Building on Maria Mälksoo’s influential 2015 article “Memory Must Be Defended”: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security (Security Dialogue, 46(3), 221–237), the volume Defending Memory in Global Politics: Mnemonical In/Security and Crisis, edited by Erica Resende, Dovilė Budrytė, and Douglas Becker, examines contemporary politics of memory politicisation and securitization captured in eleven case studies, structured according to actor types (state versus non-state). The book’s primary conceptual proposition is predicated on the concept “mnemonic in/security”. As with the broader concept of ontological security, this term encapsulates the tensions between the imperative to safeguard a collective memory against perceived external and internal threats to create and stabilize collective identities, and the inherent vulnerabilities and marginalizations that accompany the selection of memories to be enshrined in such an effort. In this perspective, conflicts over recognition, or even mnemonic “battles,” are inevitable. Such struggles manifest themselves, for instance, when governments promulgate specific memory narratives that neglect or reinterpret historical wrongdoings against other states. However, they can also occur within political communities. In such cases, political actors—particularly following periods of internal crisis and violence—promote amnesia or, conversely, memorialization of historical events. The purpose of this promotion is to legitimize a political order and its hegemonic forces.
While this basic argument has been developed by other works in the increasingly visible field of IR memory studies, the main innovations of the volume are, on the one hand, the juxtaposition of case studies representing mainly contexts of the Global South and Eastern and Central Europe, which allows the reader to identify many important parallels compared to studies focusing on a single country or region. On the other hand, the volume takes seriously Maurice Halbwachs’ argument that memories are not, or at least not only, constructed by governments and public institutions. Because of the peculiar, intersubjective nature of collective memory, non-state actors can be at least as influential and relevant as public authorities, even though the latter may have vastly superior material and often ideational resources. This helps to overcome a long-standing conceptual and empirical bias resulting from the focus on official actors practiced by IR scholars of collective memory and to identify shifting power dynamics between state and non-state memory entrepreneurs. Thus, the volume responds to the thesis made in the recent volume Memory Fragmentation from Below and Beyond the State: Uses of the Past in Conflict and Post-conflict Settings, edited by Eric Sangar, Valérie Rosoux, Anne Bazin, and Emmanuelle Hébert (Routledge, 2023), which addresses the loosening grip of governments on the memory frameworks of their societies given the increasing memory agency of sub-state and transnational actors.
Despite the book’s title, the individual case studies show that the dynamics of memory are more than just struggles over identity formation and defense. In their chapter, Chagas-Bastos and Mézu argue, in line with Maja Zehfuss’ seminal work Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) that collective memory is not uniform, and that therefore its political significance does not lie in the defense and securitization of one memory against another, but rather in the sometimes coexisting, sometimes conflicting viewpoints and interpretations of the same historical event among social groups and institutions. As they illustrate for the case of the siege of the Colombian Palace of Justice in 1985, this insight is relevant for understanding why, even within the state, individual institutions can promote particular interpretations for bureaucratic and institutional interests, rather than for the purpose of protecting a “national” identity narrative. Furthermore, an exclusive focus on the binary struggle of “one,” rigid memory narrative against the other would make processes of dialogue and historiographical deliberation conceptually impossible. The fact that, as the authors note, debates over the interpretation of “the siege of the Palace of Justice served as a turning point […] accelerating national debates on legal and political reform” (p. 29) confirms the need to see memory dynamics not exclusively as a phenomenon of antagonistic, exclusionary narratives.
This is, of course, also Maria Mälksoo’s argument when she called, ten years ago, for the promotion of deliberation and criticized attempts to “resolve” antagonistic memory disputes through legislation and other coercive instruments. It is probably a reflection of the hardened international context that today some of the contributors seem to accept that memory narratives are inevitably securitized, locked into interstate conflict, and thus immune to pluralistic change. This is particularly evident in the chapters analyzing international memory struggles in Central and Eastern European contexts, such as those by Violeta Davoliute on public history in the Baltic states, Maria Armoudian and Olivia Guyodo on the politics of cultural heritage in Nagorno-Karabakh, Didem Buhari on the securitization of memory in Russia, and Dovilė Budrytė on the gendered construction of national heroes in Lithuania. Especially in the Baltic contexts, some contributors seem to suggest a rather dichotomous confrontation between “Russian” and “Baltic” memories, rigidified and unified by various types of state action but also by the constant perception of the Russian threat. The fact that these accounts were written in contexts of actual or potential violent aggression may explain why Neringa Klumbytė qualifies Mälksoo’s calls for the “acceptance of plurality of opinions, self-reflexivity and recognition of the other” as “utopian” (p. 235). But is it not also the task of independent social science research to explore ways of (remembrance) dialogue—especially in times when powerful political actors have an interest in concealing and obstructing them?
Other chapters in the volume show precisely such avenues. An interesting case is, for example, presented in the chapter written by Marat Iliyasov on the memory politics in contemporary Chechnya. Navigating between the competing needs of “loyalty to Moskow (sponsor of the regime) and […] loyalty to the nation, which harbors many negative sentiments to Russia” p. 46), Chechen leader Kadyrow’s memory politics illustrate the precarious balance that government actors have to find between accommodating societal memory claims—which are not malleable at will—and narratives that correspond to political interests and external constraints.
The remaining chapters, dealing with cases outside Europe, also go beyond the dichotomy of antagonistic memory struggles by showing how mostly non-state actors use communicative means to undermine and reconfigure hegemonic memory frames promoted by political actors. Interestingly, these chapters focus on cases that do not involve great power rivalries, including contexts of domestic identity crisis where social actors have to build communicative coalitions to “defend”—or rather integrate—their memory claims into national memory frames. Douglas Becker’s analysis of the contemporary politicization of memory struggles over the meaning of the US Civil War, Seinenu M. Thein Lemelson’s account of the (failed) attempts to commemorate political prisoners of Myanmar’s military junta, and Erica Resende’s and Izadora Xavier do Monte’s tracing of the successful memory entrepreneurship of the Brazilian Mothers of Acari remind us that the coexistence of divergent memories within a political community does not inevitably lead to securitization and ultimately violence, even when very real issues of ideational and material recognition are at stake. Particularly where there is a clear and stable concentration of power, including in states that retain the monopoly of violence, “ordinary” politicization can obviously be a more viable and perhaps more effective strategy for making marginalized memory claims progressively heard and accepted. Milana Nikolko and Klavdia Tatar’s chapter on the role of Ukrainian diaspora movements in the transnational dissemination of the Holodomor memory highlights that in an interconnected world shaped by global communication and migration, transnational actors can have discursive agency that rivals with that of national governments. One might add that the development of memory studies can in itself be seen as a factor contributing to the transnational recognition of hitherto marginalized memories.
This volume will undoubtedly advance the increasingly visible and diversified literature on the impact of collective memory on international relations and conflict. Unlike previous works, its consideration of the importance of non-state actors seriously engages with Maurice Halbwachs’ original theoretical agenda. Above all, despite its title, the book will serve as a valuable reminder of the multiplicity and complexity of memory dynamics in a contemporary context in which governments, at least compared to their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, are less and less able to maintain a “monopoly” on national historiography and the recognition of memory frames—something observed by French sociologist Johann Michel in his work Gouverner les mémoires: les politiques mémorielles en France (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2010). Does this evolution increase or diminish need to “securitise” memory? Michael Rothberg’s widely acclaimed analysis Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2009), which uncovers the possibility and merits of transnational, multi-directional memory constellations, reminds us that we should resist the temptation to qualify attempts to find ways of dialogue about memory as utopian or even dangerous. Indeed, the diverse case studies in this volume demonstrate the empirical occurrence of processes of memory construction that are more than binary struggles for hegemony, including in societies that are below the radar of global news attention. Ultimately, the book’s findings call for a cautious, reflective approach to the study of memory dynamics, avoiding a simplistic equation of memory interactions with exclusionary identity affirmations and impositions.
