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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.

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.

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 offers a critical analytic reconstruction of some of the main symbolic properties of annual UN Holocaust and Rwandan genocide commemorations since 2005. Applying a discourse‐historical approach (Wodak and Meyer 2010), it retraces how themes of guilt, responsibility, evil and redemption are woven together across annual commemorative performances in the hope of stabilizing shared patterns of cultural translation of the significance of these atrocities to globally dispersed communities. UN commemorative discourse characteristically links memories of Holocaust and Rwandan trauma in a ‘chain of communication’ with those of other episodes of brutality (e.g., Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur) chiefly to convey the continuity of human barbarity across time and endorse certain presuppositions regarding the fate of a fallen humanity in this more ‘post‐secular’ age. As scenes of mourning, UN commemorations unite participating international delegations in their expressions of grief for the victims of ‘preventable tragedies’ in the past but also, it must be said, their uncertainty regarding new horrors likely to occur in the future. The duty to remember is reiterated continuously as both a mark of respect to those who have already perished and as a warning of atrocities yet to unfold. This paper explores how the historical constancy of violence is interpreted by the UN through a detailed critical analysis of its recently inaugurated ‘remembrance through education’ programme aimed at a transnational collective learning from atrocity.