Article

Does individual and collective remembrance of past violence impede or foster reconciliation ? : from Argentina to Sri Lanka

Jill Stockwell

• International review of the Red Cross, Vol. 101, no. 910, 2019, p. 97-124

English

While the dominant human rights discourse on transitional justice constitutes a mix of reinforcing aims that seek to “make peace with” a violent past, this article complicates this notion by exploring how affective memories can prevent individuals from envisioning a future for themselves in which their individual and their nation’s past is safely left behind. In the context of ongoing debates over whether to remember or forget a country’s traumatic past, the article will show how affective memories of violence and disappearance prevail and disrupt the reconciliation paradigm, and need to be taken into account in transitional justice processes.

• Full text

• International review of the Red Cross / ICRC
• International review of the Red Cross [Vol. 101, no. 910 (Memory and war), 2019] / ICRC