What made the Punjab particularly susceptible to violence at the time of partition was that it was one of the most militarized regions of British India.  The Punjab had historically contributed a disportionate percentage of the soldiers of British India.  Well over half of all recruits from British India during World War I and World…

The partition of British India was one of the most traumatic events of the 20th century.  The chaos that followed the creation of the nations of India and Pakistan in 1947 displaced over 14 million people and claimed the lives of another 1 million.  Some of the worst violence occurred in the Punjab, one the…

Nottingham Trent University historian Jenny Wüstenberg, author of Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, argues that Berlin’s Topography of Terror Museum is emblematic of the dramatic transformation of Germany’s memoryscape beginning in the 1980s.  It was in the course of the 1980s that Germany pivoted from commemorating the German victims of World War II to the victims…

The beginnings of many nations are marred by traumatic histories.  This is certainly true for Turkey.  The modern Republic of Turkey began with the dispossession and even eradication of many of the ethnic and religious minorities who had lived for centuries within the borders of the Ottoman Empire.  The Armenian genocide is one of the…

After fleecing billions of dollars from the Philippines, torturing and murdering thousands during the period of martial law, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was removed from power through a popular uprising in 1986.  How was it possible that his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected as president in 2022?  Dr. John Lee Candelaria, from Hiroshima University, argues…

Just as Israeli-Palestinian relations reached a new low in the early 2000s, memory activists in Israel embraced a strategy of confronting the past to resolve the crisis in the present.  Dr. Yifat Gutman, author of Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine, discusses how memory activists tackled the taboo subject of 1948. …

A few months after his Justice and Development Party or AKP won Turkey’s general elections in 2011, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on his fellow citizens to confront the past.  In the years that followed several prominent sites of state sponsored violence targeting ethnic and religious minorities and former political opponents of the…

Through her research on Syria, SOAS, University of London Professor Salwa Ismail argues that violence needs to be understood as a deliberate method of rule.  Author of The Rule of Violence: Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria, Ismail cautions us not to reduce regimes that perpetrate heinous human rights violations to despotic, backward, cultures of…

In October 1967 Nigerian federal troops slaughtered hundreds of innocent civilians in the town of Asaba.  Elizabeth Bird, anthropologist and Professor Emerita at the University of South Florida, argues that the Asaba massacre wasn’t just one of the many atrocities committed during the Nigerian Civil War.  It was a pivotal event that prolonged a conflict…

In Memory and Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda, Tim Longman argues that the memory of the genocide has been instrumentalized by the long-ruling Rwandan Patriot Front or RPF.  By casting itself as the selfless liberator of the Tusti minority, the RPF has used the genocide to mask its own crimes, abuses of power, and political ambitions. …