representing history in fiction. It also highlights the lingering effects of past violence and buried memories haunting the present for the purpose of closure in the form of splintered personal memories resurfacing at random moments.

Re-emerging memories: humanitarianism and sovereignty in the Târgu Jiu Camp

This article briefly charts the debates surrounding the afterlife of a heritage space of political violence, the Târgu Jiu camp in Western Romania, and locates the ensuing narratives in the current contestations of the liberal democratic consensus in Central and Eastern Europe. The camp was an important Holocaust site and an equally relevant space for the early communist movement. Contrary to similar sites where competing interpretations of these histories are at play, this camp has been largely absent from debates on public memory of past political violence nationally. The significance of this space for local political history has been silenced. This article concerns itself with the long dynamic of silencing difficult heritage, its causes and implications and the selective perspectives on certain histories it entails. Târgu Jiu is a microcosm of this entanglement. Emerging in Romanian media and public debate at the time of the 2014 “refugee” reception crisis, this newly retrieved collecting memory of the camp capitalized on a history of past internal European displacement, Romanian victimhood and a sense of persecuted national sovereignty. Silencing made room for newer selective histories of this heritage space. Specifically, the complex history of the camp was appropriated into a type of politics of memory that reconfigures narratives about “liberal” values in the region. This article discusses the processes through which liberal, “European” values are appropriated and instrumentalized for the very opposite principles.

Beyond the National Museum Paradigm: Troubled Past Vernacular Representations in Central and Southeastern Europe

AbstractAs nationalist and populist rhetorics have gained momentum in Central and Southeastern Europe, there is an urgency to disentangle the historical narratives and political agendas displayed by national museum paradigms. And yet, equally significant is the urgency to illuminate the strategies and mnemonic devices through which the past is rendered worthy of commemoration, both in those memory cultures that come to life in opposition, or those which are complementary to the national museum’s paradigms. In line with these considerations, this special issue addresses the vernacular dimension of public memory, with a special focus on those memory cultures instantiated by mnemonic actors who do not necessarily possess the public epistemic authority to materialize their narratives about violent pasts as official memories.