Scores of young men and women were killed by regime forces during the Arab Spring in Egypt (2011–2013). Their photographs assumed iconic proportions, meandering online and off through countless acts of creative remediation. This essay examines the different kinds of social and political work that these photographs came to play during this period, including as indexes of the revolutionary cause and as mediators of revolutionary subjectivities at a distance. This essay departs from extant studies of visual cultures of secular martyrdom or funerary portraiture framed by notions of commemoration, and instead stresses contingent presence grounded in the specific liminal temporality of the revolutionary process. In this temporal limbo, photographs of martyrs often blurred conventional boundaries between representations and their referents. Established visual conventions of funerary portraiture were turned upside down, and portraits of martyrs were understood not as representations of the dead, but as alive and present, sometimes more alive than the dwindling group of dedicated revolutionaries.

Between 2014 and 2019, millions of people witnessed and participated in a mass of commemorative activities for the First World War. Millions of pounds were spent for projects that brought together academic historians, community groups, artists, schools and the general public. These projects have been reviewed in government evaluations, by arts organisations and universities. However, commemoration is highly context-specific, affected by the contemporary actors as much as the events commemorated. Since 2019, the pandemic and the ongoing financial crisis in Higher Education have undermined the strength of the research community and the arts and heritage sectors. The world is becoming increasingly polarised and new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence pose new challenges for our discipline. By 2039, we can expect that there will be increased public interest in commemorating the Second World War. This contribution reviews the learning from the commemoration activities between 2014 and 2019 to identify what we can apply to 2039 and how we can begin to prepare in our current environment.

In response to the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1897, Armenian immigrants held commemorative events in the US that concurred with their activism for the Armenian Question. Although largely overlooked in scholarship, these commemorative practices offer insights into the early history of this community and the memory of the late Ottoman state violence. We explore how American Armenians commemorated the Hamidian massacres, addressing this gap in scholarship. Specifically, we delve into the socio-political and cultural sphere, analyzing the agencies and narratives involved in these commemorative practices. Through a close examination of various commemorative forms, we find that the incentives of American Armenians went beyond simply honoring the victims. We argue that the motives of mourning loss and striving to prevent violence from recurring were intricately intertwined in the commemoration. Despite the unsuccessful outcome, the search for prevention remained an important driving force behind commemorating Ottoman violence in the following years. By integrating its memory into their public life, communal leadership aimed not only to foster social cohesion among Armenian immigrants but also to garner public empathy and sympathy within the host society, ultimately translating it into political support for the Armenian Question, which was believed could prevent future atrocities.

This paper examines the construction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as signifiers of “peace” in postwar Japan. It offers alternate ways of understanding the impact and significance of “Hiroshima and Nagasaki” in historical context and argues that national readings of the history of the cities obscure nuances in the local narratives of the atomic bombs in each place.

My maternal grandparents were from Warsaw. On one side, only my grandmother survived the Holocaust; on the other, my grandfather and his two brothers escaped together. My sense of family always included those who were lost to genocide. The absence has always been at least as visible as the presence. Ghosts. Shadows. Still images in stories. I knew they were there. Somehow. Somewhere. As of October 2024, these ghosts have a home, a place in the city, in their city of Warsaw, Poland. This was the last place they resided of their own free will. Their names are etched in brass, planted in concrete – stumbling stones or Stolpersteine, to be exact – to remind passersby of the last place they lived by choice in Warsaw. This public humanities/public art project reveals a lot about memory, monument, and meaning in a much-contested arena – the history of Jews in Poland.

In this essay I provide an account of a series of commemorative events held in Eastern Australia since the compound disaster of March 2011 occurred in Fukushima in Northeastern Japan. Individuals expressed transnational solidarity through the embodied experience of attending and participating in local events. Reflecting on these events reminds us of the entangled and mutually imbricated histories of Japan and Australia, and the ways in which various individuals and groups are positioned in the global networks of nuclear power and nuclear weaponry.

The Miike Coal Mine, extending across Omuta and Arao in Kyushu, was an engine for economic growth in Japan until the nation's defeat in World War II. In 1873, the Meiji government introduced convict labor in the mine. This arrangement continued after the government handed the mine over to a private company, the Mitsui Coal Mine. It was not until 1931, in the wake of the International Labor Organization's 1930 Forced Labor Convention, that convict labor was terminated. The history of convicts in the mine was not widely known for decades until a local group started restoring memories of it in the 1960s. This paper examines the social and discursive environment in which the recovered history of convict labor evolved.

In 1969, a group of Japanese veterans returned to New Guinea to find the remains of their comrades and conduct funeral rites, one of many such postwar missions to former battlefields. The group documented its search in photographs and published a book of these photographs in 1970. This article shows how the visual cues of the photographs functioned to blur the temporal distance from war and encouraged an emotional response in the viewers by contrasting the recognizable, shattered remains of the dead with the peaceful and ostensibly timeless environment in which they were now found. The photographs also reveal unequal power relations between Japanese veteran visitors and their New Guinean hosts, and the enduring nature of the veterans' colonial viewpoints. This article argues that the aim of the veterans in presenting these photographs to the greater public was to contribute an emotionally engaging argument against forgetting the sacrifice of veterans in the war, underlining the powerful mechanisms that allowed conservative alliances of veterans, bereaved families and politicians to bypass debates about war guilt by appealing instead to emotions connected to grief and mourning.

This paper, as a conclusion to this special issue, discusses approaches taken to memory studies of the First World War and what they can tell us about commemoration of the Asia-Pacific War. A lot of work remains to be done in connecting the historiographies of the two world wars of the twentieth century, but this is important if we are to fully understand the development of war and memory throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The First World War was an important reference point for those who fought in the second and founded practices of commemoration such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Based on my experience as a First World War historian, I address some of the important themes that this special issue on the Asia-Pacific War has raised, namely the image of the soldier, commemoration, the temporal memory of war and how an expanded geographic lens has altered our understanding of the Second World War in general.

Disaster commemoration serves as a moment to remember victims and honor survivors. In the case of 3.11, commemoration works differently. As a slow disaster, with radiation exposure and evacuation at the center of the story, 3.11 is not yet over. This places special importance on commemoration as a moment for memory, but also for ongoing commitments to research, justice, and health interventions for survivors.

This essay summarizes my argument in The History Problem: The Politics of War Commemoration in East Asia. The history problem is essentially a relational phenomenon that arises when nations promote self-serving versions of the past by focusing on what happened to their own citizens with little regard for foreign others. East Asia, however, has recently also witnessed the emergence of a cosmopolitan form of commemoration taking humanity, rather than nationality, as its primary frame of reference. When cosmopolitan commemoration is practiced as a collective endeavor by both perpetrators and victims, a resolution of the history problem will finally become possible.