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The article examines the limitations of methodological nationalism in the studies of social memory through a case study of memory of Stalinist repression in Belarus. It analyses how various social agencies – national and local activists, religious organisations, and international foundations – use the memory of repression for constructing post‐Soviet Belarusian identity by embedding their national representations in larger transnational frameworks. Drawing on the concept of ‘internal globalisation’, this article develops the idea of ‘internal transnationalism’ that suggests the importance of wider transnational configurations for the definition of nation. Internalized transnationalism does not make a national memory concept less nation‐centred, but it affects the choice of its cultural, political and civilizational framing. In contrast to methodological cosmopolitanism that implies rediscovering of the national as an internalized global, methodological transnationalism emphasizes the multiplicity of co‐existing transnational networks that can be invoked by social actors in their national mnemonic agenda. Using the case of the Kurapaty memorial site the article analyses how multiple framings of memory representations – the Belarusian national memory, liberal anti‐communist memory, contesting memories, such as Polish, Baltic and Jewish – compete and juxtapose in the space of social memory of political repression.

This article examines memory laws as a new form of social control, demonstrating the significance of cultural memory to law and society scholarship. It focuses on two Israeli laws that seek to control public debate by giving voice to one marginalized group in order to silence another. The article presents two forms of such utilization of the law: forced forgetting and the balancing of atrocities. Forced forgetting validates the memory of one group of people over another group. Balancing atrocities equates victims, pitting the suffering of one group against that of another for the purpose of dismissing the former’s claims for recognition and redress. The 2011 Nakba Law, an example of forced forgetting, dismisses the Palestinian minority’s experience to amplify the memory of the Jewish majority, while the 2014 Jewish Nakba Law creates an analogy between Palestinian redress claims and those of the Mizrahi Jews in order to balance the atrocities that these groups suffered. We show that both forms of control have limitations that create gaps between legislation and implementation, yet their political-symbolic impact is much greater.

This article argues that attempts to conceptualize the memory boom in amnesic societies have resulted in a clash between two theoretical stands: the approach which stresses the significance of remembering and the perspective which insists on the value of forgetting. It asserts that neither the value of memory nor the value of forgetting can be taken for granted and argues that any search for possible resolutions to the dialectical relationship between remembering and forgetting should be taken in the interest of cultivating a relationship with the past that enhances societal well-being in the present. Such reasoning leads us to judge the value of cosmopolitan memory in terms of its capacity to shape post-nationalist solidaristic political communities. The acceptance of the need to judge the act of putting the past in the service of the present requires us to question the contrasting projects of cosmopolitan citizenship: one claiming that remembering is vital for sustaining plurality and diversity of a global citizenship, and the other that stresses the importance of forgetting for the emergence of the politics of a global citizenship. After presenting contrasting views on the importance of memory for the development of cosmopolitan citizenship, the article searches for an approach to memory which is better suited to projects that aim to ensure post-nationalistic solidarity and human rights while protecting cultural rights, minority rights and personal identity.

Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory and on related theories of performativity and positioning, this article analyses the public confessions during the 1990s by three prominent state actors in Turkey about their direct involvement in state crimes against Kurds and left-wing political opponents. All three cases received significant media attention at the time. The aim of the article is not only to shed new light on those specific confessions by the perpetrators within the Turkish context, but also to develop further theoretical insights into the phenomenon of public confessions as such. Whilst confessions of this kind are often welcomed and portrayed as truth-statements that are cathartic and enable society to move forward, this analysis demonstrates that the reality is often more complex as the confessions in question tend to go hand in hand with a disavowal of individual responsibility by the perpetrators involved.

The institutionalization of distinct collective memories of hate and cultural traumas as law and bureaucracy is examined comparatively for the case of hate crime law. A dehistoricized focus on individual victimization and an avoidance of major episodes of domestic atrocities in the United States contrast with a focus on the Holocaust, typically in the context of the destruction of the democratic state, in Germany. Such differences, in combination with specifics of state organization and exposure to global scripts, help explain particularities of law and law enforcement along dimensions such as internationalization, coupling of minority and democracy protection, focus on individual versus group rights, and specialization of control agencies.

The theory of cultural trauma focuses on the relationship between shared suffering and collective identity: Events become traumatic when they threaten a group’s foundational self-understanding. As it stands, the theory has illuminated profound parallels in societal suffering across space and time. Yet focusing on identity alone cannot explain the considerable differences that scholars document in the outcomes of the trauma process. Namely, while some traumas become the basis for moral universalism, generating a capacity to forge connections between an in-group’s suffering and that of out-groups, others have the opposite effect, leading to particularism and closure. Returning to the interdisciplinary literature on trauma, I argue for incorporating temporality as a twin pillar of the trauma process, distinguishing between acting out (reexperiencing a past event as the present) and working through (situating a painful event within historical context). A comparison of three U.S. sites of memory dealing with terrorism illustrates the distinction.

Some images stick out in the collective memory of mankind and become icons for a whole generation. Among the most forceful images of our generation are the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, on 11 September 2001. These attacks revealed a new face of terrorism at the dawn of the 21st century, with new targets and new means, intended to produce many indiscriminate victims and without any concern for the offenders to save their own lives. Since the dramatic events of September 2001, the academic literature has been flooded with books, articles, and reports about terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and new forms of violence, mostly from a viewpoint of political science and law. Yet, one can wonder if the attack on the twin towers was fundamentally different from the violent attacks on politicians and political targets by the left-wing terrorist groups of the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany or the Brigate Rosse in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s of the former century. These groups also used violent means against specific targets, with the objective of

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of “Hiroshima.” I also show that nationalization of trauma of “Hiroshima” involved a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other.

This paper examines how global interdependencies and the consolidation of a human rights discourse are transforming national sovereignty. Social researchers frequently address the supremacy of state sovereignty and the absoluteness of human rights as mutually exclusive categories. However, rather than presupposing that a universal rights discourse is necessarily leading to the demise of sovereignty, we suggest that an increasingly de-nationalized conception of legitimacy is contributing to a reconfiguration of sovereignty itself. Through the analytic prism of historical memories – which refers to shared understandings specific pasts carry for present concerns of a political community – we provide an explanatory factor for the salience of human rights norms as a globally available repertoire of legitimate claim making. While states retain most of their sovereign functions, their legitimacy is no longer exclusively conditioned by a contract with the nation, but also by their adherence to a set of nation-transcending human rights ideals. Legitimacy is mediated by how willing states are to engage with ‘judicial memories’ of human rights abuses and their articulation in cosmopolitan legal frames. Empirically, we focus on war crime trials and how legal inscriptions of memories of human rights abuses are recasting the jurisdiction of International Law. The readiness of states to engage with rights abuses is becoming politically and culturally consequential, as adherence to global human rights norms confers legitimacy.

This article focuses upon the disagreement between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth about how to characterize the relation between social suffering and recognition struggles. For Honneth, social and political conflicts have their source in the “moral” wounds that arise from the myriad ways in which the basic human need for recognition is disregarded in unequal societies. Fraser criticizes Honneth for the uncritical subjectivism of his account of social suffering that reduces social oppression to psychic harm. Fraser therefore redefines misrecognition not as a psychological injury but as “status subordination” understood as institutionalized patterns of discrimination and value inequality. My central argument is that while Fraser's critique of Honneth's subjectivist construal of recognition is largely justified, she falls into a counterveiling objectivism that prevents her from developing some of the central insights of her own paradigm. Her “non-identarian” rendering of recognition leads her to abandon an experiential or interpretative perspective that is associated with the idea of identity and, as a result, she cannot explain certain crucial aspects of political agency. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus is used to indicate a way beyond the naturalization of the cluster of emotions associated with social suffering that seems to be the inevitable consequence of Honneth's “ontology” of recognition (McNay 2007). At the same time, the experiential emphasis of habitus mitigates the objectivism of Fraser's dualist paradigm showing how some of its central insights can be taken further through a materialist redefinition of identity and agency.