Conflict, Violence and Memory NUBS 4.06
Jul 04, 2023 11:30 - 13:00(Europe/London)
20230704T1130 20230704T1300 Europe/London 1.16. War Narratives and Commemoration NUBS 4.06 MSA Conference Newcastle 2023 conference@memorystudiesassociation.org
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Circus Workers vs. Paris - How a small community memorial threatened Paris's monumental visions
Individual paperMemoryscapes (digital, locational, imagined) 11:30 AM - 01:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/04 10:30:00 UTC - 2023/07/04 12:00:00 UTC
My paper tells the forgotten story of the Memorial for the Fallen Circus Workers in Paris to show the broader picture of the interwar memory politics which shaped the present urban landscape and memorialscape of the French capital city. The interwar memory of WWI in Paris was controlled by political and military leadership, which intentionally attempted to keep the narratives of a "real war" (loss, suffering, injury) or power-challenging narratives (pacifism, communism) away from the capital to prevent more instability in this politically responsive community. 
The impact of this practice is visible in the Parisian cityscape and memorialscape. These memory politics resulted in commemorative places created for commanders and state leaders within the city and dismissed the counter-memories of the bereaved or veterans. These commemorative places were strategically located in the city, forming a military memory axis within the capital connecting memory districts and cross-cutting the community remembrance.
What happens when a smaller community plans to commemorate its fallen within the military axis of the city? How does location within the city affect memory? Who are the stakeholders in the debate? The paper tells the story of the conflict between a small commune bordering Paris and the city's governance over the valuable plain of  Porte Maillot. It defines three problems with the proposed community memorial - audience, design, and location- while revealing why these components contrasted Paris's great memory political ambitions.
Presenters
AK
Andrea Kocsis
Assistant Professor In History And Data Science, Northeastern University London
Cross-fertilizing memory studies and ancient history. The commemoration of conflict in Greek antiquity
Individual paperConflict, Violence and Memory 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/03 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/04 22:00:00 UTC
Anthropologist Mondher Kilani once said 'Tell me how you fight war, and I will tell you who you are'. I would also say 'Tell me how you commemorate war, and I will tell you who you are'. This is especially true for the ancient Greeks, who were not only engaged in an almost permanent state of belligerence throughout their history, but were also somehow obsessed with memory in general. 
Conflict was omnipresent in Greek antiquity. Both in people's everyday life and in the national and international political agenda, war was the core of the Greeks' experience of the world. Literary sources,   inscriptions and monuments testify to this centrality. Not only in the chain of events, i.e. in the perspective of the histoire événementielle, as according to the long-established approach of source criticism: on the contrary, as it appears clear now in the perspective of memory studies, war played a central role in the Greek communities' perception of history and of their own place in history, as well as of their self-representation(s) and sense of shared identity(ies). 
Several research trends which were developed around memory in different fields of the humanities (especially history, anthropology, and sociology) over the last few decades have deeply impacted on how we ancient historians conceptualize conflict in ancient Greece, how we interpret its forms of commemoration, and how we understand its role in the formation of Greek historical traditions. In turn, ancient Greek history as a discipline has contributed to the theoretical and methodological refinement of concepts from the field of memory studies, and has introduced its own specific euristic tools, such as H.-J. Gehrke's 'intentional history' (similar to J. Assmann 'mnemohistory', however shaped around some important constitutive features of Greek antiquity). In both directions (from memory studies to ancient history, and back) prominent attention has been devoted to the nexus between collective memory-ies and collective identity-ies, with special attention to war as a catalyst for changes into a group's self-conception.
My paper aims to give a little taste of the profound methodological renewal through which Greek history  has gone through over the past two decades thanks to the interdisciplinary encounter with memory studies. By focusing on a major case study, the Persian wars (the first 'Great war' in Western history, triggering a 'memory boom' comparable to that following WW1), my paper will discuss how they were commemorated, in different places and through different media, by the numerous involved Greek communities, how they provoked a profound change into their own self-representation, and how they triggered competing relations among the Greeks themselves. While doing so, the paper will highlight the main advantages in knowledge which are possible when approaching ancient history through the lens of memory studies. 
Presenters Giorgia Proietti
Research Assistant (part-time Contract), Department Of Humanities, University Of Trento
“On his way to the Gaelic Ground”: The use of the GAA to commemorate members killed in the NI Conflict
Individual paperConflict, Violence and Memory 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/03 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/04 22:00:00 UTC
The sports performed under the umbrella of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) can boast a sizable following. There are over 2,200 clubs on the island of Ireland (GAA, 2022) and 400 clubs worldwide (DoFA, 2017), with membership being in the hundreds of thousands as well as the organisation's premier competition, The All-Ireland Championship, inspiring approximately 1.5 million fans to annually pass through the turnstiles (GAA, 2022). The function of the GAA within Irish society extends beyond its sporting activities. It has been used to invoke collective expression of an Irish 'imagined community' (Anderson, 1991), by the Irish diaspora to retain a sense of 'Irishness' (Harkin, 2018), and as a platform for the Nationalist community within Northern Ireland/North of Ireland (NI) to publicly articulate experiences of mistreatment by British security forces (Hassan, 2005). It is the GAA within NI which this paper wishes to explore. More precisely, it will examine the use of the GAA in the collective remembrance of members killed in the conflict. The conflict in NI resulted in over 3,500 deaths in nearly 30 years of political violence. The GAA was not exempt from being impacted. On one level, it had members who were harassed, imprisoned, and killed. On another, political violence was perpetrated either at GAA clubs, or within close proximity. The cessation of political violence and progression into a transitional phase sparked a 'memory-boom' (Huyssen, 2003) in NI. Again, the GAA was not exempt as memory-makers utilised the organisation to perform collective remembrance. Mirroring wider societal divergences in collective remembrance of the conflict (Graham & Whelan, 2007), the GAA has been used in various ways to commemorate. This paper will detail three distinct ways: to commemorate a combatant actor as a civilian (Kevin Lynch); to memorialise a State victim marginalised within the official narrative (Aidan McAnespie); in the 'rehumanisation' (Robinson, 2017) of a civilian casualty (Terry Enright).
Presenters
MH
Micheál Hearty
Mr/ PhD Researcher, Transitional Justice Institute/ Ulster University
Memory Diplomacy and Competitive Memorialization: Turkey and the Armenian Genocide
Individual paperConflict, Violence and Memory 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/03 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/04 22:00:00 UTC
On April 24, 2015, while the Armenian genocide commemorations were taking place in Yerevan, Istanbul, and elsewhere on the hundredth anniversary of the genocide, the Turkish government held a transnational commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign. Traditionally a commemorative ceremony was held at Gallipoli on April 25, commemorated as Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand. However, in 2015 this ceremony was shifted to April 24. The Turkish government invited hundreds of heads of state, including the President of the Armenian Republic, to attend the Gallipoli commemoration. Many commentators rightly stated that this was an attempt to pitch the transnational memory of the Gallipoli against the transnational memory of the Armenian genocide in order to diminish the latter's impact by claiming the commemorative field. It was also a move to divide the international community and undermine the attendance to the genocide commemorations. 
In this paper, I would like to discuss Turkey's engagement with Anzac Day as a form of memory diplomacy. Drawing from recent studies of memory diplomacy (Graves, 2018; Bachleitner, 2019; McGlynn and Dureinovic, 2021), I argue that Turkey pursued international relations goals on the basis of a romanticized conception of the Gallipoli campaign and instrumentalized existing memory diplomacy relations to put up a competitive memorialization effort against the commemoration of the Armenian genocide. In developing this argument, I benefit from the perspectives provided by Macleod and Tongo, 2016 and Robins, 2020. The political establishment in Turkey employed memorialization discourses and practices to push its own agenda and suppress counter-memory demands. Adopting a zero-sum game model, the elites used the "shared memory" of the Gallipoli to ensure Australia and New Zealand's silence about the Armenian genocide. 
Presenters
Egemen Özbek
Dr./Academic Coordinator, Universität Duisburg-Essen
‘No victor, no vanquished’? Investigating Memory and Memorialisation of the ‘Biafra War’ (1967-1970)
Individual paperConflict, Violence and Memory 00:00 Midnight - 11:00 PM (Europe/London) 2023/07/03 23:00:00 UTC - 2023/07/04 22:00:00 UTC
The spate of civil wars that erupted in 'post-colonial' Africa and the underwhelming results of post-conflict interventions by international agencies, is a cause for concern. Civil wars, like other forms of violent conflict, often cause considerable damage to the physical heritage of affected communities. They also leave enduring legacies that transform the intangible heritage landscape, including ruptured values, distorted narratives, identity renegotiations and discordant memories. How does a civil war impact the knowledge of the past and memorialisation? Who and what is remembered or forgotten after a civil war, and why? When Nigeria's civil war (the 'Biafra war') ended in 1970, the then-military Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, gave the infamous 'no victor, no vanquished' speech, while committing to the Reconciliation, Reconstruction and Rehabilitation of the surrendering Biafran people – also known as the '3Rs' Policy. 52 years since then, it seems Gowon's ostensibly 'conciliatory' speech may have laid the foundation for the 'authorised forgetting' waged against the collective memory of the affected communities in Igboland, a major part of the defunct-Biafra region. There are still debates over what is certain or not about the events that happened before, during and after the war. These dissonant narratives continue to be at the centre of many socio-political and economic crises in present-day Nigeria. In this paper, I share preliminary investigations and results on a part of my PhD research which explores the complex relationship between heritage and the legacies of violent conflicts among the Igbo people in the context of Nigeria's civil war (1967-1970). This part of my research sheds light on the dissonances in the memorialization, canonization and representation of the war between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the people of Igboland, Nigeria. Understanding how memories are (re)presented and (re)calibrated after violent conflicts may contribute to effective post-conflict interventions policies by affected communities and international agencies.
Presenters
SO
Stanley Onyemechalu
PhD Student, University Of Cambridge
Research assistant (part-time contract)
,
Department of Humanities, University of Trento
Mr/ PhD Researcher
,
Transitional Justice Institute/ Ulster University
Dr./Academic Coordinator
,
Universität Duisburg-Essen
PhD Student
,
University of Cambridge
Assistant Professor in History and Data Science
,
Northeastern University London
PhD research fellow
,
HOGENT School of Arts, & Ghent University
 Seda Şen
Dr.
,
Baskent University
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