Localising Memory in Transitional Justice: The Dynamics and Informal Practices of Memorialisation after Mass Violence and Dictatorship

This collection adds to the critical transitional justice scholarship that calls for “transitional justice from below” and that makes visible the complex and oftentimes troubled entanglements between justice endeavours, locality, and memory-making. Broadening this perspective, it explores informal memory practices across various contexts with a focus on their individual and collective dynamics and their intersections, reaching also beyond a conceptualisation of memory as mere symbolic reparation and politics of memory. It seeks to highlight the hidden, unwritten, and multifaceted in today’s memory boom by focusing on the memorialisation practices of communities, activists, families, and survivors. Organising its analytical focal point around the localisation of memory, it offers valuable and new insights on how and under what conditions localised memory practices may contribute to recognition and social transformation, as well as how they may at best be inclusive, or exclusive, of dynamic and diverse memories. Drawing on inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches, this book brings an in-depth and nuanced understanding of local memory practices and the dynamics attached to these in transitional justice contexts. It will be of much interest to students and scholars of memory and genocide studies, peace and conflict studies, transitional justice, sociology, and anthropology.

Table of Contents:
General introduction Mina Rauschenbach, Julia Viebach and Stephan Parmentier PART I Memory and transitional justice International memory entrepreneurs’ prescriptions for the remembrance of the Srebrenica genocide: What implications for local understandings of collective victimhood? Mina Rauschenbach Transitional justice principles versus survivors’ experience: Conflicting interpretations in Kosovo case study involving missing persons and their memorialisation Melanie Klinkner and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers PART II Memory dynamics in transitional justice The micro-politics of remembering “the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi” in Rwanda: On the anonymous dead in Karongi district, western Rwanda Erin Jessee Bottom-up and thought-provoking sites of memory Anita Ferrara Informal commemoration in post-war Burundi: Exploring the usefulness and the limits of the concept Andrea Purdeková The struggle to remember: Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa Ingrid Samset PART III Localised memory in transitional justice Place-bound proximity at Rwanda’s genocide memorials: On coming home to the dead and the affective force of their remains Julia Viebach Missing people and missing stories in the aftermath of genocide: Reclaiming local memories at the places of suffering Hariz Halilovich Music, testimony, and emotional engagement in alternative memorial ceremonies in Palestine-Israel Luisa Gandolfo Epilogue: Localising memory and reinventing the present Brandon Hamber