Genocidal Nationalism: A Social Memory Study

Memory, truth and victimhood in post-trauma societies John D Brewer

The intensification of organized violence with globalization has created new wars (Kaldor, 1999) and transformed old ones (Moore, 2000) to fundamentally alter the focus in social science on genocidal nationalism (Shaw, 2003). The new interest in social science with memory, truth and suffering (on the latter see Wilkinson, 2004) can be attributed to the negative impact that several cases of genocidal nationalism have had on our notion of late modernity as enlightened and progressive (Bauman, 1989). The discovery of memory in social science is really the return of genocide to contemporary experience. Theories of nationalism have always been sensitive to the link between nation,
Psychological healing and relationship building have direct social benefits but social memory also needs to become an object of policy management in its own right and be addressed through various social practices that assist in the reconstruction of social memory. Civil society, which is a key agent of social change and foundational to peace processes, can be mobilized to achieve these policy objectives, so that there is not a sole reliance on the new state. Indeed, some of the social practices are best dealt with by community processes rather than national or governmental strategies. Four strategies seem
But other truth commissions have been less generous than South Africa’s. The Chilean Commission, for example, focused only on the disappearances and not on Chilean human rights abuses, although the El Salvadorian commission had a very broad mandate to address ‘serious acts of violence’ (for a comparison of the two see Ensalaco, 1994). The Northern Irish Victims Commission, not strictly a truth recovery process but which was set up as part of the peace accord, published a Report entitled We Will Remember Them, which completely excluded victims of state violence (for an account from the Chair of the Commission see Bloomfield, 1998) One response to control on the truth recovery process from above is to have community-based processes. However, these are mostly localized and focus on truth recovery in a particular neighbourhood or group, and thus tend to be quite deliberately partisan. One notable exception to this was Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification, better known as the Recovery of the Historic Memory Project (1999). This was set up by the grassroots and civil society in Guatemala under the aegis of the Catholic Church as a popular response to the weakness of the state’s own truth commission. The Report was launched in 1998 to great controversy – the co-ordinator of the project was assassinated two days later. The project addressed country-wide cases of murder and managed to be popularly