Ethics of Political Commemoration: Towards a New Paradigm (Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict) 3031315936, 9783031315930

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Ethics of Political Commemoration

Towards a New Paradigm

Hans Gutbrod David Wood

Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict Series Editors

Christine Cheng King’s College London London, UK John Karlsrud Norwegian Institute of International Affairs Oslo, Norway

This Palgrave Macmillan book series invites methodologically pluralist and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of peace and conflict. We aim to bring new knowledge and pathways for understanding conflicts and conflict actors. Thematically, we welcome monographs, strong edited works, and handbooks on peacekeeping, peacebuilding, trauma, war-to-­ peace transitions, statebuilding, violent extremism, corruption, non-state armed groups, global and regional organisations, and inter-­ organisationalism relating to conflict management. We are particularly keen on interdisciplinary work – especially where politics and international relations intersect with sociology, anthropology, law, psychology, geography, criminology, technology, gender studies, and area studies. And we are broadly interested in conflict writ large, beyond the bounds of civil and interstate war, stretching over into urban violence, sexual violence, post-colonial reparations, transitional justice, etc. Our goal is not just for your manuscript to be published, but to be read, discussed, contemplated, and acted upon. To that end, we seek research findings that are compelling, and writing that is memorable and immersive. The principal aim of this series is to provide educators and students, decision-makers, and everyday citizens with contemporary, cutting-edge thinking about the roots of conflict, international responses, and the conditions for just and enduring peace. The series includes unorthodox and cross-disciplinary approaches to these topics, as well as more traditional social scientific and humanistic monographs. We strongly encourage early-career scholars and innovative researchers – especially those from under-represented backgrounds – to submit manuscripts for review. All titles in the series are peer-reviewed and we aim to provide rapid and constructive feedback. We also welcome open access arrangements. For an informal discussion for a book in the series, please contact the series editors Christine Cheng ([email protected]) and John Karlsrud ([email protected]). For the correct copy of Palgrave’s book proposal form, please contact Palgrave editor Isobel Cowper-Coles, Editor for International Studies, isobel. [email protected]

Hans Gutbrod • David Wood

Ethics of Political Commemoration Towards a New Paradigm

Hans Gutbrod Ilia State University Tbilisi, Georgia

David Wood School of Diplomacy and International Relations Seton Hall University South Orange, NJ, USA

ISSN 2945-6053     ISSN 2945-6061 (electronic) Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict ISBN 978-3-031-31593-0    ISBN 978-3-031-31594-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Salwa Bugaighis (1963–2014) and all who fight for a better future.

Acknowledgements

A book on commemoration should acknowledge those who helped to set us on the path of thinking about these issues. For Hans, these include Michael Banks, Michael Donellan, and Philipp Windsor, who taught a remarkable and inspiring Ethics of War course at the London School of Economics, as well as Christopher Coker, who suggested that literature was essential to understanding how people see themselves. Erica Benner and James Sherr in different ways continued conversations that have helped keep the focus on these issues. Timothy Blauvelt, through the remarkable Works-in-Progress series, which will soon turn 15 years, and Oliver Reisner, through pointing at the unresolved legacy of history, have given key nudges at the right points. Regular conversations with Patrick Cohrs have reminded me of the larger arc of history. In the Caucasus, I would especially like to thank Lasha Bakradze who engaged me with his talk on the Stalin Museum; Salpi Ghazalyan, as a way of gaining a perspective on many issues in Armenia; Giorgi Kandelaki with his innovative project of Rebranding Stalin for SovLab; Tigran Matosyan who provided insights on how to approach history that helped to establish the larger context; Andrew North for chats by the water; Arpine Porsughyan, who was very good at providing the texture of what goes on; Isabella Sargsyan, who tipped me off in the first place; Gevorg Ter-­ Gabrielyan, for sharing his recollections that are now, fortunately, published; as well as many former colleagues at the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. In the vii

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last year, Andrey Babitsky, directly impacted by history, enriched the conversations in Tbilisi, a small consolation in dark times. The exchanges and work with Christian Illies at the University of Bamberg have kept me engaged with philosophy in ways that continue to inspire, as have colleagues and students there. As David below, I would like to thank my colleagues at Seton Hall University. I am particularly indebted to Ilia State University which has been a wonderful home for teaching, to Giga Zedania, who brought me on board, and to Giorgi Gvalia, who has consistently been helpful. As David, again below, I would like to especially thank my parents, who listened at the lunch table when, except for ideas in early iteration, we were mostly locked down. For David, acknowledgements include Zheng Wang, Andrea Bartoli, and Joseph Huddleston, colleagues at Seton Hall University and constant sounding boards. Zheng Wang in particular created room for the Ethics of Political Commemoration within the work of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies and guided how it could be applied in peace practice. The dedicated team at the Center, Maria Teresa Gonzalez Esquivel and Sushant Naidu, all contributed time and perspectives. Franklin Shobe, in particular, helped with invaluable research. Pariwish Abbasi was essential for pulling everything together in the last weeks. We are both grateful to the Russia and Eurasia team at Chatham House around James Nixey, who gave us a chance to present these ideas in October 2021 and receive useful feedback. Paul Murphy, Jonathan Coen, Graham Mathias, Gary White, Corina Megahed, and many others encouraged me over a longer arc to build my peace practice around the human experience of conflict, rather than idealised versions of what should be. A particular thanks go to the Libyan team at the Peaceful Change initiative, who worked with me to put the ideas for building a better peace into practice. The book draws on the experience of peacemakers who strive to build better futures from the rubble of conflict. They are numerous, some cannot be mentioned, and not all are with us now. Rajaa Altalli has talked to me late into the night on the trade-offs between justice and peace in Syria, especially for women; Farea Al-Muslimi plied me with cigarettes and inspiring rhetoric on the disruptive potential of Yemeni civil society to overcome militant leaders; Malik Al Windi, a teenage student fresh from holding a gun in the Libyan revolution (and now a doctor) helped me better understand Libyans and protected me from harm at least once.

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Perhaps the greatest thanks should go to my mum and dad, caring people, who raised me to be ethical and curious.

Context and Funding Other than the many inspiring ideas, conversations, and suggestions, this is our project. While we write favourably about the Aurora Prize, we have kept a deliberate distance. We have not attended any Aurora Prize events, lunches, or dinners, nor sought personal conversation. Until 2012, Hans worked at CRRC, an organisation that received core funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the foundation that Vartan Gregorian, one of the Aurora Prize’s founders, ran for many years. In 2011, Hans met Gregorian for less than five minutes. On occasions, Hans is still in contact with this wider network, in particular, with Deana Arsenian. Until 2017, David was a director of the peace organisation Peaceful Change initiative, which received funds from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. His present work with Seton Hall University and the Geneva Graduate Institute engages with a range of civil society, national, and international actors across the Middle East and North Africa. Writing for this book has been kept separate from those engagements, although it draws on learning from them. The writing of this book was funded or rather cross-subsidised from salaries and policy consulting work.

Contents

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 Introduction: Ethics of Political Commemoration as a New Paradigm  1 A Framework for Merit, Restraint, and Redirection    4 Flowing from Tradition: Between Theories of War and Peace    6 Conversations not Courts    8

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Ius ad Memoriam: What to Commemorate 13 Right Intention  15 Prioritising Intention in Boston  15 Assessing Intent: Centring Better Relations  17 Checking Intent and a French Distinction  19 Looking Forward: Intention of the Aurora Prize  20 Just Cause  21 An Unending Absence that Follows   22 Contextualising Just Cause in the Caucasus  22 Allowing Vico’s Complexity and Countering Distortions  23 Inspiring One: Aurora Mardiganian’s Cause  24 Legitimate Authority  25 For People not Populists in Brazil  26 Dynamite Rather than Deliberation in Georgia  27 Presidents, Diasporas, and Dual SIMs  30 A Gesture but no Unity in Beirut   32 A Warning from Istanbul  33 Broad Balance: Legitimacy in the Aurora Prize  34 xi

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Reasonable Chance of Success  35 Prevent Ghosts from Walking in Ireland  36 Managerial Concerns and Measurement  37 Reframing Discussions with Empirical Research  38 Knotted Poles and Feasibility in Tübingen  41 Being Seen: Transformative Potential of the Aurora Prize  43 3 Ius in Memoria: How to Commemorate 51 Transcend the Collective  53 Commemoration that Transcends  53 The Potential to Transform  54 Invoking Names in Flanders  55 Focus on Turkish Schindlers  56 Literary Reimagination of the German “We”  57 Stamped and Sealed: Individual Focus of the Aurora Prize  59 Exit Circular Narratives  60 Facts, Focus, and Interpretation  61 Conflict Escalation among the Unburied  61 The Rest Being Turks in Nicosia  63 Maintaining a Martial Narrative in Misrata  64 Stuck inside Misrepresentations  65 Acceptable Discourse on Vietnam  67 Books Don’t Bleed: Engaging with the Aurora Prize  68 Assert Moral Autonomy  69 Done in our Irish Name  70 Pigeon Dreams of Akram Aylisli  71 Hostage to the Actions of Any Other  73 Sperber’s Sceptical Optimism  74 Destructions of Troy and Tweaks for Citizenship in Bristol  75 Taking one’s own Decisions: Model for the Future  76 Contained Unfathomability  77 Localising and Temporalising Trauma: Graves not Posters  78 Distinct Names and HaShoah  79 Vague with Numbers and Dresden  80 Art to Unsettle and the Vanishing Monument  82 Art, documenta15, and Indonesia’s Legacy  84 Dates and Locations: Awarding the Aurora Prize  86

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 Truth of the New Paradigm 93 A Coherent Tradition of Ethical Enquiry  95 Consistent and Multi-dimensional Tradition   95 Drawing on a Vibrant Framework   97 A Tradition at a Confluence of Cultures   97 Natural Law, Games, and Rawls   99 Consensus to Transcend Inchoate Debate  100 Encompassing Scholarly Debate: Rothberg and Snyder  101 Consensus in Charters and Guidelines  102 Preparing for the Irish Decade of Centenaries  105 Intuitive Response in the Classroom  106 Corresponding to Instances of Remembrance  107 Reconceptualising Stalin’s Museum  108 Giving Authority to Yerevan’s Cascade Memorial  108 The Anachronistic Museum on Tito’s Luxury Island  109 Bolnisi, W.G. Sebald, and More  110 Positioned Between Pacifists and Crusaders  111 Pacifism and the Argument for Maximal Restraint  111 Ends Justifies the Means: Revolutionary and Realist Worldviews  113 Both Sides can Win in Commemoration  114 The Ethics of Political Commemoration as a Paradigm  114

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Commemorating for Peace119 The Emotional Content of Conflict  121 A Hostage to Conflict in Lebanon  121 Identity and Violence when Societies Rupture 123 A Responsibility to Lead a Revolution  125 Multi-Temporal Focus: Justice for the Past and Peace in the Future  127 Integrating Peace and Justice in Syria  127 Competing Justice Demands in Yemen’s Political Negotiations   128 Conflicts of Commemoration in Libya  131 A Wider Understanding of Peace  133 Relations as well as Resolution after Taif  133 Institutions that Bind in Northern Ireland  135 Worldviews and Women’s Rights  137

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The Commemoration Gap  140 Absent Commemoration  140 A Wide Scope of Application  142 6 Conclusion:  Roadmap for a New Paradigm149 Questions to Answer  151 Commemoration for Genuine Citizenship  153 Institutions, Works, Monuments Index155 Locations Index157 People Index159

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 5.1

The framework, networks, and charters The framework and Irish decade of centenaries Application of the framework in conflict

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Ethics of Political Commemoration as a New Paradigm

Abstract  This introductory book chapter presents the concept of an Ethics of Political Commemoration as a new paradigm to address the use and abuse of remembrance for political purposes. The debate surrounding the uses of memory is more ethical than historical, entailing an exploration of what political commemoration is appropriate or legitimate. The absence of a guiding framework often hinders scholars and practitioners from effectively responding to transgressions and advocating for positive forms of commemoration. To address this, the book proposes an Ethics of Political Commemoration grounded in the Just War tradition, highlighting the parallel coercive intent of both war and political remembrance. The framework consists of two sets of criteria: Ius ad Memoriam, determining the events deserving of political commemoration, and Ius in Memoria, reflecting on the appropriate forms of remembrance for those events. The Ethics of Political Commemoration assesses merit, promotes restraint, and redirects towards more constructive modes of remembrance, aiming to forge peaceful narratives about the past. The chapter also introduces the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity as a potentially illuminating example of positive commemoration. Keywords  Ethics • Memory • Politics • War • Peace • Democracy

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Gutbrod, D. Wood, Ethics of Political Commemoration, Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7_1

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Remembrance is used and abused for political ends. An Ethics of Political Commemoration helps us to assess the mobilisation of memory and shape more constructive practices that forge a better peace.

Much has been published on the “uses and abuses of history” for political ends. When the past is mobilised in a contest with others—as authority, to vindicate, to judge, or to damn—it is a political act.1 In a good or at least reasonable society, such acts should be up for debate. The substance of the debate on the uses of memory is ethical, more than a question of historical truth or method. The main question is what use of memory is appropriate or legitimate and at what points we should challenge its instrumentalisation. Critics of the political misuse of history share a sense that “memory has penetrated right to the core of the political problems of our time, and the problems of politics of our time.”2 Certain words appear regularly in analyses—nationalist, manipulation, distortion, exclusion—highlighting recurring themes. Familiar as the themes are, the impression one gets is that authors start anew with each critique. Lacking a paradigm to work from, scholars and practitioners often struggle to craft a compelling response to transgressions. Most importantly, it can be difficult to argue for a positive vision of the commemoration we should pursue in place of that which exists. What, therefore, is to be done? Is there a cogent framework that would allow us to evaluate the uses and abuses of history? How could such a framework be grounded? This book argues for an Ethics of Political Commemoration that draws on the Just War tradition. This synthesis is plausible because there is a parallel in a kind of coercive intent in the practice of both war and remembrance. Those that mobilise history for political purposes seek to influence behaviour. They assert claims about right or wrong, pressure people to recognise and accept a certain authority, and even force people to behave as desired. The political use of memory is most vivid in conflicts, as commemoration becomes another way of promoting one’s cause and undermining that of one’s enemy. In this way, politicised commemoration can provide escalatory momentum towards violence. Even when well-­ intended, misjudged commemoration can sour relations between peoples. The Ethics of Political Commemoration comprises two sets of criteria that draw on learning from the Just War tradition to weigh merit, encourage restraint, and promote potential redirection in commemoration. The

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Ius ad Memoriam criteria determine what past events deserve political commemoration. The Ius in Memoria criteria reflect on what form of remembrance is most appropriate for those events. Taken together, the criteria allow us to assess the merit of what is commemorated and how commemoration is planned. Through this assessment, the Ethics of Political Commemoration promotes restraint and redirects people towards more productive forms of remembrance. At its best, the Ethics of Political Commemoration can guide how those waging memory wars behave. When done well, commemoration can forge more peaceful narratives of the past. In this context, peace is best understood as putting in place a process in which contradictions can be approached with mutual respect and recognition, rather than forcing their resolution. More peaceful narratives integrate the concerns of different peoples who hold conflicting views. This requires creativity, or as John Paul Lederach put it, renewing a term already used by Edmund Burke, a “moral imagination” that allows us to collectively interpret the past in a manner that transforms relationships in the present and builds more constructive shared societies in the future.3 Without a guiding framework, commemoration can be fraught, as people can have different understandings of the past. In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, an account of India post-partition, the protagonist describes how memory shifts its shapes. ‘I told you the truth,’ I say yet again, ‘Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.’4

Rushdie’s account explains why commemoration is so central when people with different views try to live together: no sane human trusts the memory of others more than their own. This book lays out our proposal for a comprehensive and innovative Ethics of Political Commemoration. Its introduction describes the framework and its application. The second and third chapters explain the Ius ad Memoriam and Ius in Memoria criteria, drawing on various literature and examples. The fourth chapter demonstrates the shared heritage of this framework and the Just War tradition, explaining how it is coherent, draws on consensus, and corresponds to practice—and consequently why we

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should regard it as a paradigm. The fifth chapter connects the Ethics of Political Commemoration to conflict transformation practice and argues that the framework fills a “commemoration gap” in attempts to address the past when people are divided by memory. The concluding chapter outlines puzzles that would benefit from further research.

A Framework for Merit, Restraint, and Redirection The Ethics of Political Commemoration consists of two sets of criteria to guide decisions on what deserves commemoration and the appropriate form of commemoration.

At the heart of the Ethics of Commemoration are a set of Ius ad Memoriam (what commemoration has ethical merit?) and Ius in Memoria (what is the appropriate form of commemoration?) criteria that are similar to the Ius ad Bellum and Ius in Bello considerations of the Just War tradition. For Ius ad Memoriam, we highlight four criteria that help decisions on what to commemorate, drawing directly on the ideas of Ius ad Bellum. Commemoration needs a right intention of contributing towards a better future, rather than just trying to redress the past. Commemorative acts need a just cause by memorialising that which is significant and most in need of redress, without establishing a grievance in absolute terms. Remembrance should have legitimate authority, meaning it should speak to the experience of wider society in a compassionate way, rather than being used by elite groups to strengthen their authority. Finally, commemoration needs a reasonable chance of success in forging a better peace in the future. For Ius in Memoria, the question of how to commemorate, we propose four criteria that reflect the Just War tradition’s Ius in Bello. Commemoration should transcend the collective, by encouraging people to treat each other as individuals rather than as group representatives. Remembrance should exit circular narratives that trap people in destructive ways of thinking about themselves and others. Through commemoration, people should assert their moral autonomy, by grounding what they do in what they aspire to be, rather than excusing transgressions with reference to what others have done to them. Lastly, commemoration should have an element of contained unfathomability. It should move us to act and yet not overwhelm. Remembrance does not contribute to a better future if we have “the past eat the future,” as one perceptive journalist once put it.5

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This ethics of commemoration is “political” in the contexts that Margaret MacMillan has laid out: In a secular world, […] history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. […] It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us and damn those who oppose us.6

History is often used to help judge in our favour. When memory is drawn on to bolster claims to authority, justify actions, or condemn the actions of others, it is a political act. As for any form of politics, the use of memory should be actively scrutinised. Is it ethical? Does it provide a good outcome? Is there a better way? The Ethics of Political Commemoration provides a coherent framework for thinking differently and better about memory politics. History has loomed larger as “the light [of transformation] failed,” to use the metaphor that Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes put forward.7 In the absence of a compelling vision of the future, the past becomes even more important as people seek to situate themselves. “Where there are no gods, ghosts prevail,” was the wording that the poet Novalis had used for a world that had lost its certainties.8 Without a destination to orient ourselves on, we may understand where we are primarily based on where we believe we have come from. The story of where we come from can be told in different ways. A robust framework can explain why nuanced and complex accounts of the past are preferable to a simplified, maximalist, or even apocalyptic politics. An ethical framework makes it possible to mount a cogent critique to counter a cosmology of heroes, martyrs, and traitors—a fantastic genre of entertainment that is of limited use when figuring out how to live together. While good arguments are not enough to stop actors with manipulative intent, it can help convince others that there may be alternatives. We contend that the Ethics of Political Commemoration is as widely applicable as Just War Theory. In any society, it can help to structure debates when the past is mobilised in public discussions. During political transitions, the framework can help people reckon with their past. It can serve as a conflict transformation tool where diverging stories about the past perpetuate cycles of violence. Finally, the Ethics of Political Commemoration has utility in international relations when troublesome histories stand in the way of peace.

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To make our case, we consider artworks dedicated to victims; how memorials were blown up; where museums got stuck in the past; what presidents said or didn’t say; when remembrance raised its own spectres; why a university town put a knot into street poles; and which writers helped reimagine an identity. We show how the Ethics of Political Commemoration can suggest tweaks that could make commemoration better. Our main focus is Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and North Africa, while connecting to instructive discussions in Germany and Ireland, and mainstream debates elsewhere in Western Europe, and in the United States. Taken together, the range of examples should demonstrate what excellent commemoration can be, that it can happen anywhere if people try to approach it respectfully, and that similar ideas seem to have a global reach. The Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity (“Aurora Prize”) is one thread that runs through this book. This annual award, launched by major philanthropists of Armenian descent, based in Armenia and with global scope, seeks to recognise individuals for humanitarian work. The Aurora Prize is “rooted in Armenian history” and yet is relevant everywhere. In terms of unsettled commemoration, Armenia remains a landmark case. As the historian Stefan Ihrig put it, the Armenian Genocide is “part of our world history and heritage, a dark part […] that we as humans have to accept and integrate into our understanding of ourselves.”9 That acceptance and integration remain incomplete. We believe that the Aurora Prize can illuminate our understanding of commemoration. It is ambitious, transformative, and inspiring. Such bright spots deserve more attention.

Flowing from Tradition: Between Theories of War and Peace The Ethics of Political Commemoration draws on the strengths of the Just War tradition and the practice of conflict transformation. It can integrate and encompass other approaches, rather than displacing them.

Used as we are to the interminability of most philosophical debates, is it not ambitious to propose that a new approach to commemoration can be established? Yet the proposal is not as radical as it may first appear. The suggestion is to bring an established paradigm of ethics to a debate that so

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far has been approached unsystematically. For this purpose, the Just War paradigm is well suited. It covers various dimensions of ethical conduct, and its strengths and limitations are tested and well understood. Although ethics has made an appearance in scholarship on commemoration, it often seems more of a side-line. Paul Ricoeur, in Memory, History and Forgetting, for example, proposed “narrative hospitality” as a core concept for remembrance. This proposal suggests that each telling of the past should welcome diverse narratives, rather than looking to establish one universal truth.10 Narrative hospitality is an attractive notion and has been taken up, among others, by the President of the Republic of Ireland. Ricoeur’s idea has its origin, however, in his “hermeneutic phenomenology,” requiring significant uphill philosophical exploration for the uninitiated. Other authors, such as Yuki Miyamoto, have cited Emmanuel Levinas’ Ethics of the Other and his view that ethics is “the name given to […] critical scrutiny of, and resistance to, one's spontaneous inclinations” in the context of an excellent study of commemoration in China and Japan.11 The challenge of these streams of thought—Ricoeur, Levinas, and others—is that they flow as narrow and often remote tributaries in the academic landscape. By contrast, the Just War tradition is a wide river, which many have navigated already. An Ethics of Political Commemoration that draws on this flow is unlikely to run dry. The Ethics of Political Commemoration, as Michael Walzer has said about the Just War tradition, “is designed to sustain a constant scrutiny and an immanent critique.”12 Such scrutiny and critique will become possible through the multidimensional framework we propose. As with Just War Theory, once the criteria are linked together, they reinforce each other. The purpose of such a framework is not to impose an agreement on any one issue, but rather to ensure that we consider multiple dimensions when deliberating remembrance. The Ethics of Political Commemoration adds value as it encompasses a range of scholarly frameworks, recommendations, guidelines, declarations, and charters, rather than seeking to displace them. This includes Michael Rothberg’s theory for judging the intent of commemoration via multidirectional memory, the recommendations developed by Louise Mallinder and Margaret O’Callaghan as part of the President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative, the guidance of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, the founding declaration of Historians without Borders, and the charter of the International Committee of Memorial Museums.

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These approaches are strengthened by connecting to a broader tradition, as they are no longer stand-alone, partially isolated summaries. The Ethics of Political Commemoration also draws on established practices in conflict transformation. It incorporates (inter alia) Johan Galtung’s proposal that we should focus on a “Just Peace,” Máire Dugan’s insight on the “nested” nature of conflict in patterns of relationships, Lederach’s “integrated” approach to peacebuilding that emphasised the need to balance considerations of the past with relations in the future, and Sarah Cobb’s argument for building “better narratives” on the past. Overall, the insight from this practice is integrated across the eight Ius ad Memoriam and Ius in Memoria criteria. In this way, conflict transformation provides practical learning from efforts to manage violent conflict that enriches the proven model of the Just War tradition. While abundant with learning, conflict transformation lacks a rigorous method for addressing the use of memory conflicts in perpetuating violence. The proposed framework both draws from conflict transformation and provides it with more rigour. Bringing together an ethical tradition with the practice of conflict transformation, the book fuses two distinct perspectives. It seeks to engage citizens and scholars and help those who work to transform conflicts. This is the first systematic presentation of this approach.

Conversations not Courts The proposed framework is one of conversations, not courts. It is meant to elicit better conversation on difficult topics. There is much work required to develop the Ethics of Political Commemoration, and much room for many to contribute to this endeavour.

“Are you saying you are the judge of what is appropriate?” This is a challenge we have sometimes heard, as we expressed caution about particular forms of handling the past. We are indeed saying that when political claims are put forward, these should be assessed and also held accountable. There are, however, no final judgements. There is no “Court of Commemoration.” Instead, there are conversations in which we seek to explore and come to conclusions. In these conversations, judgments can develop. These conversations can happen at dinner tables, in workplaces, in public discussions, in political contexts, and in academic settings. All engaged citizens should participate. In a democracy, and hopefully, in all

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political systems, these are not just debates for people with years of training in ethics, history, or in how to transform conflicts. As in discussions on the justness of the use of force, debates on ethical commemoration should have wide participation. A good framework can contribute to a constructive conversation. At its best, the framework can help us to listen. When we have understood the cause of remembrance, we may also want to attend to, say, concerns about its chances of success. Speaking at least for ourselves, the Ethics of Political Commemoration has made us more attentive to myriad aspects of how people remember in diverse contexts, which is why we want to share this approach with others. Given the scope of this book, it is unlikely that we are right on all issues. We draw on a range of disciplines, debates, and contexts. While we try to present them fully, we have not been able to cover all aspects of the debate. For example, we do not offer a comprehensive account of proportionality, a core consideration of the Just War Theory. One rationale is that most people resent when they are told that they are blowing things out of proportion. Trying to shrink what people see as trauma can be seen as belittling and usually does not have a great chance of success. To us, it seems more promising to suggest that people channel their engagement with the past productively, rather than abandon it. But perhaps someone can develop a cogent approach to proportionality in commemoration. Similarly, the framework does not include an approach to forgetting. Standing amidst the stelae of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a young British man, thoroughly aware of German crimes, asked “is there a plan for how long this monument will be here?” It was an innocent question and hard to answer. While scholars have begun to write on planning obsolescence for monuments (or de-commemoration), the framework does not include Ius post Memoriam criteria, in the way that scholars have developed an Ius post Bellum to consider the aftermath of conflict.13 The limitations to applying the framework can be further explored and delineated. Future work can refine where the dividing line should be placed between political, and private or personal, remembrance. Private or personal acts of remembrance should not be interrogated for merit, restraint, and redirection in the same way as political acts. The relationship between the private and public realms is one that continues to require negotiation. There is, in other words, work to do. Our aim is to lay out a proposal, not an orthodoxy. As we will highlight, we find the framework

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illuminating. As we put forward these ideas, we do so with an awareness of their, and our, limitations. On some of the issues we write about, we changed our minds in recent years. On other points, we do not entirely agree. Moreover, while connecting to a long-running tradition does provide a solid foundation, it is a reminder of the relative size of anyone’s contribution. Most importantly, though, we are aware of the objective reality of the suffering that we write about. To try and determine what political commemoration is ethical is not just an academic exercise. Yet academic attention is needed precisely because the pain is real. Scholarship in many ways remains a privileged endeavour. From this privilege arises an obligation to try to tackle questions that continue to hurt.

Notes 1. Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History, Main edition (Profile Books, 2010). 2. David Gaunt and Tora Lane, ‘Introduction: Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past’ (Södertörns högskola, 2020), pp. 9–14. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-­43936 [accessed 23 February 2023]. 3. John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (Ivan R. Dee, 2006). 4. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Knopf Canada, 2010). p. 108. 5. Judith Huber, Khojaly, mon amour—Wenn Vergangenheit die Zukunft schluckt—Radio (Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, 4 September 2020). https://www.srf.ch/play/radio/passage/audio/khojaly-­mon-­amour% 2D%2D-­w enn-­v ergangenheit-­d ie-­z ukunft-­s chluckt?id=ef8052d6-­ 39ef-­4e4c-­b9af-­499fcaaf9a1f [accessed 12 March 2021]. 6. MacMillan, p. 20. 7. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: A Reckoning (Penguin UK, 2019). 8. deutschlandfunk.de, ‘Novalis—Die Romantisierung der Welt’, Deutschlandfunk https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/novalis-­die-­romanti sierung-­der-­welt-­100.html [accessed 27 February 2023]. 9. Stefan Ihrig, ‘German History and the Armenian Genocide’, Harvard University Press Blog. https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2015/04/german-­history-­and-­the-­armenian-­genocide-­stefan-­ihrig. html [accessed 5 December 2022].

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10. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). https:// press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3613761.html [accessed 10 December 2022]. 11. Yuki Miyamoto, ‘The Ethics of Commemoration: Religion and Politics in Nanjing, Hiroshima, and Yasukuni’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 80.1 (2012), 34–63. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfr082. 12. Michael Walzer, ‘The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)’, Social Research, 69.4 (2002), 925–44. 13. Tracy Adams and Yinon Guttel-Klein, ‘Make It Till You Break It: Toward a Typology of De-Commemoration’, Sociological Forum, Vol. 37, No. 2.2 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12809.

CHAPTER 2

Ius ad Memoriam: What to Commemorate

Abstract  For Ius ad Memoriam, this chapter highlights four criteria that help decisions on what to commemorate, drawing directly on the ideas of Ius ad Bellum. Commemoration needs a right intention of contributing towards a better future, rather than just trying to redress the past. Commemorative acts need a just cause by memorialising that which is significant and most in need of redress, without establishing a grievance in absolute terms. Remembrance should have legitimate authority, meaning it should speak to the experience of wider society in a compassionate way, rather than being used by elite groups to strengthen their authority. Finally, commemoration needs a reasonable chance of success in forging a better peace in the future. The chapter discusses remembrance in Armenia, Brazil, Germany, Georgia, Ireland, Lebanon, and other locations, to illustrate that these questions matter around the world. In this, the chapter highlights several bright spots but also discusses darker moments in which the use of dynamite rather than discussion contributed to legacies of polarisation. Keywords  History • Politics • Public participation • Legitimacy • Monuments

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Gutbrod, D. Wood, Ethics of Political Commemoration, Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7_2

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Ius ad Memoriam is the consideration of what is deserving of commemoration. It considers right intention, just cause, legitimate authority, and whether remembrance has a reasonable chance of success.

Ius ad Memoriam considers whether the mobilisation of memory for political purposes has merit, requires restraint, or may need redirection. It runs parallel to Ius ad Bellum in Just War Theory. For both frameworks, what matters is whether moving to action can make a better peace possible. Both frameworks apply when we seek to extend control over others. Control for Ius ad Memoriam means to seek to vindicate oneself or judge or damn others, as MacMillan had put it. Ius ad Memoriam has four criteria—Right Intention, Just Cause, Legitimate Authority, and Reasonable Chance of Success. Commemoration has merit if it aims to build a better future (Right Intention). The political use of memory should focus on what is in serious need of redress (Just Cause). Remembrance should be done for and by the people it concerns, rather than being used by elites to strengthen their standing (Legitimate Authority). Finally, commemoration should have goals we can realistically achieve and guard against unintended consequences (Reasonable Chance of Success). These multidimensional criteria make it possible to examine commemoration in its various facets. A just cause, in terms of histories of suffering, is insufficient to justify merit if the intent for commemoration is not constructive—for example, when commemoration appears designed to demonise another group and in doing so perpetuates cycles of violence. Similarly, a political leader may promote a just cause and have a good intent, but lack the legitimate authority required to organise commemoration. Even if there is good intent, just cause, and a legitimate authority, we still need to assess whether commemoration has a reasonable chance of success in building a better peace. The multidimensional criteria of Ius ad Memoriam encourage reflection on merit, restraint, and potential redirection. Restraint and redirection are advocated for as an ethical undertaking, not to diminish the significance of past suffering and the value of its remembrance. The Ethics of Political Commemoration builds on a sense of fairness and mutual recognition from which a reasonable accommodation can develop. Maintaining a sense of mutual respect can ward off violence, further linking Ius ad Memoriam and Ius ad Bellum along a continuum.

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Right Intention Are we trying to gain advantage over “the other” or to build a better joint future? Commemoration is an ethical undertaking if it extends bridges of empathy, if it promotes mutual understanding, or if it supports reconciliation.

An obvious criterion for Ius ad Memoriam is right intention. The relevance of intention is highlighted by the historian Jay Winter, who, in analysing the “memory boom of the twentieth century,” wrote that: “[I]t is not the act of remembrance which is problematic but rather the motives of some of those who engage in it.”1 Right intention is, of course, a key criterion in Just War Theory. For its Ius ad Bellum criterion, we typically consider several intentions to be right or justifiable. Restoring a just peace and righting a wrong are plausible intentions, as are self-defence and defending victims of unjustified aggression. The overarching goal must be re-establishing a better and more lasting peace. Similar considerations of intent are relevant for commemoration. Right intention may include, for example, efforts to build bridges of understanding or to break out of vicious cycles of recrimination. When intent is political, it usually becomes an issue of public debate, which makes it easier to scrutinise than private motivation. Prioritising Intention in Boston Various reflections on the ethical dimensions of commemoration prioritise intent. The President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative, led by Louise Mallinder and Margaret O’Callaghan, recommended intent as their second criterion.2 Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory also places emphasis on intention. His “axis of political affect” stretches from productive forms of memory that encourage “moral solidarity with victims of diverse injustices,” to more negative assessments when commemoration sets “victims against each other in an antagonistic logic of competition.”3 The focus on intention is equally prevalent in peace and conflict scholarship. Lederach, for example, in describing the practice of peacebuilding, emphasises the importance of actively imagining oneself in a web of relationships, including with one’s enemies. If the web breaks, we all fall. For Lederach, reflections on the past should intend to strengthen the web that holds up both us and our enemies.

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Intent can, of course, operate at various levels. Memorialisation can state what past events mean for a society, its values, and its vision for its future. Commemoration is an assertion of self and how that self is situated versus others. In this regard, commemoration can have the formative intent of shaping an identity. The Boston commemoration of Ireland’s An Gorta Mór (“The Great Hurt”), a nineteenth-century famine and national emigration, can illustrate such formative intent. The memorial stands on a busy crossroads along Boston’s famed Freedom Trail and depicts two Irish families. The first is reminiscent of the emaciated families that departed from Dublin’s port across the Atlantic, with the figures hunched and desperate. The second shows an Irish family in their new life in America, strong, upright, and striding purposefully. Reflecting on this Boston memorial, one author noted that the “monument seems preoccupied with the constant striving forward” of the victims rather than with other aspects of the Irish suffering of that time.4 In this way, the memorial seemed designed to construct (or re-construct) a positive view of Irish emigrant identity as a robust people able to overcome impossible odds. To take one of the world’s most martial examples, the Military Foundation Day in North Korea also has formative intent. The 2020 parade, marking the military’s 75th anniversary, was used to affirm the identity of a militarised society with the need, means, and willingness to use force. Such ceremonies reinforce “military first” politics (so ̆n ‘gunhuro) which positions the military ahead of the Communist Party in society.5 Formative intent can exist next to more immediate goals of commemoration. Louise Mallinder and Margaret O’Callaghan, of the President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative, outline several plausible intentions: when planning commemoration events, it is important to reflect upon what they are designed to achieve. Is their goal to honour the dead; to convey information about the past; to encourage unity and reconciliation among the group; to encourage debate and dialogue about how the legacy of past events continues to be felt; or to provoke reflections on the values in which the group believes?6

On occasions, such goals can come together in one and the same case. Few figures illustrate complementary intentions better than Maria Curie-Skłodowska. When people unveil memorials for Marie Curie, as she

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is commonly referred to, they usually mention a range of goals. These include honouring a pioneer of chemistry and physics; conveying information about one of the first people to win the Nobel Prize in two different fields; drawing attention to the importance of research in the fight against cancer; emphasising the strength of the French-Polish friendship in an unveiling attended by two presidents; celebrating, also, health cooperation over several decades between France and Vietnam; and encouraging more attention to the role that women have played and can play in science, a field in which they traditionally have been marginalised.7 (One exhibition in a science museum, “Beyond Curie,” encouraged visitors to explore the contributions of 40 other female scientists that can appear to be shadowed by Curie’s towering legacy.8) Assessing Intent: Centring Better Relations International conflicts, the focus of the Just War Theory, show that stated intentions can be revealing. The Kremlin’s publicly stated intentions of de-Nazification and de-militarisation of Ukraine are unconvincing intentions for the attack of February 2022. De-militarising an unthreatening neighbour amounts to subjugation. Such a purpose does not fit with the Just War tradition, as it does not restore just peace, right a wrong, or defend victims of unjustified aggression.9 Questionable intent is not restricted to the Kremlin. While the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 could be argued to be an attempt to ward off future 9/11-style attacks,10 a corresponding justification via Just War Theory is hard to make for the original decision to invade Iraq in 2003.11 Similarly, for commemoration there are more and less compelling intentions. Using remembrance for the purposes of affirming a people’s identity is an understandable reaction to trauma, can promote solidarity, and may contribute to mobilising support for defence, including national service. Rallying one’s people is not illegitimate. Countries may need to defend their liberty or their existence. And yet, justifiable as such intentions can be, they are less convincing as right intent for commemoration if they do not also include attempts to transcend cycles of violence and injustice. As Rothberg points out, we ought to be sceptical when the memory of injustices is mobilised for antagonistic purposes. In some cases, such antagonistic sentiments seem directly on display. A drive through Lebanon shows a gallery of intentions in the posters dedicated to martyrs. In Christian-majority areas of Beirut, such as Ashrafiyeh,

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one will encounter posters commemorating the Christian Phalangist leader Bachir Gemayel. Bachir, as he is commonly referred to, is implicated in the killing of Palestinian refugees, cooperated with Israel, and was assassinated by pro-Syrian sympathisers after being elected President in 1982. His commemoration can represent a vision of Lebanon as a Christian-governed country, as well as one that seeks to be independent of the influence of Syria in its internal affairs. In the Baalbek area of the Bekaa Valley, less than a three-hour drive from Beirut, the building and lampposts are adorned with posters of dead Hezbollah leaders, such as Abbas al-Musawi, who was assassinated in an Israeli military operation in 1992. These posters, whitened and weathered by the sun, provide an alternative vision for Lebanon, reflecting Shia religious values, holding close bonds with Syria, and an aspiration to reduce or eliminate Israeli influence in the region. Together with posters commemorating individual fighters, the images of these leaders provide a constant reminder to each group that sacrifice for the group is valued. The posters affirm the status of a group and religion that the sacrifice was for, encouraging duty to one’s community and to God. Such martyrs’ posters can express personal grief or assert a community’s pride in its own identity. However, they do little to bridge communal divides. While Lebanon packs its divides into a compact space, including its capital, similar chasms are found across the conflict areas of the Middle East and North Africa. Commemorative statements can also provide visions of unity, advocating for a future where different communities can thrive in the same society. The Cable Street Mural in London’s East End was erected to mark the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, when the area’s diverse local working-class residents fought to protect the Jewish community from attack by Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt gangs. The depiction promotes a vision of a society that is united in defence of minorities.12 It is also political as it promotes the idea of working-class solidarity as a unifying bond that made this defence possible. The killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black American by police in May 2020, resulted in a surge of remembrance across the United States. Much of this remembrance developed into a broader call for a fairer society, in which people of different ethnic backgrounds are treated the same and have the same opportunities. There was also intent for remembrance to cross ethnic divides and to strengthen inter-group solidarity in the present. The pain of Floyd’s killing—and what it represented more

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broadly—was to be shared by all Americans. These purposes squarely demonstrate right intention. Next to this right intention, some of the political commemoration over the summer of 2020 also took on a more divisive tone, encouraging social divisions rather than strengthening the web that binds peoples together— a tone that may have been politically expedient but was less obviously oriented on creating a shared future. Divisive remembrance is harder to justify as a call for a better peace. Intent towards constructive transformation remains a more compelling intent, even if reactions of anger and impatience are understandable when injustices persist over decades. In the context of international politics, there is much right intent in Armenia’s quest for genocide recognition. For many, the claim for recognition is seen as an assertion of justice, humanity, and to prevent future atrocity. At the same time, some Armenian analysts also identify an impulse for retribution in what they called the “traditional discourse” of genocide recognition.13 Among the most strident voices, the commemoration of the genocide becomes fused with anti-Turkish sentiment which can take on a dehumanising tone. It can be hard to identify an intent that seeks to contribute to a better future when those that campaign for genocide recognition also describe a man convicted of assassinating the Turkish Consul General in Los Angeles, Kemal Arikan, as an “Armenian hero.”14 Checking Intent and a French Distinction This is treacherous ground. Attempts to judge the intent of commemorative acts linked to past suffering can be viewed as attempts to diminish their importance. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, some Armenians bristle when their compatriots’ more strident actions are challenged. Criticism, the claim goes, adds to the injustice that victims have suffered. The most outsiders should do is “ask questions—don’t tone police.”15 Insisting that victims be treated with consideration aligns with how most decent people behave in private. If we meet someone who has been aggrieved, a standard reaction is to allow them to voice their feelings and to display patience even when feelings are intense. We do not challenge them. From an ethical standpoint, however, it is not convincing that nothing should be said. Ethical frameworks serve purposes other than the presence of a sympathetic friend. Their task is assessment, not reassurance. In a robust view, those putting forward political demands via commemoration

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should be exposed to scrutiny as part of a public realm of accountability. Seeking empathy is a personal endeavour. The Ethics of Political Commemoration navigates this challenge by focusing back on intent—to check the intent of those assessing just cause and intention. At their best, those assessing the cause or intention of commemoration can redirect efforts. By contrast, if intention is questioned with the apparent motivation of delegitimising a cause altogether, or of adding grief to the already aggrieved, it does not contribute to a better future. The practice of distinguishing intent in criticism echoes a suggestion made by a group of French historians to differentiate between groupes entrepreneurs de mémoire (“groups of memory entrepreneurs”) and groupes mémoriels (“memorial groups”). Groupes entrepreneurs de mémoire tend to instrumentalise history in and for their own partisan interest. Groupes mémoriels tend to question a dominant perspective, add their own recollection to the broader record. The questioning approach of groupes mémoriels can be a valid starting point for inquiry as long, as it remains guided by principles of the historical method, an acceptance of scientific interrogation, a refusal to pass value judgement, and strict fidelity to what is found in sources.16 Looking Forward: Intention of the Aurora Prize The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative illustrates commemoration with a right intent. As the organisation’s website says, the mission of the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity “is to recognize and support those who risk their own lives, health or freedom to save the lives, health or freedom of others suffering as a result of violent conflict, atrocity crimes or other major human rights violations.” The award highlights “inspiring acts of humanity,” based on the belief “that even in the darkest times, a brighter future is in the hands of those who are committed to giving others help and hope.” This is plausible as a right intention, in seeking to inspire a better and brighter future. One of the founders and funders, Noubar Afeyan, in an interview added that the core idea: at the centennial of the Armenian genocide […] in 2015 [was] that we needed to look forward by looking back and expressing gratitude to the people who saved my grandparents, for example, back in 1915. Instead of

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thanking them, because they were long gone, to step into the shoes of the people who are doing that today and give them the financial needs, the recognition, and all the rest.17

An image that is prominently placed on the organisation’s website says that the effort is based on the concept of “Gratitude in Action,” amidst four steps of “survive, revive, thrive, give back.” The prize comes with a $1  m award that its laureates allocate to others, giving them “a unique opportunity to continue the cycle of giving and to support the organizations that help people in need.”18 In private communication, one of the people involved in the effort added another dimension. As they said, the concept included a “vision of bringing the world to Armenia, rather than Armenia to the world. Hence the past Aurora prize events were held in Yerevan.” In terms of Armenia itself, the founders “wished to turn the concept of Armenia and Armenians as victims of genocide to confident peoples with will and ability to help the world.” This transformative intent can be seen as excellent commemoration, in MacIntyre’s sense of excellence as extending our understanding of what good practices can achieve.19

Just Cause Commemoration should look to memorialise that which is significant and most in need of redress, without needing to establish a grievance in absolute terms.

Mobilisation of memory for political purposes requires a just cause, much as a just cause is needed for the legitimate use of force in Ius ad Bellum. For commemoration, a just cause refers back to acts or experiences that collectively should not be forgotten. Much of the contemporary debate on the legitimacy of commemoration focuses on this aspect, implicitly or explicitly. The application of just cause as a criterion for deciding on commemoration is complicated in practice. It can be challenging to establish the justness of cause in absolute terms, as suffering defies objective measures. Attempts to prove an incontestable cause can narrow debate and distort historical research. At their worst, exaggerated claims about a cause’s justness can undermine credibility and polarise debate. Considering cause as only one of multiple criteria provides a more balanced consideration.

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An Unending Absence that Follows “Just cause” is broadly understood to mean that commemoration should be based on a grievous wrong that makes it harder to thrive. “An unending absence that follows,” is how Joan Didion described terrible loss in another context.20 The paradigmatic example is large-scale suffering by a collective. Memory of such horrors, heightened by displacement, can be passed down across generations. By this measure, many countries and communities have experienced such ruptures. This is true for Armenia and other groups caught up in violence against an ethnicity, Jewish communities and others exposed to Nazi murders, those repressed by communist regimes across much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the victims of authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa, or those such as the Yazidi who have suffered at the hands of extremist ideologues. A focus on just cause permeates memory debates globally, whether for the An Gorta Mór in Ireland, the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, or the victims of dictatorship in Argentina. Similar themes recur—a collective suffering, an event that ended up shaping personal, family, and national history, often with displacement, and that is passed down in larger accounts or little vignettes. The unburied dead, or the dead unnamed in mass graves, is often a central part of trauma that continues to haunt. Contextualising Just Cause in the Caucasus There can, however, be too much focus on establishing just cause. Why should just cause be de-emphasised? Unless causes are contrived, it is hard to draw lines between just and less just causes of commemoration. Numbers, though widely cited in accounts of suffering, are not instructive in this delineation. For example, some of the killings of protesters that happened as the Soviet Union was unravelling between 1988 and 1992 had fewer casualties than a bus crash. Nevertheless, they inscribed themselves into the collective psyche, as they came at a dramatic turning point towards independence, with added social and economic dislocations. Such synecdochical dates of commemoration include April 9 in Tbilisi, Georgia, the “Black January” in Baku in 1990, the “January Events” in Lithuania and “The Barricades” in Latvia in 1991, and others more. These events loom large, regardless of their quantitative reach. In these contexts, numerical consideration may be inappropriate or even distasteful, since it

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can suggest that suffering is measurable and static, rather than a continuous destabilisation. Some assertions of just cause can erase differentiation. For the Armenian case, historians have suggested that early attempts to demonstrate that what happened was a genocide went too far in trying to ensure the categorical fit. As Taner Akçam has suggested, “similarity to the Holocaust became the yardstick against which an event might or might not measure up as genocide.”21 This focus neglected, as Jennifer Dixon and others have pointed out, aspects that were specific to the Armenian experience, such as the gendered aspects of the persecution and killings, the particular context of expropriation, and the large-scale demographic re-engineering.22 Doing justice to a grievous wrong should emphasise the distinct character of what happened, not obscure it. In their most extreme form, attempts at canonisation can damage credibility and perhaps even memory. Azerbaijani claims around the massacre of Khojaly are an unfortunate illustration.23 In the context of the first war in Karabakh, some hundreds of fleeing Azerbaijani civilians were massacred in February 1992, most likely by an Armenian militia. As it was a freezing winter night in a remote location in a turbulent struggle, uncertainty on details remains. The Azerbaijani government, under the auspices of the country’s ruling family, made concerted and well-funded efforts to establish Khojaly as a genocide, including through a social media campaign. Even at a stretch, this massacre, horrendous and representative of subsequent wider displacement of Azerbaijanis as it was, does not meet the criteria for a genocide. Azerbaijani authorities claim a death toll that is higher than that evaluated as likely by Human Rights Watch.24 For many experts on the region, Khojaly is now more evocative of an encounter with a kleptocratic regime rather than the memory of the Azerbaijani civilians who lost their lives on that winter night. Had Azerbaijan presented a more sober account of its cause, it is at least possible that the terrible events of Khojaly would be more widely recognised. Allowing Vico’s Complexity and Countering Distortions Attempts to establish a just cause can contribute to, or even drive, distortions of scholarship. Many historians struggle to maintain a demarcation between scholarship and acts of political affirmation within their discipline.

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Timothy Snyder has noted in the context of Eastern Europe that the “bad news is that ours is an age of memory rather than history.”25 As Snyder highlights, some of the distinction between “commemorative and causal history” is “much the same as that Isaiah Berlin introduces between the methods of Voltaire and those of Vico.”26 Voltaire, a great figure of eighteenth-century intellectual life, had wanted to instrumentalise the past for pedagogical purposes. Giambattista Vico, whose life partially overlapped with Voltaire’s, though living in Naples mostly in obscurity, had insisted on the irreducibility of “capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance.” Similarly, the historian Alfred Heuss in 1959 argued that the discipline of history “annihilates memory,” as its task inherently is to challenge the broad sweep of collective memory that situates individuals in time and space, as the way they understand their identity and cultural orientation.27 Siding with Vico, Snyder stresses that complex events have “multiple lines of causality.” In living memory, the horrific massacre of Srebrenica in Bosnia has many causal factors, next to the intent of Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general commanding the murders. These factors include the fundamental failures of UN peacekeeping doctrine, the failure of the 1992 US-led force in Somalia and its impact on international appetite to intervene, poor decision-making by the overwhelmed Dutch paratroopers on the ground, slow responsiveness from Western capitals, and decisions by the Bosnian leadership that from afar still seem puzzling, such as the evacuation of the effective Bosnian commander by helicopter shortly before the final seizure of the Srebrenica enclave by Serb forces.28 If the focus is on just cause alone, the temptation for any nationalising history will be to simplify such accounts to fit a narrow “commemorative causality.” Inspiring One: Aurora Mardiganian’s Cause The Aurora Prize provides a strong example of how to establish a just cause. Its name “Aurora” commemorates the just cause of the suffering of a real individual. Aurora Mardiganian as a young girl “lived through horrors of the Genocide – forced to witness and experience terrible acts but was then able to escape; making an epic journey to build a new life in America.”29 After her harrowing escape to the United States, Mardiganian became the focus of an account of survival, Ravished Armenia, published in 1918. Over the subsequent years, the book was reprinted multiple times and

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translated into several languages, selling an estimated 900,000 copies. The book was made into a silent film in 1919. The Aurora Prize website in its text does not go into the depths of the horror experienced by Aurora Mardiganian, including scenes of crucifixion that, according to later accounts by Mardiganian, were even more grim than what had been shown in the 1919 film. The focus is on what Mardiganian did rather than what was done to her. The Aurora Prize website allows for complexity in summarising the life of Mardiganian: “Happiness eluded her, however: she never found her brother, contemplated suicide, and lost touch with her son after her husband’s death.” However, portraying Mardiganian’s individual complexity does not do a disservice to her story, and she is not defined by her suffering alone. Mardiganian, instead, is an inspiration: “But it is for her extraordinary resilience and her ability to give back, in spite of the suffering she faced, that today we remember Aurora Mardiganian.” The presentation of Mardiganian is measured and tactful, and while giving space to the bleaker aspects of her life, also insistent on identifying what hope can be drawn from it. This depiction illustrates why the Aurora Prize stands out as an effort of commemoration. Sometimes, the story of one individual, well-­ told, can describe the entire cause.

Legitimate Authority Commemoration should speak for and to people that envisage a better future, rather than being used by elite groups to strengthen their authority and voice over society.

Legitimate Authority is a crucial principle for commemoration. At its most basic, Legitimate Authority is a criterion for examining whether groups can achieve significant agreement through fair deliberation and whether they are capable of implementing their decisions. The concepts of legitimacy and authority can be rendered in more complex ways. The concept is robust enough to accommodate a variety of views and their evolution. In the Ius ad Bellum of the Just War tradition, the assessment of legitimate authority has changed over time. Today, there is usually more of an emphasis on gaining legitimacy through democratic governance, in place of the earlier stress on sovereign authority.

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For commemoration, ethical remembrance engages with those who have been affected and, in turn, reinforces the legitimacy of the institutions and processes that govern. Commemoration that contributes to a better peace is most likely when decisions on commemoration are the result of a deliberative process that is accountable to the public and inclusive of different perspectives. For People not Populists in Brazil To be legitimate, political mobilisation of the past has to be ethically accountable. Stating the requirement for legitimacy in these terms may appear as obvious as Karl Popper’s criterion of falsification, which says that statements are only scientific if it is possible to disprove them. The requirement, however, counters a dodge that is commonplace. When political invocations of the past are challenged, proponents often insist on the canonisation of their cause. As Margaret MacMillan has pointed out, religion: no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. […] History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings.30

If commemoration becomes sacralised “above and beyond human beings,” this positioning can be used to insulate political claims from accountability. It is not possible to have a reasonable debate when demands put themselves above scrutiny and critics are treated as heretics. Sacralisation, as Rothberg put it, can contribute to absolutist or apocalyptic politics.31 A historical precursor to such absolutism is how monarchs tried to claim divine legitimation or how wars were made holy. The scepticism we have of infallibility in other contexts should also extend to commemoration. Commemoration should primarily serve the people, not politicians. To be legitimate, political leaders should put people first and not use the authority of remembrance to elevate their partisan standing. To the extent that government authority is involved, remembrance is most convincing if it allows for the prominent participation of the opposition. As a snapshot, it is telling that while Vladimir Putin watches the 9th of May parade in

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Moscow to celebrate the victory over Nazi Germany, opposition leaders are either in jail or in a grave. Commemoration does not exhibit legitimate authority if politicians use it to bolster their political standing at the expense of others. Authoritarian governments are especially practised in mobilising the past to their own narrow benefit, intertwining the history of leading individuals with that of a people. Pervasive personality cults are a usurpation of authority. To criticise or otherwise confront the individual and his legacy is construed as a rejection of the nation. This framing can be seen in the commemoration of the Kim II Sung family in North Korea, the Assad family in Syria, or Tito in the former Yugoslavia.32 How politicians handle history can be seen as one measure of their commitment to democracy. On the occasion of the 2022 celebration of 200 years of Brazil’s independence, for example, a political scientist of Rio de Janeiro State University commented that for President Jair Bolsonaro the festivities were “more campaign rally than commemoration.”33 According to Le Monde, Bolsonaro had presided over a giant display of patriotism, from parades and air shows to rallies with “the postcard backdrop of the city’s iconic Copacabana beach” which he had used to deride his challenger in the upcoming presidential elections. The opposition candidate, former President Lula, stated that he would never use the “Dia da Patria” for electoral purposes and had not previously done so.34 Dynamite Rather than Deliberation in Georgia It is not realistic to remove politics from commemoration and nor should we want to. The process of balancing various political claims, however, should be legitimate. In the present age, a primary consideration is that commemoration should be inclusive of diverse viewpoints and accommodate competing demands. This process requires deliberation. For the Irish discussion on the decade of the centenaries, Mallinder and O’Callaghan highlighted several considerations that focused on inclusiveness. Firstly, ethical commemoration should encompass the range of ethnic, religious, or political groups in the country. Secondly, representatives from key constituencies should be involved in planning and delivering commemoration. To be inclusive, moreover, “different forms of commemoration may be required to reach different parts of the community.”35

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For genuine deliberation to be possible, it has to be grounded in somewhat shared values and mutual respect. In the context of Ireland, Mallinder and O’Callaghan, emphasise that “although debates on collective memory should be representative of diverse views, they should be underpinned by fundamental values within a society. These values should include human rights principles such as truth, justice, and equality.” There are contexts where such underlying values are difficult to find. When confronted by groups who hold iconoclastic beliefs and are intent on destroying monuments due to a divergence in underlying values (or even graves, as in Libya, Syria, or Afghanistan) consultation will rarely yield a meaningful outcome. In other contexts, however, deliberation attracts people to participate. Engaging people can give them the sense that they are being listened to, generate new ideas, and reinforce values and democratic institutions, including an accommodation of divergent perspectives. Deliberation is the proper term, implying that the process requires patience and a willingness to listen, adjust, and improve, over more than one meeting, partially because there is a reflexive process of reinforcing public legitimacy by trying to ensure that commemoration itself is legitimate. It is usually possible to get a sense of whether a fair attempt has been made to achieve legitimate authority, even if such efforts cannot be measured in absolute terms, partially because of their reflexive character. In an extreme version of dynamite rather than discussion, representatives of the Georgian government during the August 2008 war by their own account offered Russian occupying troops $50,000 if they would blow up the statue of Stalin on the central square of his hometown of Gori, in the hope of ridding themselves of his looming presence with their enemy’s assistance.36 In 2010, Georgian authorities removed the Stalin Statue themselves in the middle of the night and with no prior announcement, out of fear of protests. There was little evidence of consultation.37 After a change of government, a lawmaker said that the new ruling coalition would undertake such decisions “by daylight.”38 If enlisting your enemy and removal under the cloak of darkness appears like a farcical counterpoint to democratic discussion, tragedy would strike in Kutaisi, Georgia’s second largest city. Its Soviet-era monument to the Great Patriotic War was demolished two days ahead of schedule, again to side-step protests. As people in the vicinity received no adequate warning, a mother and her daughter were killed by falling debris.39 The Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili built a “hypermodern” new parliament

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on the location. The building was abandoned a few years later and now stands empty, an accidental $80  m commemoration of what happens if ventures, even those with a plausible intent and cause, are not properly discussed. In the case of Hermann Göring’s former headquarters near Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, public discussion contributed to finding what many consider to be a viable and legitimate solution.40 Upon unification in the early 1990s, German authorities had to decide what to do with this exemplar of Nazi architecture, tainted by its direct connection with one of the leaders of National Socialism. (It had also served as a House of Ministries under communism, as the German Democratic Republic had requisitioned the few structures left standing in Berlin’s centre, after the intense fighting in 1945.) Initially, many senior politicians in Germany, including government ministers, and some international historians, argued for the building’s demolition, as the country was preparing to move its capital to Berlin. However, the government undertook a round of public consultations. Apparently, the remark by the conceptual artist Jochen Gerz that this colossus of a building was like a bus that had experienced “many stations and occupants” (viele Haltestellen und Besetzungen) and that it was absurd to assume it had “arrived at its ultimate destination” swayed many minds in the debate.41 (Cost considerations also favoured transformation over demolition.) To counteract the Nazi and communist heritage, historical layers were added as the building was refurbished, so as to create an irreducible multitude of stories—many stations and occupants—and to make the building safe for a democratic institution to inhabit. The building now hosts Germany’s Ministry of Finance and bears the name of a government official who fell victim to left-wing terrorism in the early 1990s. Its largest meeting hall is named after a former minister of finance who was murdered by right-wing terrorists in the early 1920s. Deliberation, then, is vital for creating legitimate authority, across contexts. Whether it is the building in Berlin, or any other action of remembrance, deliberation allows formative intent to evolve, for groups to discuss what identity they want to be represented, and for them to engage in a process of creation, which in turn can be seen as strengthening democratic institutions or at least in fostering a sense of public accountability. As Nour Munawar and James Symonds have argued with regard to reconstruction in Syria “a bottom-up participatory approach,

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which gives voice to and builds consensus among all members of Syrian society” is needed “if cultural heritage assets are to provide a unifying force for reconciliation, reintegration of displaced people, and future social cohesion.”42 Presidents, Diasporas, and Dual SIMs Commemoration requires legitimacy and authority. Authority here means not just ensuring the results of commemoration in the present, but also how remembrance is used in the future. Those organising commemoration should be able to deliver and ensure that commemoration is conducted as envisaged and not manipulated for other purposes. For Ius ad Bellum, the ability to “reign in” is a crucial requirement for legitimate mobilisation. Some of the earliest thinkers on the justness of force, such as the Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, insisted its legitimate use was restricted to a central authority, as only those that can make a lasting peace should be allowed to breach it.43 Similar considerations apply to commemoration. Engaging senior political authority in the process of commemoration is a necessity, not a luxury. Representational figureheads can play a formative role for societies. As mentioned, President Michael Higgins in Ireland is a credible and legitimate voice on questions of what to make of Ireland’s history. Several German presidents contributed to shaping the country’s pivotal moments of historic reflection. The first president of Germany after the Second World War, Theodor Heuss, emphasised Germans’ “collective shame.” Richard von Weizsäcker, the president during reunification, stressed that the 8th of May 1945 was a day of liberation and insisted that “[t]here can be no reconciliation without remembrance.”44 Joachim Gauck, himself associated with the peaceful revolution in communist Eastern Germany, in early 2014, reminded Germans that their history was an obligation, not an excuse: “There are people who use Germany’s guilt for its past as a shield for laziness or a desire to disengage from the world.”45 At decisive moments, figureheads can lend their representative authority to public commemoration. They can also set an end point to inconclusive deliberation or decline to be involved on a particular issue altogether. In some contexts, presidents who have mainly a ceremonial role have been notably remiss in exercising that role in a meaningful way. Armenian

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presidents have not substantially engaged on the major issue of commemorating the Soviet repressions in the country. The red terror of the 1930s killed many members of Armenia’s elite, among them Yeghishe Charents, widely seen as the country’s most important poet of the twentieth century. After Georgia’s switch to a parliamentary system in 2013, its presidents have done little to address the country’s various thorny legacies, such as the Museum of Stalin, when a broader process of deliberation could have taken place under their auspices. Rather than deciding “by daylight,” as a member of the new ruling coalition had promised in 2013, the Georgian authorities over the last decade did not take meaningful decisions to address the country’s past. A guiding framework such as the Ethics of Political Commemoration may make it easier to move forward, as it suggests which considerations should be covered. As some degree of political authority seems desirable for ethical commemoration, there is reason to view organisations that lack accountability with some caution. Diaspora organisations are not designed to generate and maintain restraint. Often, they lack internal democratic legitimacy. When faced with a rallying cause, diaspora organisations are often in a race to attract attention and support that displaces moderate voices. Parts of the politically organised Armenian diaspora do little to build bridges between the countries. In an example from 2021, after the killing of more than a dozen Turkish soldiers, police, and civilian captives by Kurdish militants, the most prominent Armenian diaspora organisation in the United States responded to condolences by the US Embassy in Ankara with “You do know that Turkey lies,” rather than perhaps recognising that this was a time of suffering for families in Turkey, and that moments of grief may offer an opportunity to connect.46 Located abroad, diaspora organisations can be shielded from the political and geopolitical consequences of their initiatives. Libyans living or educated overseas are often referred to as “Dual Sims” (dabal shafra, literally meaning “double blades”) in the colloquial speech of their domestically prefixed compatriots. The agile elite can be viewed with suspicion, as mingling foreign and Libyan interests, but also as they can leave when times get difficult—they switch their SIM-cards and connect to their other network.

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A Gesture but no Unity in Beirut While victims should be included in deliberating on remembrance, their contributions have to be integrated into a broader context when commemoration is political and affects a wider community. Also, victims do not always agree with each other. A good example of the complexity of victims’ authority is provided by the commemoration of the Beirut Blast in Lebanon. On the 4th of August 2020 a storage facility holding a large consignment of fertiliser in the Port of Beirut exploded, with the reverberations felt as far away as Turkey. The explosion tore through the heavily populated city, affecting all of its religious confessions, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and leaving many more homeless.47 Families of victims from different confessional backgrounds have organised monthly and annual remembrance marches for their loved ones.48 These marches often begin at the site of the explosion, with the names of victims read out to those gathered, and end at the Lebanese Government’s judicial authorities, who have so far failed to investigate those responsible for the tragedy. The collective commemorations cut across identity divides, valuing the victims from each in a rare cross-confessional act of remembrance and pressuring the government to provide justice and undertake political reform. Many in Lebanon see this union as a genuine step forward in a society that otherwise had remained divided despite the Taif Agreement that ended country’s long civil war. In response to the blast, several artists created works in and around the Port of Beirut. One monument, The Gesture, was created by the Lebanese artist and architect Nadim Karam for the anniversary of the explosion in 2021. The Gesture (or more accurately, “Giant from Ashes,” al marid min ramadis) is a 25-metre-high human figure assembled at the site of the explosion from its rubble and holding a flower, or perhaps a bird, in a gesture towards the city. The monument can be viewed as an act of remembrance for the victims and as a statement of hope that a better future could be built from past grief. One company that contributed to the monument described its purpose as “being offered to Beirut to initiate a cathartic process for the grief at the loss of lives,”49 while the artist himself described it in an interview as “every single one of us and a reminder that we are the living energy of Beirut.”50 More than a dozen volunteers, affected by the blast in various ways, participated in constructing the monument.

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Not everyone welcomed the monument. Tarek Chemaly, a writer and artist who explores pop culture, collective memory, and national identity, captured the essence of the criticism in his blog, “Remember, the port is still a crime scene, no one was declared guilty over what happened, actually we still do not understand exactly what happened. And for this, the wound is still open. Maybe in a few years, we would appreciate ‘the gesture’ - but right now we are still bleeding.”51 This criticism was widely shared among some of the groups that organised the remembrance marches, such as the activist organisation “Punishment Now” (alqisas alan),52 arguing that optimistic commemoration requires the consent of victims’ families and is harmful until justice is achieved. One woman who lost her sister in the explosion stated in an interview with Al-Monitor: “The sculpture does not express our will that we still want accountability and justice. And why was it erected in the port in the first place, ground zero of the explosion, where the remnants of the victims continue to be scattered? We refuse any form of art while justice has not yet been served.”53 As the example of Beirut shows, pain does not make politics go away. Out of respect, there sometimes is the well-meaning expectation that victims have a single and authentic voice. It is tempting to think that trauma can ground truth, like a final arbiter. Instead, in Beirut and elsewhere, people can respond to suffering in different ways. Victims, too, often will need to deliberate and weigh divergent and sometimes conflicting views, among each other and in the wider society, which is why we need multidimensional frameworks. The Gesture also demonstrates that victims’ groups can become political actors on commemoration, in that they seek to influence, restrain, or even dominate how remembrance occurs. As such, their actions also deserve assessment through the Ethics of Political Commemoration. A Warning from Istanbul Legitimacy, in the end, is internal. Like memory, it cannot be imposed on a community. There are risks when one tries to pull outsiders onto one’s side, as the Armenian campaign of genocide recognition can illustrate. Internationally, this campaign typically advanced whenever the leadership of Turkey, especially under Reycep Erdogan, was unpopular abroad. From the Turkish perspective, genocide recognition internationally, and

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Armenia’s activity to advance it, can look like being aligned with anti-­ Turkish sentiment. Back in 2001, Hrant Dink, a Turkish journalist of Armenian descent had warned precisely of this danger: In history, Armenians have been used and abused over and over again, and have always been left to themselves by the big powers when calamity arrived. Internal dynamic (democracy) works much slower in this country and is much more painful, but it’s much safer and lasting.54

Dink’s warning is that while the initiation of campaigns can be justified and appear attractive, “external dynamics” can leave one exposed when calamity arrives. Calamity arrived some years after the words were written. Dink was assassinated in Istanbul in early 2007 by a teenage Turkish ultra-­nationalist. Being “left to themselves by the big powers” is an apt characterisation of the situation Armenia faces in the current context. While Dink is familiar to those studying Turkish-Armenian relations, he deserves attention more widely. He illustrates that the Armenian discussion on these fraught issues has staked out a range of nuanced positions that often are less visible from further afield. Broad Balance: Legitimacy in the Aurora Prize Legitimate authority has various dimensions that depend in part on how we conceive of legitimacy and authority, which are evolving and sometimes contested concepts. As described here, legitimate authority needs to be inclusive, institutional, and comprehensive in its political and temporal dimensions. At its best, legitimate authority can strengthen relationships and institutions, making them “much safer and lasting,” in Dink’s words. From this view, legitimate authority in Ius in Memoria may be a more complex principle than it is for the Just War tradition, illustrating that developing an Ethics of Political Commemoration requires more than a copying and pasting of concepts. In terms of legitimate authority, the Aurora Prize again stands out positively. Its inaugural Prize Selection Committee was balanced and multinational. The committee included Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor, and Benjamin Ferencz, an American lawyer of Jewish descent who was a young

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prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials. Through their participation, the composition signalled solidarity across groups of victims, rather than any potential competition. Other committee members included Shirin Ebadi, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer now in exile, previously one of Iran’s first female judges, and also a Nobel Prize laureate. Alongside Ebadi was Hina Jilani, a human rights advocate from Pakistan, demonstrating a multi-faith reach. Among the other committee members were Bernard Kouchner, the founder of the international humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontiers; Lord Ara Darzi, a prominent Armenian-British surgeon who had grown up in Iraq and is widely recognised for his work at the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College in London; and Mary Robinson, a former President of Ireland, who remains active in various global causes. The most recognisable figure in the prize committee is the actor and filmmaker George Clooney. He was not just recruited for the glamour, though he also twice won an Academy Award. Clooney has a long track record of activism and public advocacy, including on Darfur, and can contribute experience when deliberating on who to recognise for their humanitarian efforts. Legitimacy invariably has its trade-offs but in assembling a broad, multinational, and diverse committee, the Aurora Prize illustrates how one can give genuine authority to an effort of commemoration. It would have been entirely justified to staff this committee with Armenians only, as the Aurora Prize connects to the Armenian experience. And yet, with this broader base the prize became a more credible and inclusive effort. With its three founders and funders of various backgrounds, and, next to being Armenian, various nationalities, even this aspect arguably was as balanced as one can expect in a philanthropic venture.

Reasonable Chance of Success Commemoration becomes unethical if it perpetuates cycles of violence. Empirical social research helps to understand the impact of planned commemoration on conflict and its transformation.

Having a reasonable chance of success is a sensible criterion for Ius ad Memoriam. Simply put, commemoration should not backfire. In the Just War tradition’s Ius ad Bellum, a resort to arms is questionable if there is

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not a real chance of success. Extended conflicts can inflict too much suffering, even if a just cause, a right intention and legitimate authority guided the initial engagement. The mobilisation of memory, too, can have unintended consequences. It can result in attrition between groups, getting them stuck in an acrimonious quagmire that makes progress towards a more peaceful future difficult. Commemoration requires reflection about its eventual results, and reasonable people can disagree vehemently about its risks. To explore different scenarios, a respectful debate is needed in which worries are not shut down. Empirical research, both quantitative and qualitative, can test how people are likely to respond. This criterion therefore assigns a significant role to local expertise. Prevent Ghosts from Walking in Ireland Good intentions can go awry. Making up one’s mind in uncertain contexts requires a reflection on risks. With regard to the success of commemoration, the first concern will be to ensure that invoking the past does not make the future worse. Rallying people can be fraught. As the political theorist Kenneth Minogue put it, nationalism begins as the “Sleeping Beauty and ends as Frankenstein’s Monster.” Even if initially attractive, what ends up happening can be destructive beyond the control of its creators. Minogue, one of nationalism’s most incisive conservative critics, saw it as “little more than a new vocabulary to the politics of evil” and as a “form of self-expression by which a certain kind of […] political excitement can be communicated from an elite to the masses.” The critique can apply to other attempts to rally in-group identities which can unleash dynamics that may do more harm than good. The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien has linked the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland to the 1966 commemorations. As he describes it, 1966 was a “great commemorative year, a year in which ghosts were bound to walk, both North and South.” In that year, the Irish Republic’s citizens and many Catholics in the North: solemnly commemorated the Easter Rising of 1916. These celebrations had to include the reminder that the object for which the men of 1916 sacrificed their lives—a free and united Ireland—had still not been achieved. The ­general calls for rededication to the ideals of 1916 were bound to suggest to

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some young men and women not only that these ideals were in practice being abandoned […] but that the way to return to them was through the method of 1916: violence, applied by a determined minority.55

Although the government in Dublin had not wanted to encourage people to draw such violent conclusions, “there is in fact no way of discouraging them effectively within the framework of a cult of 1916.” Remembrance thus favoured “a revival of the Sinn Féin-I.R.A. movement,” which—next to a genuine cause of systematic discrimination against Catholics and a renewed civil rights movement—set the scene for a struggle in Northern Ireland that would last decades and cost 3500 lives. As O’Brien suggests, Protestant commemoration also contributed to a revival of armed extremism: Ulster Protestants, in the summer of 1966, commemorated not only their usual seventeenth century topics but also the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, when the Ulster Division was cut to pieces at Thiepval Wood. From [their perspective], the commemorations in Dublin seemed a celebration of treachery, and at the same time a threat to ‘Ulster’.

Though O’Brien’s account, from beautiful remembrance of 1916 to monstrous violence, remains contested, the possibility that it might hold some truth explains why Ireland approached the decade of centenaries with added attention for how commemorations would play out, keen not to awaken new horrors.56 (In 1966, too, some people blew up the Nelson Pillar, a central feature in Dublin, adding further memorial significance to that year.) Managerial Concerns and Measurement The recent history of war illustrates a more managerial aspect when measuring a reasonable chance of success via the Just War tradition. A common criticism of the US-led military operations in Afghanistan is that “success” was not defined early on and that the civilian leaders that organised for war were both vague and overly ambitious as to when it would end—when success would be achieved. Without clear objectives, it was difficult for the military to plan effectively for success or to measure progress towards it.

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Similar considerations apply for commemoration. It is important when conceiving commemoration to go beyond intention and cause, to describing success and how it will be measured. Without attention to success, the intention for commemoration, and the cause it relates to, can be ambitious to the point of making failure likely or possibly too vague to measure. The Armenian campaign for genocide recognition in its most strident version has a limited chance of success. It is overly ambitious. Only with a “clarification and recognition of the genocide,” according to a comment by a diaspora Armenian on the German radio station Deutschlandfunk in 2015, “can the real coming to terms with and overcoming of the trauma begin.” A goal that seems so far out of reach comes close to the “apocalyptic politics” that Rothberg has warned about. If, however, “success” is defined more modestly, the campaign for recognition has already brought an acknowledgement of Armenian suffering by the Turkish President, in a speech that fell short of what many Armenians hoped for but went much further than might have been expected before the campaign for international recognition started.57 In political contexts, the criterion of success is a reminder that the purpose of commemoration should be defined. Commemoration can have too vague an understanding of what it is trying to achieve. For example, monuments to the February 2011 revolution in Libya do not appear to have a clear goal of creating a unified and peaceful people but rather provide a vague glorification of the events as they occurred, with a contrasting call to unity. Success, then, is closely linked to the reach of intention, as Mallinder and O’Callaghan also noted when saying that “the form of memory projects is often dictated by the choice of goals.” Reframing Discussions with Empirical Research Empirical research can establish more credible goals for commemoration. In terms of choosing goals for the Armenia-Turkey relationship, empirical data suggests that a different approach to the Armenian genocide, which reframes it as a shared history rather than being exclusively focused on recognition, has a more reasonable chance of resonating with the Turkish public.58 Though little polling is available, one study conducted by the Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul suggests only nine percent of Turkish citizens believed, in 2015, that Turkey “should

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apologise” for its actions against the Armenians and “should admit that what happened was a genocide.” Therefore, there is a long way to go before the Turkish public would support a full recognition.59 Yet at the time, other conciliatory steps, such as solely apologising and other expressions of regret—garnered the support of nearly 45 percent of the population. Most importantly, only 21 percent of the respondents said that Turkey “should take no steps” on the Armenian issue. The potential willingness by close to 55 percent of the Turkish people, and the lack of objection by around 80 percent, to explore their troubled past could have represented an opening for it to be reframed in ways that would allow engagement. Underlining these results, another survey undertaken among students and teachers for a Turkish teachers’ union in 2013 found that more than 85 percent of respondents thought that the statement that the “common culture, built by various communities including Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Kurds who are living in Anatolia together for centuries, is our greatest fortune” was fully or partially true. This suggests that the framing of the past as “ours,” and one shared by many individual stories, may be a step towards conflict transformation.60 Data can also point to opportunities for engagement on tricky parts of history, as a survey of Polish youth in 2022 shows.61 According to Félix Krawatzek and Piotr Goldstein, Polish youth seem to have nuanced attitudes towards the history that is taught in school. Overall, only slightly more than 20 percent think that there should be more attention on “the suffering of Polish people throughout history,” with nearly 80 percent not thinking that this aspect needed to be expanded in the curriculum. About a third of youth think that “challenging aspects of Polish history, in particular in the relationship between the Polish majority and Poland’s ethnic and religious minorities” is not taught enough, almost three times the percentage that think there is already too much of this in the classroom. Further, close to 40 percent want to know more about “the Polish role on the territories which are now part of Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus.” As Krawatzek and Goldstein conclude about Polish youth, “[t]heir desire to know more about this contested and practically untaught history shows that the narratives emitted by the government do not translate seamlessly into the minds of young people. For all its complications, it seems that Polish youth would welcome opportunities for self-critical historical exchange.”62 Krawatzek and Goldstein’s study is an exemplar of unpacking attitudes to the past, with their survey complemented by focus

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groups that allowed a deeper examination of aspects that qualitative research may not capture. In the United States, at least some findings suggest that the views of the past can be closer than many think. Research released by the organisation More in Common, in 2022, demonstrates that people in America misunderstand each other’s attitudes to the past via a significant “perception gap.”63 Republicans tend to underestimate Democrats’ commitment to celebration of American successes. For example, 72 percent of Democrats agree that “We don’t need to be ashamed to be American,” while only 42 percent of Republicans estimate Democrats would say this. By contrast, 82 percent of Republicans agree with the statement “It is important that every American student learn about slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation,” while only 32 percent of Democrats estimate that Republicans would agree. Empirical research can, potentially, identify transformative opportunities of agreement about the past and how it should be approached. Not all situations offer a chance to craft a transformative story. However, neglecting or ignoring research can contribute to failure. Research undertaken for the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace in 2012 highlighted that 68 percent in Georgia still completely or mostly agreed that “Stalin was a wise leader who brought the Soviet Union to might and prosperity,” with only 16 percent rejecting that framing.64 Similarly, 76 percent completely or mostly agreed with the statement “For all Stalin’s mistakes and misdeeds, the most important thing is that under his leadership the Soviet people won the Great Patriotic War.” Tackling Stalin’s legacy head-on in such a mood was part of a broader failure of taking public opinion seriously. The authorities acted on a just cause but with little regard to their chances of success. As the authors of the report put it, the “anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin campaigns launched by the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili were conspicuous but superficial.” A more promising strategy, based on the data, would have been to supplant the focus on Stalin’s persona with a more personalised emphasis on the role of grandparents in building some of the positive aspects of the Soviet experience, to focus on the dignity of families as a way of side-lining the leader, and not to blow up monuments dedicated to the fight against Nazism. Most disastrously, Saakashvili had “advised the griping intelligentsia to flush itself down the toilet.”65 For some in Georgia, clinging on to Stalin seems to have been an attempt to hold on against a government that had expressed its disdain.

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To Georgia’s south, in the Armenian-Turkish context, data was also not sufficiently deployed for the purpose of securing a better peace. Little empirical research accompanied the 2009 “Zurich Protocols” which had foreseen a normalisation of relations between Armenia and Turkey, including an opening of the border that has been sealed for decades. The protocols, initiated in part as a reaction to the murder of Hrant Dink, were ultimately unsuccessful in part due to a public backlash. Empirical research thus plays a major role in determining reasonable chances of success. What do people think? What kinds of commemoration might resonate? Surveys can test messages and identify where additional agreement might be achievable. Focus groups can establish how people frame issues and give insight into the nuance of people’s responses. Social research can also prepare the public discussions that should give commemoration its legitimate authority. This kind of empirical work gives a special role to local knowledge and expertise, and especially to institutions that can undertake such research, since good quantitative research is teamwork that requires experience, and also to local universities in which such questions remain an issue of ongoing attention. Of course, causality can be hard to unpack, and it is difficult to distinguish the two-way relationship between commemoration and a better peace. But even if some of the insights remain an approximation, local knowledge and expertise play a key role in ethical action. Knotted Poles and Feasibility in Tübingen A focus on feasibility can generate creative solutions. Concentrating on what is doable at a municipal level helps to address divisive issues, as illustrated by the German city of Tübingen’s knotted poles for streets named after people who now are controversial. After previous rounds of renaming, the Tübingen city council in 2020 again focused on the issue of who streets had been named after. More than a dozen names were contested, ranging from a prominent architect with Nazi connections across colonial officials to the more widely known Clara Zetkin, an ardent feminist socialist who had been a prosecutor in 1920s communist show trials in Moscow and a leader of the Comintern until her death in 1933. The list of contested names included a local writer born in 1853 who just prior to the Second World War, in her late 80s, had written an adulatory birthday letter to Adolf Hitler. The street had been the first to be named after a woman, four years before the Nazis came to power.

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While the writer had been a patriotic author dwelling on nostalgic themes, she had previously opposed antisemitism and advocated for a peaceful rapprochement with France.66 Recent renaming had been unevenly popular with residents. Some said they resented having to change their address and for years challenged the renaming in administrative courts. In nearby cities, residents complained bitterly of a kind of displacement. All the administrative changes of moving had been inflicted on them, as they had to update their documents, registrations, and notifying bank, doctors, employers, insurances, and other teutocratic counterparts of their newly named address.67 Leaving the street names unchanged, however, did not address the uncritical allocation of names. Adding an explanatory sign had become a tired routine. Doing something about the names was a just cause. In various ways, the issue wasn’t just local. As one of a handful of dreamy university towns in Germany, Tübingen has disproportionate visibility. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Hölderlin, and also the astronomer Johannes Kepler studied by the Neckar, the town’s signature romantic river. Boris Palmer, Tübingen’s Green Party mayor since 2007, is a figure of national renown. Palmer is a pioneer of advancing urban climate adaptation with municipal pragmatism and an evangelist of cycling and trams. He is also a regular and often controversial presence on German TV talk shows.68 Palmer found an original solution for the street names. In early 2021, the city launched a competition for students to come up with suggestions. The idea was to give young people the possibility “to develop unusual ideas and thereby to offer a young perspective on the culture of remembrance.” Twelve teams submitted their designs. Two students, Milena Schwer and Vanessa Cataldo, developed the idea of Verknotung or “knottedness.” Their idea was to tie a knot into the pole carrying the street sign, a visually jarring contrast to the solid metal tube and a message that there was something verkehrt, strange and inverted, that requires attention. A QR-code on the pole would lead anyone who was interested to details about the named person’s biography. With this feature added, most of the names could stay, and yet there was a novel visual approach that in itself advanced discussion. Palmer presented the knotted poles in May 2022.69 Are knotted poles successful political commemoration? They certainly were part of a successful political style. A few months after this initiative, Palmer was re-elected against steep odds. Running as an independent after

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having been ejected from the Green Party for his edgelord tendencies, Palmer gained an absolute majority in the first round of the elections. It appears that citizens valued his focus on finding feasible solutions on a local level. In other regards this was also successful commemoration. Palmer’s Facebook post introducing the knots drew over 200 comments, often from afar. There was disagreement, but also a debate visible across nearly a hundred Shares and more than 1000 Likes. Palmer answered some comments, for example, highlighting that the silvery 3D-printed knotted sleeves were much cheaper than renaming a street, as municipalities have to cover the costs for citizens’ re-registrations. Even more successful, perhaps, that once the knots were in place, only few articles on the street names were published. At least for the time being, it seems that the previously divisive issue no longer draws as much attention, as if it had been brought back to sleep. The return to slumber can be considered to be successful commemoration. Milena Schwer has said that other cities are beginning to express interest in their solution. Being Seen: Transformative Potential of the Aurora Prize The Aurora Prize illuminates how we can think of having a reasonable chance of success. With a focused scope, its success is in the hands of organisers. Even if it does not achieve its greatest transformative aim, it still supports the saviours of today by giving them support. The emphasis on success can also explain an aspect that otherwise may raise eyebrows. Having George Clooney in the prize committee, likely perceived sceptically by those who resent the sway of Hollywood over the world’s imagination, contributes greatly to the potential success of the Aurora Prize. Clooney’s 2016 visit to Armenia, for the inaugural prize ceremony, probably drew more attention than multiple academic conferences would ever have gathered. His presence was covered widely by news outlets across the world. His visit then was a big step towards “bringing the world to Armenia,” as one of the people involved had described the intention of the Aurora Prize.70 In war, success is mostly understood as victory. For commemoration, a broader range of outcomes can be successful. The battles are in good part about how we see the world, not who holds which lands. With its contest in that space, commemoration is a realm of imagination that requires a creative approach. To some, it can even offer a kind of re-enchantment with possibility, in providing new perspectives onto familiar facts.

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Notes 1. Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century, Edition Unstated (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 287. 2. ‘Professor Louise Mallinder and Dr. Margaret O’Callaghan: The Ethics of Commemorative Practices’, Royal Irish Academy, 2015. https://www.ria. ie/news/ethical-­p olitical-­l egal-­a nd-­p hilosophical-­s tudies-­c ommittee-­ opinion-­series-­ethics-­initiative [accessed 12 April 2021]. 3. Michael Rothberg, ‘From Gaza To Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’, Criticism, 53.4 (2011), 523–48. p. 525–6. 4. Yvonne Whelan, Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity: New Perspectives on the Cultural Landscape (Routledge, 2016). p. 64. 5. Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics, Asia/Pacific/Perspectives, 1 online resource: illustrations. Vols (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012) http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=912294 [accessed 13 February 2023]; Min Hong, ‘Analysis on the Military Parade Marking the 75th Anniversary of the WPK Foundation’, 2020. 6. ‘Professor Louise Mallinder and Dr. Margaret O’Callaghan: The Ethics of Commemorative Practices’, Royal Irish Academy, 2015. https://www.ria. ie/news/ethical-­p olitical-­l egal-­a nd-­p hilosophical-­s tudies-­c ommittee-­ opinion-­series-­ethics-­initiative [accessed 12 April 2021]. 7. ‘Bust of Maria Skłodowska-Curie Unveiling’. http://www.polishheritage. co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=170&Ite mid=188%20https://www.president.pl/president-­komorowski/news/ p o l i s h -­f r e n c h -­p r e s i d e n t s -­u n v e i l -­m o n u m e n t -­t o -­s k l o d o w s k a -­ curie,38927%20https://en.vietnamplus.vn/hospital-­inaugurates-­marie-­ curie-­statue/136165.vnp%20https://cpfm.uoregon.edu/sites/cpfm2. uoregon.edu/files/womens_tour_final.pdf [accessed 26 February 2023]. 8. Helena Arose, ‘Exhibition Review: “Beyond Curie”—a Design Project Celebrating Women in STEM’, The Museum Scholar, 2019. https://articles.themuseumscholar.org/2019/05/01/tp_vol2arose/. [accessed 15 February 2023]. 9. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Russia’s Recent Invasion of Ukraine: The Just War Perspective’, Global Policy Journal, 2022. https://globalpolicyjournal. com/blog/21/03/2022/russias-­r ecent-­i nvasion-­u kraine-­j ust-­w ar-­ perspective. 10. A.  Walter Dorn, ‘The Just War Index: Comparing Warfighting and Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’, Journal of Military Ethics, 10.3 (2011), 242–62; Neta C.  Crawford, ‘Just War Theory and the U.S.  Counterterror War’, Perspectives on Politics, 1.1 (2003), 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592703000021.

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11. Christian Enemark and Christopher Michaelsen, ‘Just War Doctrine and the Invasion of Iraq’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 51.4 (2005), 545–63; Albert L. Weeks, The Choice of War: The Iraq War and the Just War Tradition: The Iraq War and the Just War Tradition (ABCCLIO, 2009). 12. María de-Miguel-Molina, ‘Visiting Dark Murals: An Ethnographic Approach to the Sustainability of Heritage’, Sustainability, 12.2 (2020), 677. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12020677. 13. Solan Zolyan, ‘Language and Political Reality: George Orwell Reconsidered’, Σημειωτκή - Sign Systems Studies, 43.1 (2015), 131–49. 14. AYF West [@ayfwest], ‘After Serving in Prison from January 28, 1982 to October 28, 2021 (Nearly 40 Years), Armenian Hero Hampig Sassounian Is Free and in the Homeland. Https://T.Co/4BiuvaC0WI’, Twitter, 2021. https://twitter.com/ayfwest/status/1454596271793074177 [accessed 26 February 2023]. 15. Author’s conversation on social media. 16. Egon Flaig, ‘Memorialgesetze und historisches Unrecht. Wie Gedächtnispolitik die historische Wissenschaft bedroht’, Historische Zeitschrift, 302.2 (2016), 297–339. https://doi.org/10.1515/hzhz-­ 2016-­0091. 17. ‘Noubar Afeyan on the Permission to Leap (Ep. 113)’, 2018 https:// conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/noubar-­afeyan/ [accessed 7 February 2023]. 18. ‘The Aurora Humanitarian Initiative’. https://auroraprize.com/en/ prize-­about [accessed 26 February 2023]. 19. Alasdair C.  MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 20. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, Reprint Edition (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007). p. 188. 21. Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity (Princeton University Press, 2012) https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/ 9780691153339/the-­young-­turks-­crime-­against-­humanity [accessed 31 March 2021]. 288. 22. Jennifer Dixon, ‘Norms, Narratives, and Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide on JSTOR’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 4, 2015. 23. Thomas De Waal, ‘The Toxic Memory Politics in the Post-Soviet Caucasus’, Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past: A Comparative Study on Memory Management in the Region, 2020, 35–44. 24. ‘Human Rights Developments in the Caucasus’, Human Rights Watch, 1993. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/WR93/Hsw-­0 7.htm [accessed 20 February 2023].

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25. Timothy Snyder, ‘Commemorative Causality’, Modernism/Modernity, 20.1 (2013), 77–93 https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2013.0026. 26. Ibid., p.92; Snyder refers to Berlin’s Essays in the History of Ideas. 27. Egon Flaig, ‘Memorialgesetze und historisches Unrecht. Wie Gedächtnispolitik die historische Wissenschaft bedroht’, Historische Zeitschrift, 302.2 (2016), 297–339. https://doi.org/10.1515/hzhz-­ 2016-­0091. 28. Alex J.  Bellamy, Paul D.  Williams, and Stuart Griffin, Understanding Peacekeeping (Polity, 2010); Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). 29. ‘Aurora Mardiganian’ https://auroraprize.com/en/aurora-­mardiganian [accessed 26 February 2023]. 30. Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History, Main edition (Profile Books, 2010). 31. Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2019). 32. Daniel Leese, ‘Rituals, Emotions and Mobilization: The Leader Cult and Party Politics’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship (Springer, 2016), pp. 217–28 (p. 2); Jae-Cheon Lim, Leader Symbols and Personality Cult in North Korea: The Leader State (London: Routledge, 2015). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315736570; Rahaf Aldoughli, ‘What Is Syrian Nationalism? Primordialism and Romanticism in Official Baath Discourse’, Nations and Nationalism, 28.1 (2022), 125–40. https://doi. org/10.1111/nana.12786. 33. ‘Bolsonaro Leads Controversial Bicentennial Celebration in Brazil’, Le Monde.Fr, 7 September 2022 https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/09/07/bolsonaro-­leads-­controversial-­bicentennial-­ celebration-­in-­brazil_5996159_4.html [accessed 7 February 2023]. 34. Lula Fala Ao Povo Brasileiro: 7 de Setembro, dir. by Lula, 2022 https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG19PpiFUO4 [accessed 26 February 2023]. 35. ‘Professor Louise Mallinder and Dr. Margaret O’Callaghan’. 36. ‘Civil.Ge | Merabishvili Responds to His Controversial Interview’ https:// old.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=22176 [accessed 7 February 2023]. 37. Hans Gutbrod, ‘The Ethics of Political Commemoration: The Stalin Museum and Thorny Legacies in the Post-Soviet Space—PONARS Eurasia’, PONARS Eurasia, 2022. https://www.ponarseurasia.org/the-­ ethics-­o f-­p olitical-­c ommemoration-­t he-­s talin-­m useum-­a nd-­t horny-­ legacies-­in-­the-­post-­soviet-­space/ [accessed 15 November 2022]. 38. ‘Stalin Statue in Gori, Georgia’, Contested Histories, 2021 https://contestedhistories.org/search/STALIN [accessed 8 February 2023].

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39. Amos Chapple, ‘Georgia’s Hypermodern Parliament Building Faces Uncertain Future’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 11 May 2021, section Georgia. https://www.rferl.org/a/georgia-­kutaisi-­parliament-­building-­ abandoned-­saakashvili/31248176.html [accessed 8 December 2022]. 40. Jaeger Zolling, Peter Falk, Das Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus (Berlin: Bundesministerium für Finanzen, 2019), p. 82. 41. Ibid. (Berlin: Bundesministerium für Finanzen, 2019, p. 82. 42. Nour A.  Munawar and James Symonds, ‘Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Forced Migration & Community Engagement: The Case of Aleppo, Syria’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2022 https://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/13527258.2022.2117234 [accessed 28 January 2023]. 43. deutschlandfunkkultur.de, ‘Nachkriegsdeutschland—Theodor Heuss Und Die Shoah’, Deutschlandfunk Kultur https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/nachkriegsdeutschland-­theodor-­heuss-­und-­die-­shoah-­100.html [accessed 8 February 2023]. 44. James M. Markham and Special To the New York Times, ‘“ALL OF US MUST ACCEPT THE PAST,” THE GERMAN PRESIDENT TELL’S M.P.’S’, The New York Times, 9 May 1985, section World. https://www. nytimes.com/1985/05/09/world/all-­of-­us-­must-­accept-­the-­past-­the-­ german-­president-­tell-­s-­mp-­s.html [accessed 26 February 2023]. 45. ‘Germany’s President Speaks Out About Taking Responsibility’, Carnegie Europe https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/54394 [accessed 7 February 2023]. 46. ANCA [@ANCA_DC], ‘Two Questions for @USEmbassyTurkey: 1) You Do Know That Turkey Lies. All the Time. About America, the Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and Everyone Else. 1) Define “Ally.” Explain and Provide Examples’, Twitter, 2021. https://twitter.com/ANCA_DC/status/1361173805478117376 [accessed 27 February 2023]. 47. ‘Lebanon: Explosion in Beirut, Secondary Data Review’, ACAPS, 2020. https://www.acaps.org/special-­r eport/lebanon-­e xplosion-­b eirut-­ secondary-­data-­review [accessed 27 February 2023]. 48. Tessa Fox, ‘Families Demand Justice Two Years on from Beirut Port Blast’, Aljazeera (04 August 2022). 49. ‘Hilights - the Gesture “‫ ’”مارد من رماد‬https://www.facebook.com/hilights/ photos/a.1383721908332447/4460628820641725/ [accessed 27 February 2023]. 50. ‘Lebanese Artist Nadim Karam Creates Memorial Sculpture at Beirut Port | Arab News’ https://www.arabnews.com/node/1904791/lifestyle [accessed 27 February 2023].

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51. Tarek Chemaly, ‘Tarek Chemaly’. https://blog.tarekchemaly.com/ search/label/the%20gesture [accessed 27 February 2023]. 52. ‘‫ ’القصاص آالن‬https://www.facebook.com/BEI04082020 [accessed 27 February 2023]. 53. ‘Lebanese Commemorate Beirut Port Explosion Anniversary with Statue, Music - Al-Monitor: Independent, Trusted Coverage of the Middle East’. h t t p s : / / w w w. a l -­m o n i t o r. c o m / o r i g i n a l s / 2 0 2 1 / 0 8 / l e b a n e s e -­ commemorate-­beirut-­port-­explosion-­anniversary-­statue-­music [accessed 27 February 2023]. 54. This is a citation as rendered in various sources, originally in Turkish. Similar wordings are in other articles ‘The Reconstruction of Armenian Identity in Turkey (2)—Turquie Européenne’. http://turquieeuropeenne. eu/the-­reconstruction-­of-­armenian-­identity-­in-­turkey-­2.html [accessed 7 February 2023]. 55. Anthony J.  Jordan, To Laugh or to Weep: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1994). p.150. 56. Margaret O’Callaghan, ‘The Past Never Stands Still; Negotiating the Past and Commemorating the Easter Rising in 1966 and 1976’, in Remembering the Troubles; Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland (Notre Dame University Press, 2017), pp. 115–41. 57. Constanze Letsch, ‘Turkish PM Offers Condolences over 1915 Armenian Massacre’, The Guardian, 23 April 2014, section World news. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/23/turkey-­e rdogan-­ condolences-­armenian-­massacre [accessed 7 February 2023]. 58. Hans Gutbrod and David Wood, ‘Peace Between Armenia and Turkey Is Possible If We Reframe the Armenian Genocide’, Foreign Policy, 2021. https://foreignpolicy-­com.eu1.proxy.openathens.net/2021/06/14/ armenia-­t urkey-­g enocide-­o ttoman-­e mpire-­h istor y-­r approchement-­ diplomacy-­public-­opinion/ [accessed 15 November 2022]. 59. EDAM, ‘Turks Regretful over the Armenian Tragedy of 1915 but Refuse to Qualify It as a Genocide’ (Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM), 2015). https://edam.org.tr/wp-­content/ uploads/2015/01/EDAMSurvey2015-­1.pdf. 60. ‘Minorities Seen as Threat by Students—Türkiye News’, 7 February 2023. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/minorities-­s een-­a s-­t hreat-­b y-­ students-­44822 [accessed 7 February 2023]. 61. Félix Krawatzek, and Piotr Goldstein, Young Poles in Times of Dramatic Change: Refugees, Identity and Social Engagement (Berlin: Centre for East European and International Studies, 2022). https://en.zois-­berlin.de/ fileadmin/media/Dateien/3-­P ublikationen/ZOiS_Reports/2022/ ZOiS_ Report_2_2022.pdf.

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62. Félix Krawatzek, and Piotr Goldstein, Young Poles in Times of Dramatic Change: Refugees, Identity and Social Engagement (Berlin: Centre for East European and International Studies, 2022). https://en.zois-­berlin.de/ fileadmin/media/Dateien/3-­P ublikationen/ZOiS_Reports/2022/ ZOiS_ Report_2_2022.pdf. 63. Stephen Hawkins, Defusing the History Wars: Finding Common Ground in Teaching America’s National Story (More in Common, December 2022). 64. Maria Lipman, Lev Gudkov, and Lasha Bakradze, The Stalin Puzzle: Deciphering Post-Soviet Public Opinion (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013). 65. ‘Memorable Moments from the Age of Misha | Eurasianet’, 7 February 2023 https://eurasianet.org/memorable-­moments-­from-­the-­age-­of-­ misha [accessed 7 February 2023]. 66. S.  W. R.  Aktuell, ‘Knoten an Straßenschildern in Tübingen: OB Palmer will Geschichte greifbar machen’, swr.online, 2022. https://www.swr.de/ swraktuell/baden-­w uerttemberg/tuebingen/boris-­p almer-­m ontiert-­ knoten-­a n-­s trassenschildern-­m it-­u mstrittenen-­s trassennamen-­i n-­ tuebingen-­100.html [accessed 7 February 2023]. 67. Stuttgarter Nachrichten Germany Stuttgart, ‘Neuer Straßenname in Ludwigsburg: Genervte Pioniere in einer korrekten Straße’, stuttgarter-­ nachrichten.de. https://www.stuttgarter-­nachrichten.de/inhalt.neuer-­ strassenname-­in-­ludwigsburg-­genervte-­pioniere-­in-­einer-­korrekten-­strasse .513e457a-­10b5-­4cc4-­9294-­5a2ada732649.html [accessed 7 February 2023]. 68. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Zurück Zur Phronesis—Digitale Transformation Und Waste Land’, Aufklärung & Kritik, 2022, 150–54. 69. S.  W. R.  Aktuell, ‘Knoten an Straßenschildern in Tübingen: OB Palmer will Geschichte greifbar machen’, swr.online, 2022. https://www.swr.de/ swraktuell/baden-­w uerttemberg/tuebingen/boris-­p almer-­m ontiert-­ knoten-­a n-­s trassenschildern-­m it-­u mstrittenen-­s trassennamen-­i n-­ tuebingen-­100.html [accessed 27 February 2023]. 70. ‘The Clooneys’ Star Power in the Caucasus | Eurasianet’. https://eurasianet.org/clooneys-­star-­power-­caucasus [accessed 7 February 2023].

CHAPTER 3

Ius in Memoria: How to Commemorate

Abstract  For Ius in Memoria, the question of how to commemorate, this chapter outlines four criteria that reflect the Just War tradition’s Ius in Bello. Commemoration should transcend the collective, by encouraging people to treat each other as individuals rather than as group representatives. Remembrance should exit circular narratives that trap people in destructive ways of thinking about themselves and others. Through commemoration, people should assert their moral autonomy, by grounding what they do in what they aspire to be, rather than excusing their own transgressions with reference to what others have done to them. Lastly, commemoration should have an element of contained unfathomability. It should move us to act and yet not overwhelm our lives. Remembrance does not contribute to a better future if we have “the past eat the future,” as one perceptive journalist once put it. This chapter describes these criteria with reference to First World War cemeteries in Flanders, literary reimagination in Germany, revolutionary museums in Misrata (Libya), a remarkable Azerbaijani author exiled in his own country, the question of how to name trauma, discussions of the bombing of Dresden, and an exhibit that ended in controversy. Keywords  Nationalism • Transformation • Literature • Art • Restraint

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Gutbrod, D. Wood, Ethics of Political Commemoration, Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7_3

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Ius in Memoria is the consideration of how to commemorate ethically. It considers how commemoration can transcend the collective, exit circular narratives, assert moral autonomy, and allow for thriving through contained unfathomability.

Once a decision is made to engage in political commemoration, it should be done well. The Ius in Memoria criteria—Transcend the Collective, Exit Circular Narratives, Assert Moral Autonomy, and Contained Unfathomability—consider the form of commemoration. Like Ius in Bello considerations on the right way to fight a war, the purpose is to ensure that a better peace remains possible. Charting the path to such a shared future requires reflection on restraint and potential redirection. Successful commemoration can expand and transform the who of identities involved in commemoration (Transcend the Collective). What stories people tell themselves can also be transformed so that their interpretations of themselves and others is less shackled to the past (Exit Circular Narratives). Commemoration should encourage people to live up to a reasonable vision of who they want to be (Assert Moral Autonomy). Finally, we should ensure that the experience of commemoration does not overshadow all aspects of thriving in life nor become routine but instead has an impact that remains circumscribed (Contained Unfathomability). Ius in Memoria corresponds with Ius in Bello of the Just War tradition. The principle of discrimination is a core idea in the positive sense of “making a distinction” and directing away from harm. The Ius in Memoria criteria are more loosely derived from the Just War tradition than those of the previous chapter. They apply to specific actions of remembrance, rather than considerations of whether to act. The criteria are a synthesis derived from the overall purpose of forging a better future from the past, together with plausible ideas that have been put forward in discussion. A significant difference is that much of Ius in Bello has been codified into International Humanitarian Law (IHL). While Ius in Bello is relevant as a foundational framework, its practical application has shifted into a legal setting, ranging from international conventions to the standard operational procedures of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. For Ius in Memoria, there is no similar institutional application, other than unbinding recommendations developed by groups interested in memory. Unlike in Ius in Bello, lives are not directly at stake when making Ius in Memoria considerations. Yet how people conduct remembrance has an

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impact on their relationships. Commemoration can help to overcome violent pasts and should not pull people back into confrontation.

Transcend the Collective Commemoration plays a central role in the development and moulding of identities and can reinforce “us and them” divisions. Commemoration is appropriate if it encourages people to treat each other as individuals rather than group representatives.

Commemoration should transcend and transform collectives, while still allowing for groups to memorialise past events and suffering. To remember well should ideally expand and transform the identity of the people that are involved, emphasising individuality and the possibility of choice, rather than submerging individuals under the weight of group experiences. This criterion mirrors the requirement of discrimination Ius in Bello. Under that requirement, those that are not combatants should not be targeted. Even for combatants, restraints are in place. Force should only be used when needed, proportional to what is required to achieve one’s goals, and some forms of force are entirely proscribed. The other side should not be treated as a collective, and individuals should be held responsible for their own actions, rather than for those of others. The overall idea is to minimise harm. These broad principles work for commemoration as well. Ius in Memoria promotes remembrance that focuses on individual worth and rejects commemoration that promotes collective blame and punishment. Commemoration that Transcends Ethical political commemoration entails crafting “better formed narratives”1 that recognise past injustices whilst not promoting their repetition. Furthermore, it should encourage caring for individuals. Ultimately, commemoration should allow people to see each other as humans. Peaceful futures depend on progress in transcending the collective, especially in contexts of pain and anguish. Done badly, commemoration tells stories that harm peace. Harmful stories essentialize others, ascribe individuals to a group, blame that group and its members for a past wrong, and remove moral impediments to

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abusive behaviour. As articulated by Sarah Cobb, a peace academic who has explored the role of storytelling or “narratives” in conflict: In the context of ongoing or historical violence, people tell stories about what happened, who did what to whom and why. And all too often, speaking of violence reproduces the social fractures and delegitimizes, again, those that struggle against their own marginalization.2

Ronald Suny, a historian writing about Armenia and the Caucasus, also warns about the risks of wider ascription when reflecting on the historical exploration of the Armenian genocide together with Turkish historians: Essentializing the other as irremediably evil leads to endless repetition of the debilitating conflicts and deceptions of the last century. At present, the histories preferred by most Armenians and Turks remain embedded in their respective nationalist master narratives, which construct the other people as perpetrator and their own as victim.3

To move beyond narrow nationalisms, Suny says, requires “shared, subversive narratives.” The Potential to Transform An optimistic vision of commemoration suggests that it could transform how people see the past, with an emphasis on sharing it. Such a vision is similar to how conflict interests are best managed in negotiations, by their integration into mutually advantageous solutions through “principled negotiation” that values both a conflict party’s objective (in this case a need to highlight past injustice) with concern at the quality of relationship held with the other.4 Similarly, different demands on commemoration can in part be integrated into a common transformative story. Existing guidance on commemoration also stresses the idea of transcending the collective. The European Network Remembrance and Solidarity’s Guidelines for International Discourse on History and Memory include two points focused on transcending collective ascription. Firstly, “[i]ndividual facts with positive or negative significance, even if in themselves historically verified, should not be used to illustrate the attitudes and conduct of an entire community.” In the following point, the Guidelines urge that one should “Treat historical figures as individuals” both when it

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comes to commendable and reprehensible actions. Individuals should be presented in an individualised manner, to avoid “fostering and spreading stereotypes which could be applied to entire communities.” Invoking Names in Flanders The invocation of names at funerals can be traced back to some of the earliest historical records. Naming the dead is a way of emphasising individuality, recovered from a collective loss. In recent history, individual names remain a central theme for commemoration. When Memorial, the Russian organisation focused on restoring the memory and dignity of victims of political repression, was banned from activity in Moscow in the wake of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, individuals around the world took up its ritual of reading out the names of victims by the Solovetsky stone.5 This annual reading had become a rallying point in Russia and also a form of protest against ongoing repressions. In the marches at the Port of Beirut, names of the victims are read, too. Whether it is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, designed by the then 21-year-old Maya Lin, the more recent Wall of Remembrance for the Korean War, or the individualised graves to remember soldiers fighting for the Commonwealth in the First World War, the fallen soldiers are cited with their name. Conversely, one major source of German resentment after the First World War was the widespread belief that the Versailles Treaty had consigned German soldiers to be buried in mass graves when other countries displayed more uplifting and personalised ways of remembering their fallen. Langemark Cemetery, at the site of a battle mythologised in Germany and known as the First Battle of Ypres in English, holds more than 40,000 dead in a space that is the size of not many soccer fields. It takes about five minutes to walk around the cemetery and would take more than a full day to read out the names of everyone buried there. As one contemporary description puts it, the graveyard “is particularly poignant by the power of simplicity.”6 After the First World War, that simplicity to many Germans looked like being lumped with indignity. The actual history of the German graves was more complicated, but with nearly 2 million German soldiers dead, the question was present for many families and too charged for nuance. In retrospect, some restrictions on commemoration seem petty. For example, German cemeteries in Belgium apparently were not allowed to have standing headstones.7 Perceived slights lend themselves to

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nationalist exploitation. As the historian Jürgen Osterhammel put it, in this period “the world came up with unusually few constructive and durable solutions.”8 Finding a constructive and lasting solution includes a demonstrative effort to retain the individuality of the enemy dead, to make it easier for their families to find peace, or at least for them not to feel more aggrieved. Focus on Turkish Schindlers Cem Özdemir, a German politician with Turkish roots, has suggested a focus on individual actions and experiences. In a landmark speech in June 2016, on the occasion of the Bundestag recognising the genocide of the Armenians, Özdemir highlighted a positive deviation at the core of terrible events: When the governor of Kütahya received the order to deport the Armenian population in his district in 1915, he publicly [emphasis in the speech] announced that he would not obey this order. The governor of Konya, and the followers of the Mevlevi Dervish Order in Konya, did exactly the same thing. They listened to their hearts. Their human compass did not fail. For many, it was their Muslim faith or their image of humanity that did not allow them to obey this pernicious order from Istanbul. We bow our heads in respect to them and to all the courageous heroes who also existed in Turkey and who did not carry out the order.9

Following a break for applause, Özdemir continued: The people in Turkey, but also the people from Turkey who live in the Federal Republic of Germany, have every reason to be proud of these Turkish Schindlers, and not of the murderers Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha.

With this framing, Özdemir shifted at least part of the focus onto the possibility of doing better. He also allowed for a narrative that can integrate some of the Armenian and Turkish pasts. (The peculiar reference to saviours seems to have currency in the broader region. The Museum of the History of Jews of Georgia, located in Tbilisi’s old town, uses the heading “Georgian Schindlers” to feature several individuals who saved Jews from Nazi murder, including in occupied France.)

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Literary Reimagination of the German “We” Literature can play a major role in attempts at reimagination, changing the sense of “we” that people can have. A prominent representative of such an approach is the German writer W.G.  Sebald, who, with reference to Friedrich Hölderlin, said “[t]here are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship.” Sebald’s novels of dislocation and displacement, especially Emigrants and Austerlitz, brought readers closer to “the memory of those to whom the greatest injustice was done,” as Sebald had put it in the 2002 speech in Stuttgart that turned out to be his last one.10 The philosopher Richard Rorty has made a more formal case for literature in ethical contexts by arguing that solidarity is “thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation—the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us.’”11 Yet contribution to the moral progress of expanding the collective was made chiefly by “strong poets,” a term that Rorty adopted from Harold Bloom. Such poets, according to Rorty, could be characterised by how they engaged with the past. At their best, they could “create a more expansive sense of solidarity than we presently have.” This task, primarily achieved by literature, had a better chance of success than attempts by philosophers to get people to “recognise such a solidarity, as something that exists antecedently to our recognition of it.”12 One such “strong poet” is Manès Sperber, an Austrian-French novelist and psychologist. Born in a shtetl in Galicia in what today is Western Ukraine in 1905, Sperber wrote the momentous trilogy Like a Tear in the Ocean, an epic account of Second World War and of being hounded by both Nazis and communists. Sperber had been a communist in the 1930s and, along with a small handful of others, had left the party and the Comintern in revulsion at its Stalinist turn—a step that took extreme courage and gave him a perspective that resulted in an extraordinary book.13 The last part of the trilogy, The Lost Bay, is the most searing. Inhabitants of a Jewish village led by a charismatic young rabbi discuss whether to rally for a last stand against the German troops, only to annihilated by the Polish partisans that they had earlier supported. In another thread of the story, partisans in Yugoslavia are wiped out between the Nazis and the

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Communists. The charismatic young rabbi provides a resigned commentary on the broader destruction, on being lost like a tear in the ocean. The novel impresses on the reader the experience of utter vulnerability when other people, based on ideas they have of your identity, are after you with murder in their eyes. Written in German during and after the war, the novel was first published in France and only came out in Germany in 1961. It took time to catch on and then found a wide readership. Some called it one of the key German novels of the century. It appears likely that it to some degree influenced Sebald. Living in Paris, insisting on his Jewish identity but writing in German, Sperber described what could be a manifesto about a radically different way of coming together. Like so many other writers before him, the author has offered his readers only one thing—to share with him his loneliness. Perhaps this is the only form of community in which those can find each other who have to draw courage from the same source, from living without illusion.

Living without illusion, for Sperber, was not a position of resigned existentialism. Rather, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a well-known Franco-German intellectual and Green politician, has described Sperber as a “sceptical optimist.” Though he received Germany’s high-profile Peace Prize of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association in 1983—awarded during the Frankfurt Book Fair in the historic Paulskirche in a ceremony typically attended by the president of Germany —Sperber is now receding from public attention. His trilogy is no longer available in English. In recent years, new publications that mention him amount to no more than a trickle. Sperber’s name turns up mainly in the context of being a friend of André Malraux and a colleague and contemporary of Arthur Koestler and Willi Münzenberg, the chief international propagandist of communism that many believe was murdered by Soviet assassins while fleeing the advancing Wehrmacht in France in 1940. Only a small yard in Vienna is named after Sperber. He should be considered if a street were to be renamed in Tübingen. Several other Jewish authors and intellectuals stand out for reclaiming German as their own. While Theodor Adorno said in 1949 that “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he and several of his colleagues from the Frankfurt School went back to writing in German.14 Hannah Arendt

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regularly returned to Germany, for example, to accept the Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Prize of the city of Hamburg in 1959, and her speech “On Humanity in Dark Times,” issued as a little booklet, found its way onto many bookshelves. Later, Germany’s foremost literary critic would be Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto whose parents were murdered in Treblinka. With his regular presence on TV, he became a household presence in Germany, and according to one survey in 2010, more than 90 percent of Germans recognised his name. One of Germany’s leading newspapers titled its obituary “The Man who Taught us to Read” (Der Mann, der uns das Lesen lehrte).15 On occasions one can detect a whiff of braggadocio when Germans instruct others on their ongoing Vergangenheitsbewältigung, of how they tried to forge a better future by addressing their past, as if that had been a triumph of their will. The credit for that transformative change goes at least partly to the Jewish authors who wrote themselves back into the “we” from which Germans had tried to exterminate them—an act of heroic reimagination if there ever was one. Stamped and Sealed: Individual Focus of the Aurora Prize The Aurora Prize transcends the collective by identifying and supporting “an individual [authors’ emphasis] whose actions have had an exceptional impact on preserving human life and advancing humanitarian causes.” The focus on the individual connects the commemoration of Aurora Mardiganian and of genocide to humanity beyond the specific Armenian experience. The 2020 Aurora Prize laureates Fartuun Adan and Ilwad Elman, a mother-daughter team of peacebuilders in Somalia, exemplify exceptional commitment to advancing a good cause. Having emigrated to Canada after the family’s father Elman Ali Ahmed, a businessman and peace activist, was assassinated, they eventually returned to advance women’s rights and rehabilitate child soldiers. Illustrating their focus on individuals, they have said with regard to the members of the country’s most feared militias that when you hear ‘Al-Shabaab’, you expect the worst but when you stay with them and see how they’re playing or learning—they’re just children. They need a chance for a new life.16

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The Elman Peace Center tries to offer former child soldiers a new chance with vocational training, even if this effort requires much commitment and patience. The press release cites Samantha Power, the current USAID administrator, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, and academic who has written on the international responsibility to protect, as saying that “acts of kindness make a difference when you add them up, and Fartuun’s and Ilwad’s courageous activism is a vivid testament to that.” There is symbolic value in the commemorative stamps issued in Armenia for the Aurora Prize Laureates as it is remarkable when national stamps portray foreign individuals.17 Although few people write letters today, it is tempting to imagine that messages of transformation, featuring Fartuun and Ilwad as mother-daughter peacebuilders in Somalia, make their way from Armenia to places around the world.

Exit Circular Narratives Commemoration should help people exit circular narratives that trap them in debilitating interpretative loops so that their views of themselves and others are less shackled to the past.

Commemoration at its best lets people see the world as a place where they can contribute to positive change. However, people will struggle to contribute to change if they are trapped in patterns of interpretation that make it harder to leave conflicts behind. Richard Feynman, light in his wording even when making serious points about science, put it this way: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”18 This do-not-fool-yourself challenge of science also applies to thinking about the past. Historical narratives can become hypotheses hungry for confirmation. Caught in such loops, commemorative politics can end up establishing “Institutes of Trauma Re-production” as Per Anders Rudling put it, with reference to Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania.19 To escape becoming trapped, Suny had suggested in a book aptly titled “Leaving it to the Historians” that master narratives should “continually be challenged by more critical history.”20

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Facts, Focus, and Interpretation In a minimalist version, to exit circular narratives entails emphasising the historical accuracy of commemoration. In the Irish context, Mallinder and O’Callaghan argue that it is “important to ensure that commemorations as far as possible are historically accurate,” even if “collective memory is distinctive in its forms and how it draws from history.” Similarly, the Guidelines of the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity state that memory initiatives should “use academic knowledge as their source” and ought to also cite the academic experts they consulted. “Factfulness,” to use a contemporary term, is a major consideration for exiting circular narratives. A focus on factfulness is, however, insufficient given the importance of storytelling and meaning-making that goes into the creation of identity. For meaning-making, it matters where the focus is put in the first place and how that focus is interpreted. People often have diverging stories about the past because they disagree as to which facts are most important, not because they disagree on the facts themselves. What deserves attention when considering the Troubles in Northern Ireland? Should we concentrate on the marginalisation of Catholics, the mobilisation of violence, the bombing campaigns (and which one), the suppressive tactics by the British Government, or the widespread communal strife between Unionists and Republicans? The focus—and the starting point of any account—can frame the interpretation. Narratives about the past are ingrained in community groups and reflected in their practice of commemoration. This practice solidifies the narratives as fixed and exclusive rather than evolving and inclusive. Ethical commemoration suggests that all the elements of the above histories can be of relevance and that it should be possible, for example, to commemorate in the Troubles both a fight for more political recognition and the victims of terrorism. Conflict Escalation among the Unburied Circular narratives play a critical role in the escalation of conflict. Pruitt and Rubin argue that conflict escalation can be modelled through structural changes within peoples.21 How one people is treated by another results in changes to the first group’s psychology and social structure.

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Psychological changes in peoples include shifts towards blaming and fear and the development of hostile attitudes towards others. Hostile attitudes manifest in a tendency to see the other as immoral, to distrust their actions and intentions, to reduce empathy, and to diminish restraint. A loop is created where people can be encouraged to see the worst in the other. Group changes see a stronger mobilisation of a people’s identity, and a polarisation between identities, with people being forced to pick a side. Hegel had offered a philosophical account of such dynamics in his Lord-­ Bondsman dialectic (following Alexandre Kojève sometimes less accurately translated as “Master-Slave Dialectic”), an analysis that continues in concepts such as “othering” and that influenced post-structural thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. The development of group consciousness can lead to stronger cohesion in a group but also to a group’s takeover by militant or extremist leaders and runaway norms expressed in “right thinking” that extols aggression towards “the enemy.” Such runaway norms are not easily challenged. Those that contradict them often described as ill informed, inept, or even traitors. These changes become self-reinforcing in a vicious cycle. The result is that a community transforms into “a struggle group [that] exists for the primary purpose of prevailing over the adversary”22 and hence becomes prepared for violence. These structural changes make it difficult to exit circular narratives. A struggle group dominated by militant leaders depends on the maintenance of simple stories, marked by clear plots and characters that are good or evil.23 These stories develop into morality tales that are passed through generations,24 protecting a group and its leaders from criticism. Pruit and Rubin argue that three psychological components of circular narratives are particularly insidious—selective perception, self-fulfilling prophecy, and a type of solipsistic hostility.25 Selective perceptions manifest in people focusing on information that confirms their group’s story and ignore that information that would seem to undermine it. Hence, in the case of the Armenian Genocide, it might be difficult for the families of victims to recognise or appreciate the Turkish Schindlers. Self-fulfilling prophecy manifests in actions towards the other group that encourages them to act in expected ways, reinforcing one’s understanding of that group. For example, accusations that one’s group conducted injustices can lead to a forceful response, which vindicates a sense that the group is prone to anger and violence. In the case of Libya, it may

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be difficult for the victims of Qaddafi’s authoritarianism to accept criticism of the immorality of, say, displacing an entire “pro-Qaddafi” community, a case we will return to below. Solipsistic hostility manifests in the refusal to communicate and engage with the other and to discuss the issue of conflict between peoples. It remains, of course, legitimate to insist on the relevance of one’s own experience. Yet not all interpretations of this experience are a suitable prism for regarding and assessing the experience of others or for identifying opportunities for change. Writing about Russia as the “the land of the unburied,” the historian and literature scholar Alexander Etkin suggested that “In mourning as well as in trauma, the subject obsessively returns to certain experiences of the past, and these returns obstruct this subject’s ability to live in the present.”26 The aim of exiting circular narratives is to end the obsessive return and to remove the obstructions to living in the present. Exiting circular narratives also has a direct relevance for conflict transformation, as a future chapter will explore. Aiding those in conflict to view the world in more complex terms allows for more effective decision-­ making and admitting it offers a higher likelihood of forging peaceful futures. The Rest Being Turks in Nicosia National museums often put circular narratives on full display, as the National Struggle Museum in Nicosia in Cyprus illustrates. It showcases, as its name indicates, a heroic anti-colonial struggle against British control, guns and grenades, and only after one has walked past many displays, some of them grisly, will one realise that the museum’s centrepiece is the gallows one floor up, three nooses dangling into empty space. That upper gallery of the museum is a shrine to the heroes of the EOKA, the paramilitary organisation of Cypriot fighters. One has to look elsewhere to find the information that some of the people executed in 1956 had ambushed British soldiers and killed an off-duty policeman. As one reviewer on TripAdvisor puts it, the narrative that is presented “needs to be balanced. It was still good but quite graphic and certain things were not brought up.” One aspect that is not brought up is the question of whether the resort to violence by the Cypriot fighters was justified, or whether, in retrospect and by the standards of the Just War

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tradition, a struggle of civil resistance might have been “much safer and lasting,” to use Hrant Dink’s words. Another reviewer notes that the museum veers toward hagiography and overblown prose—such as describing the incident where 4 bomb makers blew themselves up as a ‘holocaust’ and the British detention centers—however unjust they may have been—as concentration camps. Also of note, apparently women had no role in this struggle.

The story that is told here can be characterised by an introductory note to the museum which explains that Cypriots had fought at the side of the British during two world wars in the expectation that Britain would respect their aspirations for political union with Greece (Enosis). As this was not forthcoming, the Cypriot people took the matter in their own hands and held a referendum in which 78% of the population voted in favour of union with Greece, the rest being Turks (18%) and foreign nationals (4%).

Describing a large group as “the rest,” so the impression for a visitor to the island, set the scene for more conflict and the eventual partition of Cyprus in 1974. A mirroring circular account is on display in a museum on the Turkish-controlled size of the island.27 Maintaining a Martial Narrative in Misrata The Misrata War Museum, one of several that sprung up in revolutionary towns across Libya after the end of the fighting, also demonstrates the challenge of exiting a circular narrative once it is established. Misrata is Libya’s third largest city, a bit less than 200 kilometres to the East of the capital Tripoli, and along the Mediterranean coast. The museum is situated in one of the parts of the city most damaged by the fighting in 2011, at the visible centre of the city’s suffering. The Museum’s entryway is a courtyard full of weaponry captured from Qaddafi forces. The rubble of war includes a vast array of shells and munitions used in the Qaddafi offensive against the town, organised around an artillery piece and tank—the instruments used to bombard the civilian population. The array of weapons demonstrates the odds stacked against the town and points to its resilience.

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Entering the museum building, the exhibitions become more personal, focusing more on the individuals who fought to defend the community— a shift from communal resilience to individual heroism. In one powerful exhibit, a ceremonial throne used by Qaddafi is surrounded by pictures of Misratans who died during the fighting. The exhibit contrasts the opulence of the Qaddafi regime with its victims, as a constant reminder to the town of its just cause it struggled for. After Qaddafi’s regime was toppled, the town of Misrata became a major national political actor because of its status as a pillar of the revolution and its powerful military. The museum, originally put together by volunteers, continues to display a narrative of suffering. The guilt of others can be used to justify Misrata’s actions now that it is strong, even when such actions harm other communities in Libya, including the displacement of the Tawerghan people from their community (an issue we return to below), the military operations against the town of Bani Walid in 2012, and the rejection of the outcomes of the national election in 2014, which have contributed to nearly ten years of instability for the country. The Museum has come to represent the loss of hope that the town’s suffering was meant to end. One international visitor to the Museum reflected on the experience in a blog post: It feels weird to walk around these weapons, these guns, these instruments of war, used against people who rose up against their dictator. It feels sad to realise that, eight years after the uprising, the Libyans are still living in dire conditions, with warring factions and several governments, with a future that can at best be called uncertain.28

The Misrata War Museum can serve as an exhibit of contemporary politics, not just of what happened in the past. In the early years of the exhibition, it was discovered that some of the ammunition in the museum was still filled with explosives, posing a risk to visitors.29 Stuck inside Misrepresentations Being stuck in circular narratives can make it harder for people to assess where they are in their larger historical context, dimming prospects for a peaceful future. Scholars have a special obligation to contribute to critical self-reflection, to help people not fool themselves. Unfortunately, they do not always succeed, as an event organised to discuss the 2020 Karabakh war illustrates.

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In a February 2021 online discussion by a collective of scholars and activists, titled Media Manipulation and Cultural Erasure, one panellist claimed that international media had misrepresented the war as a conflict of roughly equal sides, even though Azerbaijan had a population several times Armenia’s, more resources, and access to modern weapons from Turkey and Israel. The media had obscured the “David and Goliath” component of the Karabakh conflict, the charge went, in another case of “false equivalence.” The assertion found affirmation by the moderator and went unchallenged at the event. This accusation neglects that the conflict’s representation in international media, itself not a collective body, was in good part the result of the Armenian Government’s assertive communications. Their assured messaging was hard to challenge as, from the middle of October 2020 until the end of active hostilities, most foreign journalists were refused access to Karabakh. One Russian journalist who had provided a sceptical assessment of Armenia’s prospects in mid-October 2020 was forced to leave the area. The government insisted it was in control until the night before it signed a humiliating ceasefire. Providing an optimistic narrative is a legitimate strategy in a war. To hold one’s own, one does need to project confidence. Yet it was odd for scholars later to seek fault with the international media for allegedly misrepresenting a conflict. The narrative put forward in the February 2021 discussion was one of victimisation. While that prism reflected the country’s genuine trauma, it is the role of scholars to tell the difference between spurious and credible explanations. Taken by itself, the event might be unremarkable—who does not get things wrong from time to time?—had it not been so timely for scholars to engage in a reckoning. In 2019, for example, the Armenian minister of defence had asserted that in case of a war, Armenia would take new territory from Azerbaijan. During the conflict, why had the government spun a consistently optimistic story, which made the eventual ceasefire such a shock for many Armenians? And why were warnings from figures such as the historian and politician Gerard Libaridian ignored for so long?30 If the asymmetry between Armenia and Azerbaijan was so stark, why had the government not acted on it in peacetime? In Feynman’s terms, the country had been fooling itself for years. A meeting should have been an opportunity for scholars, presumably a group of people who could discern false theories, to provide a sober account of what had gone wrong. Instead, with the circular narrative of

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being misrepresented, what was sidestepped was a more profound reckoning with the lessons the bitter defeat might hold for Armenians. Drawing the proper lessons matters for decisions to be taken for the future, not just to get hindsight aligned. A reckoning is difficult to undertake three months after a traumatic war. The 2021 event may be an extreme example. Circular narratives and motivated reasoning by scholars are evident in many contexts, including those in which people, unlike that predominantly Armenian group, do not have to deal with grief, displacement, and fear of further aggression. Yet the Armenian example highlights a lost opportunity from an informed and active group, based at a distance, with scholars, to exit a circular narrative. The event could have promoted a reflection on what could have been done better in the preceding months and years. Acceptable Discourse on Vietnam The boundaries of circular narratives often are policed with vehemence. As Daniel Hallin has shown with reference to the Vietnam war, public descriptions of events are organised into three spheres.31 Next to the sphere of consensus, there is a sphere of legitimate controversy in which issues can be disputed without a person’s morality and integrity being questioned. Further out, there is a sphere of deviance. People expressing deviating views can be ostracised or even attacked. For many years, the debate in the United States was restricted to more minor aspects of the long conflict rather than its fundamental premises. With his analysis, Hallin showed that the United States did not lose the war because of disloyal media at home, as some revisionist analysis had suggested. Instead, the media had been restrained in its critique of the rationale for the war over a long period. These three spheres of consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance can be seen across a range of public discourses regarding health issues, immigration, extremist violence, and what constitutes appropriate politics.32 A similar rendering of the idea is the Overton Window, which demarcates the range of positions you can put forward at a dinner without people looking at you in wonder. When it comes to the past, peoples, especially those in conflict, usually have little tolerance for views that step outside the realm of what is perceived to be legitimate controversy. Those who challenge established narratives—“strong poets” if we take the term of Harold Bloom—are often

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placed into the sphere of deviance. A brief look at comments under articles by or about Gerard Libaridian, or Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist, shows the viciousness of personal attacks experienced by those who are seen to be straying from a mainstream course.33 The Ethics of Political Commemoration provides a framework for structuring controversy on how to approach past events collectively. Established types of commemoration can be discussed according to its multidimensional criteria. There is a parallel to Just War Theory, which is a good framework for discussing a country’s military ventures with more nuance than the patriot-traitor prism that is so corrosive to constructive discussion. If conflict represents diverging and conflicting stories, the aim should be to transform public discourse, share stories, see the value in others’ narratives, and enable stories to co-exist—as well-summarised by the idea of “narrative hospitality” that Paul Ricoeur had suggested. Along similar lines, some in the field of conflict transformations argue that social contracts and political settlement entail that conflictual groups are able to interact and to confront each other with different ideas and stories, but without resorting to violence.34 Books Don’t Bleed: Engaging with the Aurora Prize The Aurora Prize demonstrates excellence in helping Armenians to exit circular narratives, by focusing on those who make a positive change through humanitarian acts. An extensive nominations process and a public shortlist ensure that there is a conversation. In this way, the exceptional acts of humanity are not just posited but also allow for engagement and even participation. As the Aurora Prize illustrates, exiting circular narratives is about directing one’s effort, not letting go of history. The Aurora Prize makes clear on the first page that “Its mission is rooted in the Armenian history as the Initiative was founded on behalf of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and in gratitude to their saviours and strives to transform this experience into a global movement.” The suggestion is to tell one’s story in ways that ultimately move to a focus on thriving. Tom Catena, a doctor who was worked in the Nuba mountains of Sudan for many years, and who has said that his “duty as a Christian and a human being [is] to help others,” exits some of the established narratives in the short video featuring him, as the Aurora Prize Laureate of 2017.35

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Catena talks of the people of Nuba in positive terms, not as people that just need to be attended to: The thing that impresses me about the Nuba is their sense of independence and their feeling of pride, that ‘we have a sense of dignity, we are humans, we are equal to anybody else’.

This emphasis on dignity departs from how people in contexts of need often are portrayed. Catena also admits that trying to save people in dire circumstances can be overwhelming. When fighting in the area started some years ago, most medical professionals left, as the numbers of wounded and injured increased. Catena stayed. The documentary shows him doing the rounds in a makeshift hospital. He often sees patients that he cannot do much to save: When those things happen, you say ‘let me just do any other job in other job in the world. Let me be an accountant, because books don’t bleed, people don’t die—you just do the numbers.’ And just—your brain is on fire.

Catena finds a way back to inspiration when a “somebody you didn’t think would do well survives.” That motivation surges when children begin to recover and laugh again “this just gives you energy to get on with life.” The underlying message, however, is that beyond the inevitably glossy narrative of a prize, there is a raw (“books don’t bleed”) quality to helping those who are in true need.

Assert Moral Autonomy People should justify their actions in universal terms, rather than excusing transgressions with reference to what others have done. This means that commemoration should help those in conflict to assess themselves first.

Commemoration should make it easier for people to keep their moral bearings. People should continue to hold themselves accountable to internal or universal standards, rather than justifying their transgressions with reference to the actions of others. These standards can come from different ethical traditions but should be grounded in an emphasis on restraint rather than retribution.

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When commemoration emphasises past trauma and the guilt of other groups within that trauma, it can inadvertently reduce people to passive participants in their own drama or even provide excuses for the maltreatment of others. Instead, ethical commemoration should help people live up to a reasonable vision of who they want to be, strengthening their ability to assert moral autonomy, so that they have greater control of themselves and ultimately their own identity. There may be an interplay of remembering and forgetting in asserting one’s moral autonomy. As Edward Casey has put it in his phenomenological study of memory, remembering can be forgetting—forgetting about one’s moral commitments when the presence of the painful past is too acute.36 Ethical remembrance would insist to remember both what happened in the past and what one wanted to be in the future and not to have one displaced by the other. Done in our Irish Name Moral autonomy, in philosophy, describes the idea that people should be their own person. Their decisions should be based on their own reasons. While people often work out the decisions and reasons in conversation and deliberation with others, they do so as active and respected participants. Their actions should not be driven by subordination, from angry impulse, or because they are told what is expected of them as a member of a people. This idea of moral autonomy is central to various philosophical traditions in which individuals are to work out how to decide, from Kantian notions of practical reason to John Stuart Mill assigning individuals a deciding role in his utilitarian liberalism.37 Collective ascription and circular narratives run in the opposite direction from moral autonomy. They conspire towards a focus on the other person, rather than oneself. This focus on others can detract from an interrogation of our own role and that of our people. We can be especially tempted to be distracted when actions committed by our people cause others pain. It is difficult to reconcile a positive story we tell about our own group with negative examples. There is a tendency for groups in conflict to dismiss the accusations against their group as unjustified and to believe that commemoration that highlights the actions of their group are treasonous. This focus on the other is detrimental to moral autonomy and our own individual obligations to act ethically towards others. Conor Cruise O’Brien mirrored this focus on one’s integrity when saying for the Irish

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context that “We do right to condemn all violence, but we have a special duty to condemn the violence which is committed in our name.”38 Holding one’s own side to account is essential to ensure restraint. There can be limited willingness to be critical of one’s own side. To take a contemporary example, in Libya in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising, Misratan armed groups enforced the displacement of all the residents of the nearby town of Tawergha. Tawerghan armed groups, who mostly fought in defence of the Qaddafi regime during the uprising, were accused of human rights abuses in Misrata, including sexual abuse of Misratan women. Following the successful overthrow of the Qaddafi Government, the entire Tawerghan community of approximately 40,000 people was displaced because of these abuses, with the first return only negotiated ten years later in 2022. Critiquing the collective punishment of the Tawerghans was difficult because of the accusations of abuse, Misrata’s general suffering during the revolution, and Misrata’s standing as a revolutionary force. A Human Rights Watch report, which indicated that Misratan armed groups were responsible for widespread human rights abuses since the revolution, led to a public rebuke from the city’s Local Council and widespread anger among Misratans.39 During focus groups on the issue in 2012, one Misratan expressed anger that the “people of Misrata have been depicted as if they are the people that breached the Tawerghans’ rights.”40 People in Misrata continue to live under the weight of their past suffering, viewing themselves as oppressed: “How can residents that have had injustices committed against them return to a normal life … when those that committed injustice are free? How can oppressed people go back to their normal lives?”41 The belief that they were primarily victims, reinforced perhaps by commemoration such as at the Misrata War Museum, reduced the community’s moral autonomy, rather than getting them to assert it. As the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out, to “have been a victim gives you the right to complain, to protest, and to make demands.”42 While the abuses suffered by Misratans are open for public commemoration, those suffered by the Tawerghans have been commemorated mostly through private protests demanding return. Pigeon Dreams of Akram Aylisli In the Caucasus context, the Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli offers an inspiring example of asserting one’s moral autonomy. Aylisli has described

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what was done to Armenians in his novella Stone Dreams, in contradiction to the standard depiction of Azerbaijanis as victims.43 The novella aptly begins in the Department of Trauma and Surgery of a Baku hospital during the turbulence of the early 1990s, with a man arriving injured after he tried to prevent a mob from lynching an Armenian. Lingering in his coma, the man remembers the killings earlier in the century, especially those in Aylis, a historic city in the Nakhichevan exclave, now an Azerbaijani fiefdom squeezed between Turkey, Armenia, and Iran. Individual Armenian characters are developed, one passage cites the poet Yeghishe Charents, and through one of the protagonists, Aylis sketches the possibility that difference can be appreciated, recalling earlier decades of peace: How those four churches were constructed […] the Muslim population of Aylis, naturally, never saw. However, there was no need to be Armenian or know the ABCs of history to see the harmonious unity that those churches created with the mountains standing behind them.44

In the newly fanned nationalist fervour, in which the Soviet Union unravelled in the late 1980s, and in which it is “fashionable […] for people to spread lunacy about Armenians,” little space for such appreciation and mutual respect is left. Another vicious round of violence is about to set off, driven by a mix of “brainless screamers,” petty criminals, and opportunistic politicians. The novella recounts individual killings in which some are kicked to death, others thrown from balconies, and gives a glimpse of the larger scale of what is done. As one of the Azerbaijani characters in Stone Dreams says: If a single candle were lit for every Armenian killed violently, the radiance of those candles would be brighter than the light of the moon.45

In response to the publication in 2013, Azerbaijani authorities organised burnings of Aylisli’s book, though Stone Dreams could not be burned since it was not available in the country. One politician offered $10,000 if anyone would cut off Aylisli’s ear.46 The writer was stripped of his national honours and consigned into a kind of internal exile. This is even though Aylisli had made clear that Azerbaijanis had also suffered greatly and were also facing hatred from the Armenian side. But as one of his characters put it, one had to decide who one wanted to be:

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What today’s Armenians are like is beside the point—the point is, what we’re like now.

In the last pages, it is January 1990 in Baku, the man in the coma fades into oblivion, and a writer in Baku incites a mob of women with cries of “freedom, independence, and Karabakh” to try to set an Armenian church on fire. “However, the church didn’t want to burn, and it was this circumstance that especially enraged the unmarried women-patriots surrounding the poet.” It is only the pigeons, symbols of an alternative future and able to fly away, that “still slept peacefully and dreamed pigeon dreams.” Hostage to the Actions of Any Other If a laudable focus is on what was done in one’s name, centring what one has suffered can unintentionally create prisons composed of the actions of others. For example, waiting for foreign efforts to recognise the Armenian genocide can risk turning Armenians into “a hostage to what they say and do not,” as Libaridian warned, thus linking their “future, psychological and intellectual independence to others.”47 An Armenian woman living in Berlin manifested such a risk in a comment to the German newspaper Die Zeit: “Only when all states have recognised the massacres as genocide will we Armenians find peace.”48 Waiting for “all states” would give any state a veto on Armenians finding peace. These are extreme positions, of course, and one can argue for genocide recognition on other grounds. Yet they illustrate a negative eschatology that surrenders narrative sovereignty over one’s own life. This debilitating outlook runs counter to much of moral philosophy, from Ancient Greek virtues across Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative to more recent pragmatism. Giving up one’s peace is not how to thrive. A similar apocalyptic current runs through many social media discussions on the past. In acrimonious exchanges, sides become consumed with others’ most egregious offenses. As social media dissolves the geographical divide between private space and public encounter, it can continuously pump objectionable content onto people’s devices. In its extreme forms, this tit-for-tat can lead to a constant sense of emergency in which at least some lose their moral compass. Prominent activists for social justice cannot escape such vortices either. In early 2021, Serj Tankian, a famous musician and lead of the

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award-­winning band System of a Down, tweeted that he hoped that terrible things would be done to President Erdogan of Turkey “in his afterlife.”49 Though he added a smiley emoticon, he had put forward a vision of revenge rather than justice. A year later, Tankian would complain about the “division, violence and treasonous condemnation” in inner-Armenian discussions, apparently oblivious to having set the example of the opposite.50 Victims will legitimately be angry. Yet in dealing with the painful past, sides should foster and assert their moral autonomy and emphasise an account that centres on their own potential as individuals. This is an imperative one could derive from Immanuel Kant, from Stoic philosophy, or from virtue ethics to name just some traditions. It seems sensible to apply it to commemoration, too. Sperber’s Sceptical Optimism One convincing response to history’s horrors could be “sceptical optimism,” the attitude ascribed to Manès Sperber. The main attitude is optimistic because it believes in the possibility of a better future. Sperber insisted that “I still believe that the world can be changed and will be improved.” The optimism is tethered by scepticism, reflecting that grave disappointments have resulted in a negative certainty. In an interview towards the end of his life, Sperber commented that: As I once wrote: Whenever I have fought against something, against an injustice, I have been right. I have never actually been wrong in the choice of the evil I was fighting. But I have often been wrong when I thought I was fighting for what was right. That’s my life story; that’s just Like a Tear in the Ocean.51

Such sceptical optimism is preferable to resignation. In a fitting contrast, Aylisli had characterised the nationalist as “terrible because his character is that of a heartless optimist who, in rejecting a tragic perception of life, fundamentally contradicts truth.”52 The scepticism also towards one’s own conclusions is an essential qualifier to the optimism. Those experiencing conflict for a long time often view themselves as having no agency. They believe that their lives are determined by external forces, by national elites, and global powers. A 2019 survey demonstrates

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that Yemenis overwhelmingly thought they could do little for peace, with 60 percent believing peace depended on the international community putting pressure on the conflict parties.53 When asked, Yemenis tend to see agency for making their lives better as residing primarily with the international community, despite the reality of their experience in managing conflict locally, as demonstrated by the fact that 50 percent of respondents stated that they turn to local tribal leaders to manage conflict and its impacts. People living in conflict, whether ongoing situations marked by violence or constructed from memory, are adept at knowing how to live in that conflict and survive it. However, they can struggle to creatively imagine different ways of managing the conflict and of constructing a different type of future. Those who provide external support for groups in conflict can encourage creative thinking, engender a sense of agency, and help individuals and communities in conflict to find the space for meaningful action even when it seems impossible—by bringing sceptical optimism. Destructions of Troy and Tweaks for Citizenship in Bristol The question of assisting citizens assert their moral autonomy also arises in democracies. An overly didactic presentation in museums communicates to visitors that one does not trust them to make up their own minds. Little tweaks can make a great difference in presenting material from the past to one’s citizens. In an exhibition on Heinrich Schliemann, who had found and excavated Troy in the nineteenth century, the overall presentation in Berlin’s James-Simon-Gallery was nuanced and layered, showing how this polyglot merchant and adventurer had found his way to archaeology, over many years in Russia and with a waystation in California’s Gold Rush. The exhibition was launched on the occasion of the 200th birthday of Schliemann in the summer of 2022 and had a scope that one will likely not see again on this topic within a generation.54 Over three floors, with an apt interruption between the exhibition rooms to match the switch in Schliemann’s life, from adventures in commerce to research, visitors could approximate how Schliemann had made the world realise that the Homer’s The Iliad had its unique location, not just a mythical past. In one exhibit which explained how Schliemann cut large incisions into the mounds he was excavating, however, the exhibition derailed by posting a quote in large letters that said “‘Troy was not destroyed by the

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Achaeans, but by Heinrich Schliemann.” This citation, using one of The Iliad’s terms for the attacking Greeks, which the expensively prepared exhibition could not attribute to a source from which it might have derived (“unknown”), invited smug condescension. A more plausible approach would have been to say “today we think of Schliemann’s methods as damaging. Likely people in future decades will consider our excavations to be crudely destructive, too.” Such wording would have provided visitors with a richer perspective on the substantive questions we continue to face today. The Bristol Museum & Art Gallery shows an alternative way of handling contested histories. With the city being in particular focus after the statue of the slave-trader and benefactor Edward Colston was taken from its plinth and thrown into the harbour in the summer of 2020 by a group of protesters, there is significant attention on how the city’s museum handles the complications of Britain’s past. The museum acquits itself well. It respects diverse viewpoints and invites its visitors to reflect together. A mid-sized space on the ground floor is titled “curiosity” and explores “uncomfortable truths” and “hidden histories” across a range of issues. In a central showcase, a skeleton of a young man killed some 3400 years ago is displayed (“bronze age bloodshed”), and perspectives on whether it is appropriate to exhibit mortal remains are explored. Another display shows contrasting opinions on how dead wildlife is to be shown. Panels present the views of artists, conservators, curators, experts, faith representatives, schoolchildren, and scientists, and even here the categories are unstable and overlapping. Through the centrality of the curiosity exhibit, the museum conveys that it seeks to bring more sensitivity to what it does, beyond the rehearsed debates, and that its visitors as citizens are their own arbiters, and part of that bigger conversation. Taking one’s own Decisions: Model for the Future The Aurora Prize advances commemoration on its own terms, demonstrating faith in the power of its transnational example. Identifying saviours from around the world, focusing on all of humanity rather than one region, emphasises concern for transformation and values. The transgressions of others are marginal to the story that is being advanced. The effort is in charge of its narrative.

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Julienne Lusenge, the Aurora Prize Laureate for 2021, can illustrate the idea of asserting your moral autonomy. Lusenge, an activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who brought to justice hundreds of perpetrators of violence and war crimes while also providing holistic medical care to thousands of survivors, has said that she wants to “transform victims to be agents of change in our country.”55 This statement, victims as agents of a positive change, captures the essence of the Aurora Prize, with its cycle of Survive, Revive, Thrive, and Give Back. Lusenge stresses that “DRC [should] become the capital of solidarity” and that she is not happy when it is characterised by reference to the violence that is committed there, conveying her orientation on moral aspiration. The laureates—including those not mentioned here in detail, such as Kyaw Hla Aung from Burma (2018), the Yazidi activist Mirza Dinnayi (2019), or Jamila Afghani from Afghanistan (2022)—can illuminate various aspects of ethical action. Mentioning them in the context of Ethics of Political Commemoration is not to suggest that criteria define their actions. Rather, they are compelling precisely because there is a rich context to each of their trajectories. Behind their stories, however, a similar ethical grammar seems to be discernible, of the kind that the framework lays out.

Contained Unfathomability Commemoration should have an element of contained unfathomability. It should be limited to meaningful locations and times, rather than infuse all of life, while maintaining the power to move and touch those that engage in it.

If we want people to thrive, we should ensure that the experience of commemoration remains circumscribed. The past should not continuously overshadow the present. At the same time, when one engages in commemoration, it should retain the capacity to unsettle. Otherwise, commemoration risks becoming an empty ritual. In that regard, true remembrance should continue to move us. There should be something that remains hard to fathom. These requirements merge in the criterion Contained Unfathomability. For commemoration, these considerations suggest that one should be precise with dates and locations, distinct with names, and vague with numbers. Moreover, art has an integral part to play in engaging people in

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remembrance. Typically, art that commemorates should evolve over time, to speak to an audience living in the present. Localising and Temporalising Trauma: Graves not Posters A degree of containment is implicit in how commemoration is connected to a date and location. Annual commemorations, such as days of remembrance, are an established way of marking significance. Heritage sites, or geographic areas that encourage learning and reflection, provide another venue. Combining a time and place, commemoration gains its power through repetition and absorption into patterns of life. To contain, dates of liberation or moments that stand for a new beginning may be more suitable than days on which horrible events started. A liberation signifies an ending. A day of founding can be reminiscent of a promise. The contrast between ending and starting horrors marks the difference between Holocaust Memorial Day, the date of liberating Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, and the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, the day marking when the larger killings in the Ottoman Empire began on 24 April 1915. Symbolically, the implication could be that the Armenian genocide begins anew every year but never ends. Commemoration in Lebanon is also more likely to point to the start of suffering and violence, rather than its end. The country’s different confessions do not actively participate in joint commemoration of the ending of the country’s civil war. Some commemorative monuments do exist, such as the Espoir de Paix (“Hope for Peace”) an imposing 30-metre construct of 78 military vehicles positioned next to the Ministry of Defence. This monument is not actively used as a place of commemoration but is rather side-lined from the public along with memory of the war’s ending. This is largely due to a lack of leadership among Lebanese politicians, who have not agreed to mark the ending of war. Likewise, politicians have not agreed how the war should be taught in schools. Public curriculums in the country end with the beginning of the civil war, almost freezing history in place. The most that the public is involved in commemoration is in consultations on what to do with the visible damage caused by the war—to remove or keep as a reminder to the past. Localisation is a sensible consideration if one seeks some kind of containment. As previously described, the proliferation of prominent pictures dedicated to young men, killed in war or sectarian violence across the Middle East and North Africa, infuse contemporary life, creating a kind of

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omnipresence of commemoration that keeps conflict too visible. This geographic permeation makes it difficult to return to everyday life. Even in settled contexts of everyday lives, some people would like to limit the presence of remembrance. After the opening of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in Boston, too, a central stretch of the city, there was an informal agreement “that the Greenway would not contain any memorials for at least the first five years of its existence.”56 The Greenway is already loaded with history, intersecting with the Freedom Trail, running close to Paul Revere’s house and the Tea Party’s harbour, has a statue to John F.  Fitzgerald, who was mayor, father of Rose, and grandfather of John F. Kennedy. As a columnist for the Boston Globe put it, “No one I know wants to see the Greenway covered with memorials. It was never meant to be the Washington Mall.” A Boston native commented that she would prefer parks without memorials. A physical focus seems intrinsic to mourning. It should be possible to leave sites of mourning behind. Graves have their yards. Even where memory activists propose a radically decentralised commemoration, there is some containment. Across Germany, there are more than 70,000 Stolpersteine, “Stumbling Stones,” little copper cobble stones that commemorate individuals (mostly Jewish, but also trade unionists and other victims) at the last location from which the Nazi German authorities deported them to their murder.57 Yet their physical presence is limited. The Stolpersteine are visible and discoverable but not dominant. When cemeteries are purposefully destroyed, as happened in former Armenian communities of Nakhichevan, and sadly also with Azerbaijani graveyards in Karabakh, geographical containment of grief is dissolved and “ghosts are bound to walk,” to use O’Brien phrase. Aylisli, who had courageously remonstrated against the destruction of the historic Julfa cemetery, has similarly talked about jinns “who will never give […] peace.” Creating and keeping a distinct location for commemoration is a way of tethering such ghosts. Distinct Names and HaShoah To highlight the absoluteness of rupture, there is a strong argument to be made for marking traumatic events with distinctive names, especially those that are unfamiliar to non-native speakers. In this way, we have An Drochshaol (“hard times”) or Gorta Mór (“great hunger”) for the famine and emigration in Ireland, Meds Yeghern or Aghet (“great crime” or

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“calamity”) for the Armenian genocide, or also the neologism Holodomor (“death by hunger”) for the instigated famine in 1932–1933 in Ukraine. That the pronunciation of these terms may initially be difficult accentuates their specificity. The terms are their own stumbling stones.58 Though “holocaust” is now accepted as a settled term, previously some commentators thought that Shoah might be better to refer to the murder of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, as it takes the Hebrew term for calamity or destruction. In current usage in Hebrew, the term used is HaShoah or Ha-Shoah, to have a prefix, as in “The Destruction.” Using the Hebrew term could be seen as a gesture of respect. By contrast, holocaust is a term that derives from the Greek word signifying a burnt sacrifice to a deity. This connotation was also why the historian Walter Laqueur, whose parents were murdered in it, rejected the term holocaust as “singularly inappropriate.”59 Like the term “the Troubles,” these specific names make it possible to encompass a multitude of events and to allow for different interpretations of those events to coincide and overlap. It might be plausible for Georgian activists, rather than trying to convince the world to recognise as a “genocide” the murder and displacement suffered by ethnic Georgians in Abkhazia in the early 1990s, to find a term that makes the experience specific. This role could potentially be filled by the Georgian word gandevna, indicating displacement. The “Abkhazian War,” the current term used, is too general, as describes many other events and horrors, including those perpetrated by Georgians. It is also located in the past, does not convey the long-term trauma of displacement, thereby contributing to the marginalisation of those who are referred to as internally displaced persons. Using such specific names would also follow Michael Rothberg’s suggestion that in the context of trauma, we should go for differentiation rather than equation. Differentiation, too, is an argument for de-­ emphasising the term genocide, which can obscure the specificity of a trauma. That said, as noted earlier, it may be simpler to call many more traumas genocide, to sidestep allegations of denial. Vague with Numbers and Dresden Unfathomability also requires a lack of precision. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and more than a million are ways of expressing the reach across a society while deliberately

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leaving indetermination. Precise numbers suggest a measurability that does not do justice to the radical rupture of atrocity. As Albert Camus had written in the Plague, deaths on a large order can become “just a mist drifting through the imagination.” We should treat human beings as ends, as Kant stated, and this sits uncomfortably with attempts at arithmetic. Numbers suggest a comparability that, in turn, feeds interminable and circular debates, as evidenced in the discussion page of the List of Genocides by Death Toll on Wikipedia, which can be toggled as if it was a chart of sports results.60 The unfathomability of victims-as-numbers is a theme across contexts. In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s story of India following its partition, the protagonist speaks of the Futility of statistics: during 1971, ten million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh into India—but ten million (like all numbers larger than one thousand and one) refuses to be understood.61

Victim numbers can become part of an ugly contest. After the bombing of Dresden on 13–15 February 1945, Nazi authorities had initially talked of hundreds of thousands of dead in their wartime propaganda. In the Cold War, communists continued to cite high numbers as they could be held against Western Germany’s now-allies. In the 1950s, for example, the East German authorities put forward slogans such as “Yesterday Dresden, today Korea, tomorrow the rest of the whole world—therefore fight to keep peace!”62 Following unification, newly emerging right-wing groups also emphasised a high death toll. Most see these claims, accompanied by a diminution of the number of Nazi victims, as intended to distract from German culpability. In 2004, the mayor of Dresden tasked an independent historical commission to establish how many people had died in the bombings in February 1945. The intent here, as a deputy mayor put it, was not to end the debate but “to obtain scientific arguments against a deliberate political instrumentalization of the numbers of victims.”63 In the immediate aftermath, efforts to arrive at a death toll had been complicated as the city had been crowded with refugees, had been swept by a fierce blaze, and many victims had been trapped under rubble. The commission interviewed hundreds of survivors, looked at personal accounts of more than a thousand people, examined the archaeological evidence from basements, and undertook extensive public outreach, to ensure the effort had broad public

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legitimacy. In the end, the commission provided a detailed report, concluding with a number in the tens of thousands.64 While the report seems to have settled the scholarly debate, the phrasing “tens of thousands died, many suffocated in the firestorm” used in the caption of a picture in a BBC report on “Dresden: The World War Two bombing 75 years on” remains the most plausible wording when describing an event that we cannot reduce to a single number—not least since survivors can also be victims of a sort.65 (Not all are. A friend’s father recalled jumping into the river to escape the fires as if it had been an adventure outing.) Three other numbers show that it may not always be possible to replicate a Dresden-style fact-finding effort. The Dresden commission worked for six years. The city funded it with €100,000. This funding covered incidentals but not the salaries of its 13 members, who mostly volunteered or aligned work with their obligations at universities and research institutes. Such resources and institutional capability will not be available for many other contexts. In other words, the reasonable chance of success should also be considered when planning to establish facts. Historical scholarship can sensibly scrutinise quantitative details of large horrific events. By contrast, ethical commemoration can be sensibly vague. Commemoration will seek to do justice to individuals as ends in themselves, in invocations, names on graveyards, or, as in the case of Dresden, the exhibition of “Nineteen Names out of Nineteen Thousand,” seeking to trace some lifelines of those who died in the bombing who were known by name, as a cross-section of the 19,000 dead known by name, including victims who themselves had been implicated to the point of perpetration.66 Art to Unsettle and the Vanishing Monument “Unfathomability” is one way in which the role of art in commemoration can be understood and even evaluated. Art allows for multiple interpretations and can speak where words may fail. Commemoration at its best should have the potential to unsettle those that engage in remembrance, in ways that can renew the commitment to building better relationships between people. Kurt Vonnegut, who survived the bombing of Dresden as a Prisoner-­ of-­War locked up deep in the cooling cellars of Slaughterhouse 5 (“There

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were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-­explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked.”), conveyed unfathomability by the flatness of the catchphrase “so it goes” that he used whenever a death happened in a novel that in its introduction he had called a failure. “Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words,” is how Salman Rushdie described Vonnegut’s perspective, and “there are no words” is an essential residue of remembrance.67 Art rather than text is central to much of public commemoration. Monuments, in particular, are significant lieux de mémoire (“site of memory”).68 As symbols of  “public memory”69 they can come to represent “dominant conceptions of national history and identity.”70 In this regard, contained unfathomability reminds us that such art should invite and even provoke engagement while allowing for reinterpretation. As the artist Jochen Gerz has put it, the “division of the world into artists and audiences endangers democracy.”71 Some of the most successful monuments are those that are novel and which convey rupture. Prominent examples include Esther Shalev-Gerz’ and Jochen Gerz’ Monument Against Fascism, in Hamburg-Harburg, which is, so to speak, a landmark of absence. The monument invited citizens to add their names and comments as part of a commitment “to remain vigilant.” As more names and comments were inscribed, the 12-metre column was step-by-step lowered into the ground: “One day it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the long run, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.”72 Another example is the Empty Library, by the Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman, in the centre of Berlin and positioned in front of Humboldt University, as a monument to the burning of books on Bebelplatz in April 1933. The memorial is hard to make out and invisible from even a few steps away, from which one only sees others gazing into a window into the ground, at a space with empty shelves several metres down. From a little distance away, one can hear parents explaining to curious children about how the burning of books was followed by the murder of people. Remarkable monuments are not only in the centres of large cities. Outside Berlin, on a medical campus, the Argentinian artist Patricia Pisani created as a memorial an oversized white pillow inscribed with first names, to commemorate victims of euthanasia on this and other locations. The pillow, something that should be soft and soothing, is visually compelling. The victims are an absence, just a light imprint of a head still vaguely

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discernible “and thus the loss as a result of the crime are addressed.”73 This monument was the result of a public competition which contributed to a discussion and an eventual legitimate authority of the monument that was chosen. A key feature of many of these monuments seems to be their walkability. They can be approached and seen from different angles, which in turn requires one to assert one’s moral autonomy by choosing where one stands and how one sees. How to look and where to stand involves conscious decisions, not just watching. “People, not monuments, are the places of memory,” as Gerz also said.74 Art, documenta15, and Indonesia’s Legacy Art, however, should not be confused with propaganda. When art seeks to primarily communicate one political message, little is left that is unfathomable or sublime. “Where is the art?” was the question that the journalist and author Wladimir Kaminer traced with subtle irony when examining the ultra-political documenta15 art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, in the summer of 2022.75 Documenta is often called “the world’s most prestigious art fair” and thus has symbolic reach. It was founded in 1955 as “an attempt to bring Germany up to speed with modern art, both banishing and repressing the cultural darkness of Nazism” as an article in the New York Times put it. The term documenta, deliberately in lower case, is believed to have been chosen to communicate its intent of showcasing and documenting that type of art that Germans were barred from during the Nazi period and also because it implied the Latin docere for teaching and mens for mind.76 The art fair takes place every five years, and the 15th exhibition took place between June and September 2022. The fair is set across locations in the mid-sized city of Kassel, itself in the middle of reunited Germany, and centred on the Museum Fridericianum, opened in 1779 as one of Europe’s first public museums, which had been badly damaged in the Second World War, giving the first exhibition a makeshift character. Documenta15 proved divisive due to its politicisation. Several international media outlets described the fair as “agitprop” as they saw art marginalised within it. The exhibition emphasised positionality and strident messaging. In a 45-minute documentary on the exhibition, Kaminer— with Russian accent, as a person who had immigrated to Germany in the early 1990s—wondered what he was seeing: “Ausstellung? Einstellung?

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Vorstellung?” These words’ respective translations (literally “exhibition,” “attitude,” and “performance”) imply intentions ranging from presentation across imagination to spectacle. The documenta15’s curators, the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, claimed that their ambition was to build on the ideas of the first 1955 exhibition, but go further and address more contemporary issues. If documenta was launched with the noble intention to heal European war wounds, this concept [for documenta15] will expand that motive in order to heal today’s injuries, especially ones rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal structures.77

In attempting to “heal today’s injuries,” some of the artists at the documenta15 got stuck in a circular narrative of their own. One large mural, “People’s Justice” by Indonesian artists, intending to commemorate the “struggles of living under Suharto’s military dictatorship, where violence, exploitation and censorship were a daily reality” was found to contain, according to journalists, “a soldier with a pig’s face and a Star of David, as well as a man with sidecurls, sharp teeth and SS runes on his hat.” The artist collective had wanted to criticise “militarism and state violence” and “the involvement of the government of the State of Israel” in Suharto’s dictatorship.78 Once this antisemitic depiction gained public attention, the mural was first covered with black cloth and then dismantled. This depiction was, however, only the most high profile of several concerns. The fair ended in recriminations, including angry rejections by the curators, amidst comments suggesting that “the whole event should simply be shuttered.”79 The poet Friedrich Schiller, back in 1793, and himself interested in history with plays such as Don Carlos and Wallenstein, had written that we call an object sublime if our sensuous nature feels its limits, but our rational nature feels its superiority, its freedom from limits. Thus, we come up short against a sublime object physically, but we elevate ourselves above it morally, namely, through ideas.80

Some such “freedom from limits” and “coming up short” should remain part of commemoration, so that there can also be a moment of elevation, even if its moral ideas will not always be straightforward. For the Indonesian setting, the documentary The Act of Killing by Joshua

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Oppenheimer has the viewers coming up short, at the sight of perpetrators acting out their atrocities.81 The documenta15’s head-on conception, by contrast, seems to have come up short itself—“where is the art?”—and few commentators described the result as any kind of elevation. Dates and Locations: Awarding the Aurora Prize The term “contained unfathomability” hints at a degree of instability. What we consider “contained” and what we experience as “unfathomable” changes over time, and in this way, this concept is open to evolution. Approaches may need to be refreshed. One of the criticisms of the Stolpersteine, for example, is that it has become too mainstream to still engage. Quantity now trumped the quality of the encounter, and its impact, the critic says, may have peaked.82 Contained unfathomability appears to be a workable concept for thinking about commemoration. It suggests where to be specific and where to be vague and how to be distinctive with names that at first may appear strange. Though there is a vast literature on art and remembrance, the concept of unfathomability synthesises a key characteristic—that it should retain the ability to unsettle. The Aurora Prize has been specific with its date and locations. It marked the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day as a date for its inaugural prize ceremony (2016), as the day for announcing prize finalists (2017) and as the beginning of the next process of nominations (several years). In 2021, Remembrance Day was used for participation “in a flower-laying ceremony at the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial Complex in Yerevan, Armenia to pay tribute to those who perished during the Armenian Genocide in 1915–1923 and to express their gratitude to those who helped the persecuted to survive.” The Aurora Prize Ceremony, the initiative’s landmark event, in 2017 was also scheduled for May 28, to coincide with First Republic Day. As the website wrote, this day “embodies the resilience of survivors who, just three years after the Genocide, declared and sustained an independent Armenian Republic from 1918 to 1920. The ceremony and accompanying events will highlight this journey from death to life, from horror to hope, from tragedy to revival.” The Aurora Prize focused its first events on Yerevan, as an act to bring the world to Armenia. It eventually varied the locations, organising some events to Dilijan, a mountain town in which one of the founders and sponsors has also launched a United World College boarding school. In other

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years, a prize ceremony took place in Venice, a city with that has rich links with Armenian history. As such, the Prize is both localised and temporalised. Is the Aurora Prize as commemoration sufficiently unfathomable to have an impact? On this we can only speak for ourselves. The Prize certainly moved us to think more about commemoration.

Notes 1. Sara B.  Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution, Explorations in Narrative Psychology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Ibid. 3. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman Naimark, ‘Introduction: Leaving It to the Historians’, A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, 2011, 3–11. 4. Roger Fisher William Ury Patton Bruce, Getting to Yes (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2020). 5. Margaret Comer, ‘Uncovering Violent Narratives: The Heritage of Stalinist Repression in Russia since 1991’, in Heritage of Death (Routledge, 2017), pp. 164–77. 6. ‘German Military Cemetery’, Municipality of Langemark-Poelkapelle https://www.langemark-­poelkapelle.be/en/german-­military-­cemetery [accessed 26 February 2023]. 7. ‘Forgotten Soldiers—DW—04/10/2014’, Dw.Com, 7 February 2023 https://www.dw.com/en/the-­german-­soldiers-­that-­history-­forgot/a-­ 6218386 [accessed 7 February 2023]. 8. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2015). P. 918. 9. ‘Genocide—Not Only the Armenians—Cem Özdemir’ https://www.­ oezdemir.de/themen/armenien-­resolution/ [accessed 26 February 2023]. 10. W. G. Sebald, ‘An Attempt at Restitution’, The New Yorker, 12 December 2004. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/20/an-­attempt-­ at-­restitution [accessed 16 January 2023]. 11. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989). p. 192. 12. Ibid., p. 196. 13. Jack Zipes, ‘Manès Sperber’s Legacy for Peace in Wie Eine Träne Im Ozean’, The German Quarterly, 61.2 (1988), 249–63. https://doi. org/10.2307/406848.

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14. ‘Poetry After Auschwitz—What Adorno Didn’t Say | Persistent Enlightenment’ https://persistentenlightenment.com/2013/05/21/ poetry-­after-­auschwitz-­what-­adorno-­didnt-­say/ [accessed 7 February 2023]. 15. ‘Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Der Mann, Der Uns Das Lesen Lehrte—Kultur— SZ.De’, 2023 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/marcel-­reich-­ ranicki-­ist-­tot-­der-­mann-­der-­uns-­das-­lesen-­lehrte-­1.1379918 [accessed 7 February 2023]. 16. ‘2020 Aurora Prize Laureates: Fartuun Adan and Ilwad Elman’ https:// auroraprize.com/en/2020-­a urora-­p rize-­l aureates-­f artuun-­a dan-­a nd-­ ilwad-­elman-­623 [accessed 26 February 2023]. 17. ‘New Stamp Honors 2020 Aurora Prize Laureates’ https://auroraprize. com/en/new-­stamp-­honors-­2020-­aurora-­prize-­laureates [accessed 26 February 2023]. 18. Richard Feynman, ‘Cargo Cult Science: Some Remarks on Science, Pseudoscience, and Learning How to Not Fool Yourself’, 1974 http:// calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm [accessed 2 February 2022]. 19. Pers Anders Rudling, ‘Institutes of Trauma Re-Production in a Borderland: Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania’, in Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past A Comparative Study on Memory Management in the Region (Stockholm: Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, CBEES, 2020), p. 10. 20. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman Naimark, ‘Introduction: Leaving It to the Historians’, A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, 2011, 3–11. 21. Jeffrey Z.  Rubin, Dean G.  Pruitt, and Sung Hee Kim, Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement, 2nd Ed, Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement, 2nd Ed (New York, NY, England: Mcgraw-Hill Book Company, 1994), pp. xviii, 269. 22. Ibid. 23. Christina Nemr and Sara Savage, Integrative Complexity Interventions to Prevent and Counter Violent Extremism (JSTOR, 2019). 24. Sara Cobb, Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative in Conflict Resolution (Oxford University Press, 2013). https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199826209.001.0001 25. Jeffrey Z.  Rubin, Dean G.  Pruitt, and Sung Hee Kim, Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement (Mcgraw-Hill Book Company, 1994). 26. Alexander Etkind, ‘Warped Mourning’, in Warped Mourning (Stanford University Press, 2013). See also Jade McGlynn’s multiple recent publications on this topic, including her upcoming Memory Makers (2023), with Bloomsbury Publishing. 27. Yiannis Papadakis, ‘The National Struggle Museums of a Divided City’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17.3 (1994), 400–419. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01419870.1994.9993833.

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28. ‘Misrata War Museum | Travel Story and Pictures from Libya’ http:// www.traveladventures.org/continents/africa/misrata-­war-­museum.html [accessed 26 February 2023]. 29. ‘Clearing the Misrata War Museum - Libya | ReliefWeb’, 2013 https:// reliefweb.int/report/libya/clearing-­misrata-­war-­museum [accessed 26 February 2023]. 30. ‘Publications | Gerard Libaridian’s Website’ http://libaridian.com/publications/ [accessed 26 February 2023]. 31. Daniel C.  Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam, With a New Preface, 1989. 32. Charles L.  Briggs and Daniel C.  Hallin, ‘Health Reporting as Political Reporting: Biocommunicability and the Public Sphere’, Journalism, 11.2 (2010), 149–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884909355732. 33. Aneeta Mathur-Ashton, ‘Campaign of Hate Forces Azeri Journalist Offline’, VOA, 2021 https://www.voanews.com/a/press-­freedom_ campaign-­hate-­forces-­azeri-­journalist-­offline/6200504.html [accessed 26 February 2023]. 34. Andreas T. Hirblinger and Dana M. Landau, ‘Daring to Differ? Strategies of Inclusion in Peacemaking’, Security Dialogue, 51.4 (2020), 305–22. 35. ‘VIDEO. Dr. Tom Catena—2017 Aurora Prize Laureate’ https://auroraprize.com/en/video-­dr-­tom-­catena-­%25E2%2580%2593-­2017-­aurora-­ prize-­laureate [accessed 26 February 2023]. 36. Edward S. Casey, Remembering, Second Edition: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd edn (Indiana University Press, 2000), JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt16gzfjf [accessed 20 February 2023]. 37. John Christman, ‘Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N.  Zalta, Fall 2020 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020) https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/autonomy-­moral/ [accessed 9 February 2023]. 38. Anthony Jordan, To Laugh or to Weep : A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1994) https://www.worldcat.org/title/to-­ l a u g h -­o r -­t o -­w e e p -­a -­b i o g r a p h y -­o f -­c o n o r -­c r u i s e -­o b r i e n / oclc/32857824. p. 189. 39. ‘Misrata Local Council Response to Human Rights Watch’, 11 April 2012 https://www.hr w.org/news/2012/04/11/misrata-­l ocal-­c ouncil-­ response-­human-­rights-­watch [accessed 7 February 2023]. It should be noted that Misratan leaders do not accept responsibility for the displacement. 40. ‘Understanding the Relationships between Communities and Armed Groups in Libya  - Peaceful Change Initiative’, 2012 https://peacefulchange.org/ resource/understanding-­the-­r elationships-­between-­communities-­and-­ armed-­groups-­in-­libya/ [accessed 26 February 2023]. p. 28.

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41. Ibid. 42. Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals of History (U of Minnesota Press, 1995). p. 56. 43. Akram Aylisli, ‘Stone Dreams’, in Farewell, Aylis (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022). 44. Ibid., p. 104. 45. Ibid., p. 154. 46. Joshua Kucera, ‘Akram Aylisli’s Lonely Battle for Reconciliation’, in Farewell, Aylis (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022), pp. viii–xvii. 47. Gerard Libaridian, Gerard Libaridian: “The New Chance Should Serve a Certain Purpose” (Mediamax.am, 13 January 2015) https://mediamax. am/en/news/interviews/12798#sthash.ocyslVVT.dpuf [accessed 12 March 2021]. 48. Ralf Pauli, ‘Armenier in Deutschland: Endlich raus aus der Opferrolle’, Die Zeit (Hamburg, 24 April 2015), section Gesellschaft https://www.zeit. de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-­0 4/armenien-­v oelkermord-­ genozid-­erinnerung [accessed 12 March 2021]. 49. Serj Tankian-#StopArtsakhBlockade [@serjtankian], ‘@YourAnonNews I Can’t Wait. I Will Celebrate It More than My Own Birthday. I Hope He’s Ass Raped by a Thousand of His Jihadist Pets in the Afterlife :)’, Twitter, 2021 https://twitter.com/serjtankian/status/1349241207793217536 [accessed 26 February 2023]. 50. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Armenia’s Cascade Memorial—Returning from Hilltop Marginalization’, Slovo, forthcoming. 51. Jack Zipes, ‘Manès Sperber’s Legacy for Peace in Wie Eine Träne Im Ozean’, The German Quarterly, 61.2 (1988), 249–63. https://doi. org/10.2307/406848. p. 263. 52. Ibid., p. 290. 53. R. Joseph Huddleston and David Wood, ‘Functional Markets in Yemen’s War Economy’, Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2.2 (2021), 204. https://doi.org/10.31389/jied.71. 54. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, ‘Schliemanns Welten’ https://www.smb. museum/ausstellungen/detail/schliemanns-­welten/ [accessed 26 February 2023]. 55. ‘Julienne Lusenge: 2021 Aurora Prize Laureate’ https://auroraprize. com/en/julienne-­lusenge-­2021-­aurora-­humanitarian [accessed 26 February 2023]. 56. Adrian Walker, ‘At Least They Had a Plan’, Boston Globe, 2 October 2007 http://archive.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/02/at_least_ they_had_a_plan/ 57. ‘FAQ’ https://www.stolpersteine.eu/faq/ [accessed 26 February 2023]. 58. Thomas De Waal, ‘The G-Word’, Foreign Affairs, 7 January 2015 https:// www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-­states/g-­word [accessed 12 March 2021].

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59. Richard J Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London: Pantheon, 1989). p. 142. 60. Matthew J. Newcomb, ‘Feeling the Vulgarity of Numbers: The Rwandan Genocide and the Classroom as a Site of Response to Suffering’, JAC, 30.1/2 (2010), 175–213. 61. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Knopf Canada, 2010). p. 182. 62. Claudia Jerzak, ‘Der 13. Februar 1945 im kollektiven Gedächtnis Dresdens’, Deutschland Archiv, 2023 https://www.bpb.de/themen/ deutschlandarchiv/518214/der-­1 3-­f ebruar-­1 945-­i m-­k ollektiven-­ gedaechtnis-­dresdens/ [accessed 19 February 2023]. 63. Michael Bartsch, ‘Historiker zu Dresden-Bombardement: Gegen die rechte Legendenbildung’, Die Tageszeitung: taz, 18 March 2010, section Politik https://taz.de/!5145808/ [accessed 19 February 2023]. 64. Dresden, ‘Materialien zur Kommission’, www.dresden.de, 2023. https:// w w w. d r e s d e n . d e / d e / l e b e n / s t a d t p o r t r a i t / s t a d t g e s c h i c h t e / ereignisse/03/historikerkommission/02_materialien.php [accessed 26 February 2023]. 65. Toby Luckhurst, ‘Dresden: The World War Two Bombing 75 Years On’, BBC News, 13 February 2020, section Europe https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-­europe-­51448486 [accessed 19 February 2023]. 66. ‘Neunzehn Namen aus Neunzehntausend | Weiterdenken | Heinrich-­Böll-­ Stiftung Sachsen’, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, 2023 https://weiterdenken.de/ de/neunzehn-­namen-­aus-­neunzehntausend [accessed 19 February 2023]. 67. Salman Rushdie, ‘What Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now’, The New  Yorker, 13 June 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/ books/page-­turner/what-­kurt-­vonneguts-­slaughterhouse-­five-­tells-­us-­ now [accessed 19 February 2023]. 68. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–24. 69. Barbara Franco, review of Review of Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture; Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, by Michael Kammen and John Bodnar, The Oral History Review, 21.1 (1993), 115–18. 70. Anna Cento Bull and David Clarke, ‘Agonistic Interventions into Public Commemorative Art: An Innovative Form of Counter-Memorial Practice?’, Constellations, 28.2 (2021), 192–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-­ 8675.12484. 71. Davide Brocchi, ‘Gelebte Kunst 2’, Magazin Cultura21, 2007 https:// web.archive.org/web/20160220015635/http://magazin.cultura21. de/kultur/kuenste/gelebte-­kunst-­2.html [accessed 20 February 2023].

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72. ‘Jochen Gerz und Esther Shalev-Gerz: Harburger Mahnmal’, KUNST@ SH | Schleswig-Holstein & Hamburg, 2020. https://sh-­kunst.de/jochen-­ gerz-­und-­esther-­shalev-­gerz-­harburger-­mahnmal/ [accessed 20 February 2023]. 73. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Addressing Institutional Trauma in Health Care: The Case for a Structured Ethical Framework’, STAT, 2022 https://www.statnews.com/2022/08/09/addressing-­institutional-­trauma-­health-­care-­ structured-­ethical-­framework/ [accessed 15 November 2022]. 74. Davide Brocchi, ‘Gelebte Kunst 2’, Magazin Cultura21, 2007 https:// web.archive.org/web/20160220015635/http://magazin.cultura21. de/kultur/kuenste/gelebte-­kunst-­2.html [accessed 20 February 2023]. 75. Wladimir Kaminer, ‘Kaminer Inside: documenta 15’, ARD https:// p r o g r a m m -­o r i g i n . a r d . d e / T V / P r o g r a m m / A l l e -­S e n d e r / ? s e n d ung=280074000756046 [accessed 2 December 2022]. 76. Harald Kimpel, Documenta: Mythos Und Wirklichkeit. (Köln: DuMont, 1997), xxv. 77. ruangrupa, ‘Documenta Fifteen’, Ruangrupa, 2022 https://ruangrupa. id/en/documenta-­fifteen/ [accessed 2 December 2022]. 78. Stuart Braun, ‘Antisemitic Mural Removed from Documenta Art Show’, Deutsche Welle, 22 June 2022 https://www.dw.com/en/antisemitic-­ mural-­removed-­from-­documenta-­art-­show/a-­62216554 [accessed 20 February 2023]. 79. ‘New Antisemitism Scandal Hits Documenta’, Deutsche Welle, 28 July 2022 https://www.dw.com/en/new-­antisemitism-­scandal-­at-­germanys-­ documenta-­art-­exhibition/a-­62632478 [accessed 2 December 2022]. 80. Lydia L.  Moland, ‘Friedrich Schiller’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2021 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2021/entries/schiller/ [accessed 20 February 2023]. 81. Brad Simpson, ‘The Act of Killing and the Dilemmas of History’, Film Quarterly, 67.2 (2013), 10–13 https://doi.org/10.1525/ fq.2014.67.2.10. 82. Sandra Sattlecker, Steine des Anstoßes oder normiertes Ritual. Zur Rolle des Stolperstein-Projekts in den Erinnerungskonflikten der Gegenwart, H-Soz-­ Kult. Kommunikation und Fachinformation für die Geschichtswissenschaften (H-Soz-Kult, 5 September 2019) http:// www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-­126993 [accessed 20 February 2023].

CHAPTER 4

Truth of the New Paradigm

Abstract  The plausibility of the Ethics of Political Commemoration can be demonstrated by subjecting it to three tests. Is it coherent? Can it command a significant degree of consensus? Does it correspond to plausible instances of remembrance? As this chapter shows, the framework passes these three tests. Its coherence derives from being based on the tested and multidimensional Just War tradition, with parallels in other traditions, such as thinking about natural law. The framework can command significant agreement, in that it encompasses scholarly debate, and has analogies in various museum charters and guidelines on commemoration—while connecting these to a larger tradition. Moreover, the framework corresponds to instances of compelling remembrance and helps us to understand why certain suggestions for the Stalin Museum in Georgia, the Cascade Memorial in Armenia, or the Tito Museum in Croatia are more plausible than others. Like the Just War Theory, the Ethics of Political Commemoration is positioned between perennial challengers: the pacifist view that no political compulsion has merit on the one side and an ends-­justifies-­means rejection of restraint on the other. Taken together, these considerations highlight that the framework constitutes a plausible paradigm. Keywords  Paradigm • Natural law • Ethical tradition • Pacifism • Realism • Museums

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Gutbrod, D. Wood, Ethics of Political Commemoration, Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7_4

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The Ethics of Political Commemoration is demonstrably true. Its truth can be shown as the framework passes several tests that establish whether a claim is plausible—coherence, consensus, and correspondence.

A strong case for the Ethics of Political Commemoration can be made along three additional dimensions, after the previous chapters outlined the main features of this new paradigm. An assertion is credible if it is internally coherent, for which adherence to mathematical logic is the stand-out example, with its absence of internal contradiction. Credibility can be tested by consensus, or at least widespread agreement. For instance, the statement that Ludwig van Beethoven developed more expressive modes of music can be seen as credible when it is widely supported. Finally, credibility is established when a claim corresponds to externally observable phenomena, such as a theory predicting the results of a scientific experiments. The Ethics of Political Commemoration passes these three tests. The framework offers a coherent ethical account of political uses of commemoration. The coherence in part derives from it being an adaptation of an established tradition. The Just War Theory has been examined for centuries and is well understood. As with the Just War Theory, a consensus is possible that the Ethics of Political Commemoration is a comprehensive approach of reflecting on merit and restraint. As part of this consensus, the framework can encompass many methodologies and recommendations, providing a more extensive synthesis. Our examples illustrate that the framework corresponds to the kinds of commemoration that many find laudable, providing a richer vocabulary, and helping to identify ideas for better remembrance. Unlike some post-modern approaches, the framework is not just a hermetic redescription that, when applied, fizzles into relativism. As a credible framework, the Ethics of Political Commemoration should be applied to remembrance as much as we use Just War Theory when reflecting on the use of force. At first glance, this looks like a stark proposition, but it also expresses a limitation. The Ethics of Political Commemoration carries some weaknesses of the tradition from which it derives. Taken together, the Ethics of Political Commemoration should be seen as a paradigm in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of the word—as a comprehensive worldview that provides orientation and a framework for resolving individual puzzles. This paradigm offers a fresh perspective and overcomes the crisis arising from the inchoate debate on appropriate commemoration.

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A Coherent Tradition of Ethical Enquiry The Ethics of Political Commemoration is plausible as an approach because it derives from the Just War tradition. Both frameworks consider merit and restraint when one side seeks to compel others and examine these decisions according to multi-dimensional criteria. The Ethics of Political Commemoration builds on an established tradition of moral enquiry in the Just War tradition.1 Its criteria aim to make a better peace possible, transform conflict, and leave a past of trauma behind. The framework builds on a tradition to which hundreds of scholars have contributed. Scholars have addressed and overcome potential contradictions in debates that span centuries, even if puzzles remain.2 The Ethics of Political Commemoration draws on the coherence of this tradition, which is successful in its wide adoption, relevant across cultures, and makes sense of our intuitions. Consistent and Multi-dimensional Tradition The Ethics of Political Commemoration has as its foundation the Ius ad Bellum and Ius in Bello criteria of the Just War tradition. This tradition guides reflections on the merit of going to war, and the appropriate restraints for its prosecution, to ensure that a better peace can follow. This tradition is not static. Its core criteria have evolved, such as now centering accountability in legitimate authority. As an approach for reflection, traditions can become better. Like, say, the design of musical instruments, they can improve as practitioners work out how best to use them. Given that the Just War tradition has been tested in extremis, it is a framework that is likely to last. It is consistent to ground the Ethics of Political Commemoration in Just War Theory. Both frameworks are concerned with merit and restraint when reflecting on “contested matters”, as a popular definition of politics goes.3 When commemoration is political, in that it concerns contested matters, it usually entails an attempt to compel others. Rephrasing Clausewitz, politics is the continuation of war with lesser means. In commemoration and war, it is plausible that ethical scrutiny focuses on whether attempts at compelling others contribute to making a better peace possible. Yet ethical consideration, as Nietzsche notes, is itself a contest. Similarly, the philosopher Charles Leslie Stevenson argues that “ethical terms are instruments used in the complicated interplay and readjustment of human

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interest.”4 How to readjust such human interest in an interplay without a final arbiter is the focus of the Just War tradition. When there is no binding legal or ethical space, restraint needs to be internalised because it is not imposed from the outside, other than through the fear of retaliation. The “memory wars” of remembrance require similar internalisation of restraint. At their best, ethical frameworks can shape behaviour. In shaping behaviour, the value of the Just War tradition is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Taken by itself, each criterion of the Just War Theory can appear obvious or trivial. It is familiar at an elementary level, from The Iliad forward, that having a just cause does not automatically lead the aggrieved to have a good intention. Once the criteria are taken together, however, they link up to make a comprehensive interrogation possible. Michael Walzer points out that this kind of interrogation is essential. As the old saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals; just war even more so. The ongoing critique of war-making [via Just War theory] is a centrally important democratic activity.5

An ongoing critique is similarly needed for commemoration. History is too important to be left to those who seek to instrumentalise it for narrow ends. While there are differences, there is a strong connection between the Just War Theory and the Ethics of Political Commemoration. The frameworks relate to different aspects of time. Just War Theory seeks to constrain violence that is being committed in the present and future, whereas the Ethics of Political Commemoration seeks to manage what we collectively do with the violence that was committed in the past to improve prospects for the future. The recently established category of Ius Post Bellum fills a gap in between, with its focus on transitional justice and reconstruction immediately after a conflict.6 “Ethics”, in this context, means, at a minimum, an orientation towards building relations that we can sustain. For relations to be sustained, they must align with multiple parties’ fundamental values and needs. As will be explored in chapter five, this can become fraught when worldviews contradict each other, but is nevertheless still possible.

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Drawing on a Vibrant Framework To fully understand the potential of the Ethics of Political Commemoration, it helps to understand the reach of the Just War tradition. The major conflicts of the last quarter century—Afghanistan, Iraq, Nagorno Karabakh, Ukraine—can be described in its terms. The Just War Theory highlights concerns such as a low chance of success at reasonable proportionality in Afghanistan or the problems of a flimsy cause that turned out to be false in Iraq. As a tradition, it remains acutely relevant and can put in order a frequently fragmented debate. It is not a pre-Copernican flat-earth account that is primarily a dusted artefact.7 Despite this reach, few people engage with Just War Theory in more depth. Ask a class of Master students of International Relations, and only a few hands will go up to confirm that people have engaged with the tradition in detail. In a poll of Twitter followers, less than 10 percent of respondents said they knew the Just War Theory well. More than 60 percent of respondents said that they had only cursory knowledge (“have heard of it” or “would need a refresher”). While not representative, the poll seems to indicate that the framework is not widely known among an interested segment of the public, even if many who studied international relations have a vague idea that Michael Walzer revived the tradition after the Vietnam War. While conflict remains present, the principal framework for making ethical sense of it is not. One reason the Just War tradition is neglected is its success. To many, the tradition is familiar in how it manifested itself as International Humanitarian Law. Ius in Bello, in particular, is now widely accepted. If people think of Prisoners-of-War deserving protection, they mostly reference the Geneva Convention. In not needing to be evoked, the Just War tradition has become embedded in contemporary world views, as described by Whitehead’s dictum that “[c]ivilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”8 A Tradition at a Confluence of Cultures Yet that civilizational character can also attract scepticism. Are its origins a potential constraint for the Just War Theory and by implication for any ethics that seeks to draw on it? Although often identified as a tradition of Catholic thought, the thinking captured in the Just War Theory relies on a broader base. We can trace the first ideas to ancient Greece. Later, the

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Roman politician Cicero in various works outlines the core criteria of Ius ad Bellum, including just cause, right intention (some version of repair and restitution), last resort after negotiations failed, and that war should be conducted by the central state authority only.9 From classical antiquity, the rough contours of the approach are already in place when Augustine integrates thinking on war into a Christian tradition. Roughly 800 years later, in formalising the framework further, Thomas Aquinas drew on Arabic and Jewish scholarship to rediscover Greek texts and reconcile Aristotle with the then-dominant Augustinian thinking. The Just War tradition thus arises from the confluence of various cultures of thinking. Thinkers needed to work out what respect to accord to perspectives that are different from their own. This question arose elsewhere also. As the International Committee of the Red Cross has emphasized through a series of publications, many of the core notions of the Just War tradition can be found across cultures.10 In pre-modern China, the Art of War Corpus stresses the wisdom of restraint.11 Hence, one of the routine objections against the Just War tradition, that we should no longer take it seriously because it comes from a dated and religious lineage, is not persuasive. That critique overlooks the blended origins of its reflections on the use of force. That the Catholic tradition developed an exceptionally detailed rendering of this approach is perhaps a result of the improved circumstances of intellectual production from the twelfth and thirteenth century on—writing, monasteries, the beginnings of the idea of law following on the Gregorian revolution, and a tradition of discussion and disputation. The possibilities of moral reflection are bound up with the genre of discussion, as MacIntyre has repeatedly pointed out.12 The monasteries of the Middle Ages, together with the development of the first universities in Bologna and Paris, made a particular style of scholarly debate possible. By contrast, a culture that transmits its reflection in heroic epics can convey instances of admirable chivalry and of shameful transgression but will not formalise reflection into the kind of text that is on these and similar pages. In an epic culture, moral education, explicit or implicit, mainly proceeds by exemplars, from Achilles’ treatment of Hector across Icelandic sagas to contemporary Star Wars. The Greek historian Plutarch, writing in the first century A.D., implied that heroic epics can serve to instill martial virtues, when suggesting that the poems of Homer were compiled by Lycurgus, the ruler who “made Sparta Spartan.” Lycurgus apparently

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valued the epic for its “political and disciplinary lessons.”13 Whether Plutarch’s account of the Spartan origin of The Iliad is historically accurate or not, it shows a keen awareness that this resilient genre is linked to an affirmative impulse. Instruction through exemplars is usually compelling, and the incomplete character of each individual story may be both more inspiring and more of a warning to individuals to be morally attentive than nuanced systems of analysis. And yet, attractive as epics are, guiding frameworks have their role. They are like maps that allow independent navigation, whereas in epic tales we are to follow heroes and heroines on their paths. A guiding framework, therefore, is likely to contribute to asserting one’s moral autonomy through better orientation, even if it is not as emotionally engaging as the follow-me of heroic quests. Natural Law, Games, and Rawls One can arrive at a similar ethical framework without drawing on tradition. The possibility of reconstructing Just War Theory using contemporary perspectives is attractive because many are reasonably sceptical of tradition. Tradition can imply passed-down authority and unquestioning deference. Such deference, however, would be anathema to most notions of judgment. Can we conceive of ethical frameworks without subordination? As it turns out, Just War Theory can be grounded without reference to the past. It is likely that something like the Just War Theory would result once people deliberate on painful experiences. Most people would want rules that allow them to stand up and fight for issues they care deeply about, while also allowing them to live on with some dignity if they cannot prevail. Hence, one can argue for the Just War Theory, and the Ethics of Political Commemoration, from the “original position” or “veil of ignorance”. In The Law of the Peoples, John Rawls elaborates eight core principles, based on sovereignty, that run parallel to Just War Theory, as Bill Soderberg has shown.14 If you do not know whether you will win or be defeated, which rules would you pick to be applied? If we were to organise an ethics of war from scratch through thought experiments—whether iterative games or Rawls—we would likely arrive at a framework of inquiry similar to the Ius ad Bellum and Ius in Bello, and by extension with derivations from them.

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As for individual impulses or views on justice, Cicero suggested that core notions of justice could be worked out based as “nature makes common conceptions for us and starts forming them in our minds”.15 Citing his own experience of adolescent wrong-doing, Augustine, in turn, mentioned an understanding “written into the hearts of men” of transgression.16 A contemporary way of putting it would be to say that many intuitions can provide guidance on how to act. While intuitions guide us, frameworks are needed to understand how and why (and when) those intuitions can reasonably be justified, as they often are fragmented and sometimes contradictory.

Consensus to Transcend Inchoate Debate As with the Just War Theory, a consensus is possible that the Ethics of Political Commemoration is a comprehensive framework of reflecting on merit and restraint. The paradigm reflects recommendations on commemoration from various contexts, and how people intuitively think about the issue.

Consensus can be used as a measure for establishing the plausibility of a claim. It is a sensible criterion when assertions remain somewhat subjective, such as deciding whether Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Antonio Salieri is the more formative composer, or how to judge, say, the literary merit of Scott Fitzgerald vis-à-vis Dan Brown. We can use consensus to decide which objective indicator (e.g., album sales or citations) we select to compare and assess. In scholarship, the consensus criterion is applied through the mechanism of peer review which scholarly texts including this one undergo. Consensus can establish validity when non-specialists try to make up their minds. Laypersons can get a sense whether experts in significant numbers seem to agree on climate change, even if they cannot assess the internal consistency of the science on the issue. Consensus does not mean unanimity but rather “significant agreement by those in a position to assess properly.” It is possible, of course, for a consensus to evolve or to be proven wrong. Such an evolution takes place mostly through uncovering inconsistencies or new thoughts on correspondence, for instance after Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands.

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Encompassing Scholarly Debate: Rothberg and Snyder Many scholars say that public commemoration requires systematic attention. They identify similar issues for scrutiny, though ethical arguments often are more implicit than directly stated. Two prominent examples can illustrate this. Earlier sections have already outlined how the Multidirectional Memory of Michael Rothberg can fit into the Ethics of Political Commemoration.17 In a landmark article in 2011, later turned into a book, Rothberg offers two axes for thinking about the uses of memory. The axis of memorialisation’s affect runs from solidarity to competition. This axis arguably could also be redescribed as one of intent, as in Ius ad Memoriam. A second axis runs from equation to differentiation. Here equation can be seen as trapping people in ascribed collectives and narrative loops, as in Ius in Memoria. By contrast, differentiation emphasises the individual, insists on nuance to exit circular simplifications, and helps people assert their moral autonomy. The Ethics of Political Commemoration offers additional dimensions to Rothberg’s model. Rather than two axes only, it envisages eight lanes of reflection, with one lane per criterion. While rendering an assessment more complicated, it also allows us to describe commemoration with even more differentiation, offering a multidimensional rather than multidirectional consideration of memory. The framework also connects with points raised by Timothy Snyder in his 2013 essay on Commemorative Causality.18 Snyder, as already mentioned, laments that “the bad news is that ours is an age of memory rather than history.” In historical debates in and on Eastern Europe, “[e]ach side is so palpably wrong about so many major issues that the other cannot help but feel that it must, in turn, be right.” Ius in Memoria responds to this pattern by insisting on asserting moral autonomy. One should not justify oneself with reference to others’ faults. Much of historical discourse, Snyder suggested, was characterised by a presumptuous “contagious exceptionalism”—arguably another way of saying that it lacks legitimacy and authority. The absence of relevant language skills and lack of source work in Eastern European countries keeps many historians trapped in the German perspective, which is its own circular narrative. Snyder’s essay is primarily a diagnosis from the perspective of a historian critiquing “commemorative causality,” which leads to “the confusion between present resonance and past power” and also “denies history its

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proper subject.” Snyder criticises attempts to establish just cause by seeking to recognise killings as genocide, when “by the legal definition, both the Germans and the Soviets committed multiple genocides. So any debate as to whether the proper number of genocides is one or two is political, and likely carried out in either ignorance or bad faith or both.” In this way, historical representation often consists of “parallel histories of victimhood grounded in commemorative causation.” Again, the Ethics of Political Commemoration with its emphasis on right intention, exiting circular narratives, and contained unfathomability should assist in separating historical from commemorative discussions and channel memory initiatives in directions that can transform conflicts, rather than perpetuate them. Other disciplines and practices also connect to this framework. The next chapter will demonstrate how the Ethics of Political Commemoration encompasses scholarly enquiry in peace and conflict studies. For example, the framework argues that legitimate authority should move beyond individual legitimacy, towards that of accountable and inclusive institutions. Similarly, the framework’s emphasis on exiting circular narratives mirrors Susan Cobb’s call to “build better narratives” that can encompass different stories on conflict, including on past tragedies. Consensus in Charters and Guidelines Beyond scholarship, a range of historical or commemorative associations have developed recommendations that mirror the Ethics of Political Commemoration. This underscores that the framework can link up charters or guidelines with a broader tradition of moral enquiry. The European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), based in Warsaw, suggests eight recommendations as Guidelines for International Discourse on History and Memory, starting with “present varied viewpoints.” The ENRS developed these guidelines with the intent of fostering dialogue on twentieth-century European history and to “support the development of a common European culture of remembrance.” Within this context, it proposes that activities and initiatives should serve the overriding goals of peace, international cooperation, democracy, and human rights. The suggestions are put forward based “in the firm belief that the criteria of objectivism, openness and tolerance are the best means of depicting reality, including historical reality.” Previous chapters have already mentioned some of the recommendations. Here, an overview in Table 4.1 highlights that all eight recommendations

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Table 4.1  The framework, networks, and charters The ethics of political commemoration

Ius ad memoriam

European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 2015(Indicative and abbreviated)

International Memorial Museums Charter, 2012(Indicative and abbreviated)

Right intention Preamble: Peace, 2. “…shared set of positive cooperation, democracy values […] in the universal and human rights declaration of human and 6. Clearly define the civil rights.” nature of each initiative Legitimate 7. Use academic 5. “Fundamental decisions authority knowledge as your […] should be based on source open, non-hierarchical pluralistic discussion with survivors, scholars, educators, lobbyists, and committed social groups.” 3. Ensure independence and “anchor in civil society & make effort to integrate minorities.” Reasonable 8. Apply up-to-date 4. “The memorial museums chance of didactical concepts and will only be able to assert success technical standards themselves […] if they have achieved a high level of quality work, infrastructure, and personal organization.” Just cause 5. Ensure a genuine 3. “Memorial museums […] historical basis involved mostly in remembering public crimes committed against minorities.” (continued)

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Table 4.1 (continued) The ethics of political commemoration

Ius in Memoria

European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, 2015(Indicative and abbreviated)

International Memorial Museums Charter, 2012(Indicative and abbreviated)

Transcend the collective

3. Avoid generalisations 4. Treat historical figures as individuals

Exit circular narratives

1. Present varied viewpoints 7. Use academic knowledge as your source

Assert moral autonomy

2. Avoid deterministic expressions

7. Integrate into “historical contexts without minimizing the personal suffering of individuals.” 8. “The perpetrators should not be demonized, but rather their ideology, aims and motives should be used to explain their actions.” 1. “Accept the co-existence of different commemorative imperatives that are aimed at pluralistic cultures of remembrance” 10. “Memorial museums as contemporary history museums are always engaged in self-criticism of their own history.” 9. “The visitors are not overwhelmed or indoctrinated, that the subjective view of individuals be respected, and that controversial subjects be treated as controversial.” 6. “Information […] about historical events should evoke empathy [and] should avoid commemoration in the form of revenge, hate and resentments between different groups of victims.”

Contained unfathomability

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can be matched to the criteria under Ius ad Memoriam and Ius in Memoria, except perhaps Contained Unfathomability.19 For example, “use academic knowledge as your source” can relate to the criterion Legitimate Authority, in that scholarly consensus should legitimise the validity of claims. In parallel, an emphasis on knowledge can remind people to exit circular narratives. Implicitly, the case for contained unfathomability is made by the International Memorial Museums Charter.20 Among its ten principles, it suggests that remembrance “should evoke empathy with the victims as individual humans and groups” (Principle 6).21 The charter otherwise offers a range of sensible and apt suggestions, including that perpetrators should not be demonised. Instead, “their ideology, aims and motives should be used to explain their actions,” with reference to “institutional and social mechanisms as well as the individual biographies of perpetrators.” This criterion matches Transcend the Collective of Ius in Memoria. The similarities show that the Ethics of Political Commemoration can integrate guidelines and charters on the use of memory. The two complementary texts underline the incipient consensus on questions of ethical remembrance. As in previous cases, connecting them to a larger tradition of moral enquiry can strengthen their plausibility. Preparing for the Irish Decade of Centenaries In Ireland, scholars developed a similar set of suggestions in preparing for the decade of centenaries. As previously mentioned, Mallinder and O’Callaghan summarised five considerations as part of the President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative, a series of seminars and public reflections to explore “the challenge and invitation of living ethically.”22 Table 4.2 demonstrates how these issues, paraphrased for readability, correspond to the Ius ad Memoriam and Ius in Memoria criteria. This alignment shows that the Ethics of Political Commemoration apply widely, including in contexts with points of reference other than the totalitarian and genocidal horrors that usually are at the centre of considerations of commemoration. The Ethics of Political Commemoration reflects Mallinder and O’Callaghan’s major recommendations, offers additional criteria, a sensible hierarchy of organising them, and again a larger tradition to connect to. The President of the Republic of Ireland, Michael Higgins, has described remembrance as an ethical undertaking across various public

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Table 4.2  The framework and Irish decade of centenaries Ethics of commemorative practices (Ireland)

Ius ad Memoriam and Ius in Memoria criteria

Take inclusive approach, to extend a welcome to all who reflect on group membership. Reflect upon what commemorations are designed to achieve Ensure inclusiveness. Representatives of key constituencies should be involved in planning and participating in commemoration efforts Underpin with fundamental values, including human rights principles such as truth, justice, and equality Historical accuracy

Transcend the collective Right intention Legitimate authority

Right intention Exit circular narratives

addresses. In one speech, he argued for principles that align well with the Ethics of Political Commemoration. Remembrance, he stated, should be historically accurate (Exit Circular Narratives), balance against collective memory (Transcend the Collective), and connect to external, sociological, and transnational history (Assert Moral Autonomy). In addition, he suggested that commemoration should exhibit “narrative hospitality” to other perspectives, a term adapted from Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney. Narrative hospitality relates to the goal of making peace possible by accommodating the other. While Higgins has said that there is a need for “ethics of commemoration,” an exact framework is difficult to pin down between approximately two dozen speeches and a series of events of Machnahm, a Gaelic word that “encapsulates meditation, reflection, consideration and thought.”23 A more structured framework thus might be helpful. The considerations of Mallinder, O’Callaghan, and Higgins underline how relevant a framework for ethical remembrance can be. The question of commemoration in Ireland had political urgency, as some worried whether the decade of centenaries could raise ghosts to haunt the Good Friday Agreement that had ended The Troubles. Intuitive Response in the Classroom People gravitate to considerations similar to the paradigm when reflecting on how they want remembrance to be conducted. Asked to adapt the Just War Theory in an informal class experiment, students identified four criteria from Ius ad Bellum as relevant, often with detailed explanations. One

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student suggested that “last resort” could also be used in Ius ad Memoriam. What is specific to trauma, her argument went, is that it leaves only commemoration as a way of connecting to the people one has lost. For Ius in Memoria, the coverage was less consistent. However, students came up with criteria such as “protection of the affected” and “individualising grief and commemoration,” which could be linked with the criterion Transcend the Collective; “no undue influencing of society” or “what kind of history is being transmitted,” which correspond with Exit Circular Narratives; “the relevance for the present” and “impact on the individual,” which loosely connects to the Assert Moral Authority; and with “choosing proper location,” which in part points towards Contained Unfathomability. Several students mentioned “proportionality” as a desirable criterion (“neither too much nor too little” and “could negative consequences outweigh the positives?”), underscoring that the notion of the right ratio, central to Aristotle’s thoughts on judgement, could be explored in more detail. The results come from a seminar with philosophy students at Bamberg University, as a during-the-week take-home task that students seem to have done in less than an hour. Future research could test whether a broader effort of deliberation would yield similar results and a large degree of consensus.

Corresponding to Instances of Remembrance The framework corresponds to the kinds of commemoration that many find laudable, provides a richer vocabulary to describe both positive and negative aspects of remembrance, identifies gaps and thus can also generate recommendations for improvement.

The Aurora Prize, a central thread in this book, illustrates one example of excellent commemoration that can be depicted in detail through the Ethics of Political Commemoration framework. The Aurora Prize demonstrates that apt commemoration results when “[f]undamental decisions [… are] made mostly on the basis of an open, non-hierarchical pluralistic discussion with survivors, scholars, educators, lobbyists, and committed social groups,” as the International Memorial Museums Charter recommends for remembrance. In other writing, we have applied the framework to a range of political commemoration. This section will draw out three such examples—Stalin’s Museum in Georgia, Yerevan’s Cascade Memorial, and Tito’s Luxury Island.

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Reconceptualising Stalin’s Museum For the Stalin Museum in Georgia, the Ethics of Political Commemoration shows a way forward after the debate on what to do with commemoration in the Soviet leader’s birthplace has remained stuck for many years.24 There needs to be a broader debate in Georgia on what the intention for the museum should be and how that relates to the vision that Georgian society has for its future. This debate should address residual identification with authoritarianism. The process of reconceptualising Stalin’s legacy requires legitimate authority. As the Irish example illustrates, engagement by Georgia’s president could assist. The presidential office otherwise has a limited remit. A commission to develop ideas should include artists, philosophers, and writers, such as Nino Haratischwili, whose magisterial Eighth Life has traced the dislocations of “a century which cheated and betrayed all who hoped.” To be entirely legitimate, the commission should include representatives of groups that remain politically marginalised now and who have a stake in the lessons of citizenship that are rehearsed in this building. An updated museum may want to avoid the style of the Museum of Soviet Occupation in Tbilisi, which does little to foster introspection. While that museum showcases individual victims and emphasises the scale of the horrors, it shifts responsibility to an external occupier. Other ideas to foster the moral autonomy of those who visit, from schoolchildren to pensioners, include a kind of Gori Biennale—a Caucasian documenta of sorts—to establish continued engagement. Understandably, the residents of Gori want to retain a sense of pride. By reframing their city as a location of a conversation that is possible, in that way, only right there, some of the resistance to change could be sidestepped. Transformation of the location may have a higher chance of success than trying to eradicate or remove Stalin’s traces. Giving Authority to Yerevan’s Cascade Memorial The Ethics of Political Commemoration can help to reconceptualise Armenia’s commemoration of its victims of Stalinist and Soviet repression.25 With the Cascade Memorial, a remarkable concrete memorial bunker at the top of Yerevan’s landmark Cascade staircase, the country already has a unique location, contained and unfathomable. A small group of activists, led in part by the researcher Gayane Shagoyan, organise moving

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events. The remembrance, however, lacks authority as it garners limited attention. The remembrance could gather more engagement by emphasising the names of individual victims even more, including an automated system in which names need to be read to gain access to the Cascade Memorial, as a kind of rollcall of the thousands that were killed in the purges of the 1930s, and with particular reference to the poet Yeghishe Charents, who also perished in a Soviet prison in 1937. Other changes could connect to June 14, the date on which the victims of repression are remembered in Armenia, including using that date to shift a statue of Alexander Tamanyan, the city’s chief architect, to Yerevan’s central square that stands empty since Lenin’s statue was removed. Bringing the creator of Yerevan’s design to the symbolic heart of the capital would fill a void and certainly be a figure that better stands for a forward-­looking recreation of a society than, say, a monarch of thousands of years ago. The Anachronistic Museum on Tito’s Luxury Island If a democracy hosts a museum designed to flatter a dictator’s legacy, should we be concerned? The Ethics of Political Commemoration answers that question for a museum in Croatia that seeks to honour the late Yugoslav Communist ruler Josip Tito.26 Situated on the luxury island of Brijuni—a famous suit manufacturer chose its Italian name as its brand— the museum showcases Tito’s presence with approximately 200 photos. At first glance, the intention of the museum is not convincing. As one reviewer on TripAdvisor puts it, from “the exhibit, you get the impression that Tito was the most awesome dictator ever.” Yet a closer look also shows that the authoritarian narrative is threadbare. As it appears from dozens of TripAdvisor reviews, most of its visitors realise that something here is not quite right. The stuffed baby giraffes on the ground floor of the museum, a sinister picture of Tito with a hunting rifle, dead game, and the caption that Tito was “constantly taking care of the animals” are a disturbing demonstration of his ability to inflict violence without accountability. Again, the Ethics of Political Commemoration assists in generating ideas. For example, one could challenge the halcyon narrative on this Adriatic island if there was an explicit reference to Goli Otok, a prison island not far away on which thousands were imprisoned and hundreds

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died in the early years of communist Yugoslavia. Such a reference would be a powerful reminder that Tito was not just a debonair man in a white suit and provide a more complete picture of the legacy of authoritarian rule without needing to remove the exhibit, which, as one reviewer put it, can “interest those nostalgic for a world that is to be forgotten.” The case of Brijuni also illustrates that the Ethics of Political Commemoration can make places more intelligible. The reviews, usually just snippets, make more sense if put into the structured context of a larger framework. Assembled into a larger frame, these snippets—or shards—can render a rich and nuanced mosaic with contributions from around the world. Ultimately, this makes it possible to put a larger moral picture together. Bolnisi, W.G. Sebald, and More These are just three examples. (We omitted a discussion of Babyn Yar as Ukraine currently is at war.) Other publications have explored how the Bolnisi Museum in Georgia works in showcasing “the longest journey” from the first hominids outside Africa to more contemporary dislocations.27 This is a landmark museum and showcases that Georgia can present inspiring visions of commemoration that connect to citizenship. Sarah Slye has analysed Circassian remembrance with the framework also. An upcoming publication will examine how W.G.  Sebald, one of Germany’s best-known authors focused on “literature as restitution” (as per his last speech, also published in the New  Yorker), himself is commemorated in his birthplace of Wertach, in the Allgäu.28 With reference to the framework, the publication will argue that the design of tracking Sebald’s own homecoming story from Il Ritorno in Patria succeeds in engaging walkers in reflection and in rendering his ambivalence about “Heimat.” There are, however, shortcomings. The walk still lacks authority and omits emigration and immigration as a core theme and cause. Visitors cannot inscribe themselves and their own experience—suggesting that there should be more art to enliven the walk. Also in the German context, as previously mentioned, the building designed for Hermann Göring’s Nazi Luftwaffe, currently housing the German Ministry of Finance, can be read through the framework.29 That building and its layerings include a socialist mural and a commemorative counterpoint. These illustrate a dialectical juxtaposition reminiscent of Aufhebung, in the three meanings which the philosopher Georg Friedrich

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von Hegel had put forward: in preserving contradictory impulses; in resolving an immediate collision; and in elevating or transcending to a higher level of understanding—and thereby rendering, also by our criteria, this building safe for a democratic institution to inhabit.

Positioned Between Pacifists and Crusaders The Ethics of Political Commemoration offers a path between the pacifist view that there should be no attempt to compel others and the “anything goes” of revolutionary fervour or Realpolitik.

The Ethics of Political Commemoration has some of the same limitations as the Just War tradition. Like the Just War tradition, the Ethics of Political Commemoration seeks to weigh merit and restraint and ultimately to redirect. This puts the Ethics of Political Commemoration between two established positions. On one side, pacifists maximise restraint and tend to be sceptical of most claims to merit. They maintain that we have to renounce force. On the other side, crusaders and revolutionaries prioritise merit above all else.30 The end justifies the means. Restraint is relegated to instrumental and tactical considerations rather than being a guiding principle. In the context of commemoration, both pacifists and crusaders have a plausible case to make. Their positions express real preferences and can also be internally consistent. However, their appeal depends on a more foundational perspective of individuals, society, and the world. Pacifism and the Argument for Maximal Restraint Pacifism argues that we should not try to coerce or compel others. Similarly, one can argue that history should not be instrumentalised to make arguments directed against others. Along those lines, the journalist Andrew North proposed in a headline that “We would all be better off if politicians left history alone,” adding that “teaching the past is best left to professionals.”31 The former Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja launched the organisation, Historians without Borders in 2016 to “support efforts to identify the abuse of history in fostering and sustaining conflicts.”32 Saying that commemoration should on principle not be political can be a plausible position. Some “pacts of forgetting” may have merit. We are

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often told that an unexamined past will come back to haunt. Yet it is unclear whether that is true. There are cases in which forgetting or at least benign neglect seem morally plausible. What, after all, are Germans to do with the experience of civilians being bombed in the Second World War? The German writer W.G.  Sebald, an unimpeachable commemorator, had taken his writer colleagues to task for how little they had to say about this formative experience.33 Notably, the best-known novel on the issue remains Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, written from the perspective of an American PoW. Other than far-right groups, most Germans show little interest in looking back at all the destruction. Those that bring up the experience of the bombings are viewed askance. At least in this instance, the pacifist position—let sleeping issues lie— seems intuitively plausible. Similar considerations apply elsewhere. For example, should Spain set aside its Pacto del Olvido? Here, too, an argument can be made for a pact of forgetting and a pragmatic pacifism. Perhaps the prospects of raising ghosts to walk are too ominous and chances of success too slim. As a criticism of international peacebuilding, one of the authors has consistently been told by those living in conflict that outsiders constantly try to identify social cleavages and to describe their importance and in doing so stop those in conflict from finding peace. Purposefully gathering, say, young Armenians and Azerbaijanis to discuss their past and “reconcile” can get them to discover the depth of their differences. The appeal to put the past behind us keeps being made.34 In talking about his proposal for Irish Home Rule, Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1886 spoke about the “blessed oblivion of the past” to help achieve “happiness, prosperity, and peace” for Ireland after previous injustices.35 Winston Churchill invoked Gladstone’s wording on oblivion in a speech in Zurich in 1946. The guilty had to be held to account, and Germany had to be deprived of the ability to initiate another aggressive war. But once that was ascertained, it was time to set the memory of trauma aside. In Churchill’swords: We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years to come hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past. If Europe is to be saved from infinite misery, and indeed from final doom, there must be this act of faith in the European family, this act of oblivion against all crimes and follies of the past.36

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Pacifism, as has often been pointed out, carries a contradiction. In refusing violence, pacifism can surrender to the violent. Similarly, refusing to engage with the past may leave it to those entrepreneurs that seek to mobilise remembrance for their political ends. Instead of quietism, we ought to provide attractive moderate alternatives to exclusive and excluding narratives. The past cannot necessarily be appeased. And yet, pacifism is likely to remain a principled position in opposition to a more compromising, and sometimes compromised, framework of justification. Ends Justifies the Means: Revolutionary and Realist Worldviews Another critique of Just War Theory rejects most forms of restraint. Realists and revolutionaries justify their actions through the urgency of their cause. Restraint is primarily a matter of expediency. From both realist and revolutionary perspectives, force is a means of achieving peace through victory rather than accommodation. This type of thinking has its place. Causes can be pressing, and some injustices are hard to bear. Absolutist thinking is also recognisable in memory wars, in which people are driven by fervour for their cause. To them, strictures of restraint are veiled attempts to keep perpetrators in power, prevent accountability, and foil justice. That critique can seem valid, especially when nothing of substance is done to address the concerns of those who have suffered. Though commitment can be laudable, devotion to a cause carries risks of righteousness and zealotry. The crusades are an extreme but exemplary case. Venturing forth to invade other lands, crusaders stand in at least some contrast with the scholars in monasteries and universities that were developing Just War Theory at home. (Acquinas was born in 1225, a little more than ten years after one of the big children’s crusades in which hundreds or thousands perished. A Children’s Crusade is also the subtitle to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5.) Another critique is that of the perspective of Realpolitik. The realist sees restraint as an insincere dressing of select windows. Better acknowledge the hard reality, the argument goes, and focus on winning. Realists can apply such a pessimistic lens to conflicts and to attempts to mobilise history. Political sides will be self-serving and, so the argument goes, one should win the battle however possible. Frameworks can, of course, be used for motivated reasoning. In an oft-­ quoted critique, the historian A.J.P.  Taylor, for example, described the attempt to pursue a just war as “a pursuit as elusive as that of the Holy

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Grail. For it is almost universally true that in war each side thinks itself in the right, and there is no arbiter except victory to decide between them.”37 Leaving aside that few believe themselves in possession of the Holy Grail, Taylor’s critique primarily highlights that any framework of moral enquiry can be manipulated. The objection is an argument against partisan use rather than against reasoning itself. Indeed, early modern thinkers such as Francisco de Vitoria acknowledged that both sides might believe themselves to have just cause, making adherence to Ius in Bello all the more critical.38 Both Sides can Win in Commemoration Some of the critiques of Just War Theory are less stinging when applied to the Ethics of Political Commemoration. The Ethics of Political Commemoration is more optimistic than Just War Theory. In commemoration, a genuine synthesis without casualties is possible. At its best, both sides can win. Just War Theory, at its best, can stop people from starting wars by giving good arguments against its initiation. Yet once there is a resort to arms, it offers only mitigation in a context where people are still getting killed. By contrast, the Ethics of Political Commemoration can be constructive and provide a synthesis. Former enemies can commemorate together. For this purpose, the framework gives practical guidance, next to allowing a structured critique, to meaningfully identify exemplary approaches, capture multiple dimensions of ethical conduct, and set public expectations.

The Ethics of Political Commemoration as a Paradigm The Ethics of Political Commemoration is a new paradigm that addresses and overcomes a crisis in current debates on the use and misuse of memory.

The Ethics of Political Commemoration can be understood as a paradigm, in the sense of the term put forward by Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions.39 New paradigms, at their best, address and overcome a crisis in the current debate. This crisis is evident and so far abuses of commemoration are critiqued mostly from an “unprincipled eclecticism,” to borrow a phrase from MacIntyre.40 This chapter hopefully demonstrates that the paradigm is grounded in various ways.

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New paradigms can bring a more coherent order to empirical observation, as in the Copernican revolution. The trajectories, the ellipses, and various gravitational pulls are integrated into an account with fewer internal contradictions. In this way, a new paradigm can add illumination even if it does not discover any new planets. Any such improved account will still have its flaws and will over time be improved further, updated, or even revised, but still presents marked progress over a state of inchoate contradiction. To invoke Copernicus may suggest that we are reaching for the stars. Yet as we have argued throughout, the suggestion is rather pedestrian: the main idea is to transfer a working paradigm to questions of remembrance. The novelty is in the transfer, rather than in a shift. Still, like with a new paradigm, old debates can appear in a new light.

Notes 1. For a comprehensive argument in favour of tradition as a mode of moral enquiry, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/200/monograph/book/48319. 2. For an overview on current debates, see Seth Lazar, ‘War’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2020 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2020/entries/war/ 3. This definition of politics as resting in the friend-foe distinction is most starkly put forward by Carl Schmitt, but for a recent discussion, see also Cees van der Eijk, The Essence of Politics, 2018, https://www.aup.nl/en/ book/9789463727211/the-­essence-­of-­politics 4. Charles Leslie Stevenson, ‘The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms’, Mind 46, no. 181 (1937): 14–31. 5. Michael Walzer, ‘The Triumph of Just War Theory (and the Dangers of Success)’, Social Research 69, no. 4 (2002): 936. 6. See Eric De Brabandere, ‘The Concept of Jus Post Bellum in International Law’, in Jus Post Bellum, ed. Carsten Stahn, Jennifer S. Easterday, and Jens Iverson (Oxford University Press, 2014), 124–41, https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685899.003.0008 7. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Just War Theory: The Only Winner Across Four Grim Conflicts’, Opinio Juris, 27 June 2022, https://opiniojuris.org/2022/ 06/27/just-­war-­theory-­the-­only-­winner-­across-­four-­grim-­conflicts/

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8. Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (Henry Holt and Company, 1911). p. 61. 9. Andrea Keller, ‘Cicero: Just War in Classical Antiquity’, in Cicero: Just War in Classical Antiquity (De Gruyter, 2012), 9–30, https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110291926.9 10. See ‘Religion and Humanitarian Principles’, Religion and Humanitarian Principles, 22 February 2023, https://blogs.icrc.org/religion-­human itarianprinciples/ 11. Ping-cheung Lo, ‘The “Art of War” Corpus and Chinese Just War Ethics Past and Present’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 40, no. 3 (2012): 404–46. 12. Alasdair C.  MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 13. Adam Kirsch, ‘The Classicist Who Killed Homer’, The New Yorker, 7 June 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/the-­ classicist-­who-­killed-­homer 14. ‘John Rawls on Just War’, Bill Soderberg, Philosopher at Large (blog), 1 December 2015, https://billsoderberg.com/bills-­talks/john-­rawls-­on-­ just-­war/ 15. ‘On the Laws (De Legibus) | Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism’, accessed 26 February 2023, http://www.nlnrac.org/ classical/cicero/documents/de-­legibus 16. ‘The Confessions of Saint Augustine, by Saint Augustine’, accessed 26 February 2023, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3296/3296-­h/3296-­ h.htm 17. Michael Rothberg, ‘From Gaza To Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory’, Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–48. 18. Timothy Snyder, ‘Commemorative Causality’, Modernism/Modernity 20, no. 1 (2013): 77–93, https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2013.0026 19. See ‘Guidelines for International Discourse on History and Memory’, ENRS, accessed 26 February 2023, https://enrs.eu/guidelines 20. ‘International Memorial Museums Charter’, IHRA, 10 December 2022, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-­ definitions-­charters/international-­memorial-­museums-­charter 21. The principled critique of empathy by Paul Bloom can in some ways be taken as a plea for a larger framework of ethical consideration. 22. ‘Professor Louise Mallinder and Dr. Margaret O’Callaghan: The Ethics of Commemorative Practices’, Royal Irish Academy, 31 March 2015, https://www.ria.ie/news/ethical-­p olitical-­l egal-­a nd-­p hilosophical-­ studies-­committee-­opinion-­series-­ethics-­initiative

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23. Office of the President of Ireland, ‘Diary President Hosts Machnamh 100 Event’, accessed 26 February 2023, https://president.ie/index.php/en/ diary/details/president-­hosts-­machnamh-­100-­event/video 24. Gutbrod, ‘The Ethics of Political Commemoration: The Stalin Museum and Thorny Legacies in the Post-Soviet Space—PONARS Eurasia’. 25. Forthcoming publication, Gutbrod. 26. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Brijuni or Brioni: Reviewing Tito’s Luxury Island’, Baltic Worlds, 18 October 2022, https://balticworlds.com/brijuni-­or-­brioni-­ reviewing-­titos-­luxury-­island/ 27. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Bolnisi Museum—the Longest Human Journey’, OC Media, 1 August 2022, https://oc-­media.org/features/bolnisi-­museum-­ the-­longest-­human-­journey/ 28. W. G. Sebald, ‘An Attempt at Restitution’, The New Yorker, 12 December 2004, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/20/an-­ attempt-­at-­restitution 29. Jaeger Zolling, Peter Falk, ‘Das Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus’ (Berlin: Bundesministerium für Finanzen, 2019). 30. LeRoy Walters, ‘The Just War and the Crusade: Antitheses or Analogies?’, The Monist 57, no. 4 (1 November 1973): 584–94, https://doi. org/10.5840/monist197357424 31. Andrew North, ‘We Would All Be Better off If Politicians Left History Alone’, Nikkei Asia, 5 September 2022, https://asia.nikkei.com/ Opinion/We-­would-­all-­be-­better-­off-­if-­politicians-­left-­history-­alone 32. Pers Anders Rudling, ‘Institutes of Trauma Re-Production in a Borderland: Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania’, in Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past A Comparative Study on Memory Management in the Region (Stockholm: Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, CBEES, 2020), 10. 33. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell, 1st edition (New York: Random House, 2003). The German title of the essay is “Air War and Literature”. 34. Judith Pollmann, ‘Acts of Oblivion’, in Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Judith Pollmann (Oxford University Press, 2017), 0, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198797555.003.0007 35. ‘The Case for Home Rule’, accessed 26 February 2023, https://celt.ucc. ie/published/E900030/text001.html 36. ‘Address given by Winston Churchill (Zurich, 19 September 1946)’, (CVCE.EU by UNI.LU, 6 May 2014), https://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/ address_given_by_winston_churchill_zurich_19_september_1946-­ en-­7dc5a4cc-­4453-­4c2a-­b130-­b534b7d76ebd.html

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37. A.  J. P.  Taylor, review of War and Peace, by Geoffrey Best and Martin Caedel, London Review of Books, 2 October 1980, https://www.lrb.co. uk/the-­paper/v02/n19/a.j.p.-­taylor/war-­and-­peace 38. Ping-cheung Lo, ‘The “Art of War” Corpus and Chinese Just War Ethics Past and Present’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 40, no. 3 (2012): 404–46, p. 435. 39. Thomas S.  Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 40. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. p. 87.

CHAPTER 5

Commemorating for Peace

Abstract  The Ethics of Political Commemoration draws on the learning of conflict transformation practitioners, who have as a key task supporting those in conflict to address past grievances and injustices in a positive manner—to face the past without damaging the future. The frameworks’ criteria fill a “commemoration gap” by focusing on the role of political actions in addressing the past, rather than legal justice or social reconciliation efforts, and by applying an ethical lens to the pursuit of peace. The framework engages directly with the emotional content of conflict so that groups that have experienced mass suffering are more resilient to the mobilisation of the past as a rationale for violence. The framework also redirects attention from group responsibility, towards the power of individual action, and emphasises the responsibility of leaders to internalise the goal of building a better peace when making decisions on commemoration. It demonstrates the power of the framework as a conflict transformation tool through case studies from Libya, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and Ireland. Finally, it confronts the challenge of agreeing on commemoration with those who may on the surface have very different values. Keywords  Conflict transformation • Peace and justice • Identity and violence • Transformational leadership • Women’s rights

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Gutbrod, D. Wood, Ethics of Political Commemoration, Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7_5

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The Ethics of Political Commemoration is grounded in conflict transformation practice, but also fills a “commemoration gap” that could help efforts to build peace.

This chapter provides a resource to peace practitioners interested in commemoration while offering readers from other disciplines an insight into how a philosophical framework can be applied “on the ground.” It demonstrates that the Ethics of Political Commemoration aligns with established approaches to transforming conflict but is also an additional resource for those working for peace. The Ethics of Political Commemoration assist the emotional engagement of people experiencing conflict. By giving attention to moral autonomy, the framework encourages people to avoid calls to violence irrespective of the abuse they have suffered. Overall, the criteria lead to remembrance that tells complex stories, rather than promoting good and evil mythologies. They also encourage transformational leadership, so that influential figures work across conflict divides to collectively plan for remembrance that also provides a vision for a shared future. The framework engenders remembrance that sculpts with time, giving room for past trauma in visions of the future. It provides an entry point for informal dialogue on competing memories and their intertwined justice demand when such issues are not addressed in formal peace negotiations. The Ethics of Political Commemoration can guide the artistic processes that are themselves a form of remembrance and that can increase public and political appetite for agreements on justice. It can also be used to navigate competing demands on what should be remembered, either within national reconciliation processes or more locally. The Ethics of Political Commemoration does not focus on the resolution of individual memory disputes but looks to strengthen the infrastructure that helps manage such disputes, as well as broader conflict issues. Remembrance provides an opportunity for relationship-building and collective action among civil society leaders to record and debate the past, especially when it is in political leaders’ interests to misuse memory. The framework can be used as an additional way of building the inclusive institutions essential for social cohesion, by bringing officials and community representatives together to plan for remembrance. It also provides an avenue for accommodating worldview differences through the exploration of memory and commemoration among those with very different ideas of how a society should function.

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The Emotional Content of Conflict Conflict transformation increases humans’ resilience to calls to violence, emphasising the role of complex storytelling and good leadership.

Conflict is transformed when people individually resist calls to violence, irrespective of the trauma they have faced. Conflict is, in part, an emotional construct and requires emotional engagement as well as a logical resolution. Resilience to calls to violence, the “evil cradling” in every human, is helped when people think in complex terms about conflict, rather than latching on to simple stories of heroes and villains. Leaders have a particular responsibility to encourage complex stories and to encourage each individual to take better responsibility for their actions. The Ethics of Political Commemoration provides a model for complex storytelling about the past in remembrance and emphasises the role of leaders in such storytelling. A Hostage to Conflict in Lebanon Conflict has an emotional shape that is difficult to convey in prose and to resolve through logic. In Chap. 3, we described this emotional shape as a structural change that occurs when a people’s experiences of trauma and injustice disrupt its moral compass, enabling inhuman treatment of another. The Belfast poet Brian Keenan more poignantly portrays the potential for this change as “an evil cradling.”1 Keenan experienced inhuman treatment first-hand. He was kidnapped by the “Islamic Jihad Organisation” (Ḥarakat al-Jihād al-'Islāmiyy), in Beirut in 1986, during Lebanon’s civil war, and was held for over four years. During his captivity, Keenan was not just constrained physically, chained for long periods in cramped positions, but also tied to the swing of his captors’ moods. In his memoirs, Keenan writes of how his captors would treat him politely during the day and beat him during the night, often covering their faces and assuming different personas as a way of distancing themselves from the abuse. His memoir is an expression of his determination not to cradle evil inside himself, in the same way that his captors had cradled their own evil, providing a foundation for violent acts towards him. Every human with trauma can become a hostage to conflict.

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In Keenan’s city, Belfast, the Orange marches have an emotional shape that is not easily negotiated. The marches, organised by the Orange Order and other Protestant groups, are an annual commemoration of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, a key event in securing the protestant presence in Ireland. The routes are fixed in history while the demography around them has changed, meaning that the marches pass through some areas that are now predominantly Catholic, meeting counter-protests by Catholic residents. While less commented on, Republican groups also have a history of marches. Each year, the marches remind Belfast’s residents of the city’s divide and heighten tensions between Protestants and Catholics. The marches fail to meet the Ethics of Political Commemoration’s criteria. They do not appear to have a good intent to build a better peace and do not help exit circular narratives between Protestants and Catholics. Why not, at the least, change the Orange marches’ routes so that they do not pass through Catholic areas? A former senior Northern Irish police officer explained to the authors that “Every inch counts. Every inch is charged with meaning. This is about contested space. It’s a mistake to make logical arguments because this is not about logic. It is about their very existence.”2 Peace practitioners are often good at logical analysis of conflict but can struggle to centre its human emotional experience. The logic of peace programmes can place demands on individuals in conflict on how they “should” think and act. At its best, when peace work takes a transformative approach, it engages with the emotional content of conflict. What could this example mean for the marches in Belfast? Each year the police work with Protestant and Catholic leaders to prepare for the marches and to manage the tensions created by them. This engagement focuses on the prosaic issues of routes and policing presence. It does not, however, engage with the emotion of the marches or help both communities scrutinise the impact of their remembrance on peace. The framework could be used to organise such collective scrutiny that does not look to undermine the reasons for marches but redirect their commemorative aspect. This requires a moral imagination by those involved, to exit set patterns of behaviour. Keenan himself underscored the importance of imagination in a conference speech in 2009 (a key date for policing and peace, as we will see below): “I’m not a historian, I’m not a politician, I’m not an expert of demographics … What we have in Northern Ireland now is a

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badly hobbled together thing … The issue is not about a united Ireland. It’s about imagination.”3 Employing one’s imagination can prevent an “evil cradling” and interrupt the cycle of vengeance. The personal story of a Libyan doctor provides an example of moral imagination. During a late-night search for food across the post-war capital in Tripoli in 2020, negotiating various checkpoints established by revolutionary armed groups, a Libyan doctor described to one of the authors his struggle to maintain his moral autonomy. The doctor’s father was a high-ranking security official during the Qaddafi period. Many years after the end of the fighting, the doctor was kidnapped by revolution-aligned armed groups, detained for months, tortured, and only ultimately released when his family paid a significant ransom. The doctor learned that his neighbour since childhood organised the kidnapping. The doctor’s father offered to arrange for the neighbour to be killed, as the only way to gain justice, given the collapse of the police and judiciary in post-revolution Libya. The Libyan doctor refused. He wanted: to be able to look at myself in the mirror every day. To look at my children and know that I am raising them well, in a godly house. I want there to be police and justice, and I want to help make them. I don’t want to be the reason why my country fails.4

He decided to make a statement about his future self, and that of his family, by not taking violent revenge. This did not mean he forgave, but rather, he imagined what he wanted his country’s future to be like. One twist to “asserting moral autonomy” may be that it is easier to do so when one imagines one’s responsibility to others, especially future generations. Identity and Violence when Societies Rupture Amartya Sen, reflecting on the communal violence that erupted with the partition of British-occupied India, argued that “identity can also kill— and kill with abandon.”5 Anger permeates Sen’s writing at the ease with which former neighbours were willing to hurt each other, simply because of their status as “Hindu,” “Muslim,” or “Sikh.” One way of reading his frustration is that a narrow focus on such labels is a refusal to see the many other aspects that connect us. From this flows the proposal that peace is

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built by overcoming simple descriptions of people and their identities and through individual decisions not to cradle evil. Central to leading a human life, therefore, are the responsibilities of choice and reasoning. In contrast, violence is promoted by the cultivation of a sense of inevitability about some allegedly unique—often belligerent—identity that we are supposed to have and which apparently makes extensive demands on us (sometimes of a most disagreeable kind). The imposition of an allegedly unique identity is often a crucial component of the “martial art” of fomenting sectarian confrontation.6

The relationship between memory and the formation and maintenance of group identity is well charted. Collective stories help define who can claim membership of a people and who constitutes an external threat to it.7 A shared identity can solidify around a sense of “chosenness” that views past traumas (or glories) as a defining feature that gives it meaning in the world.8 In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, a character whose birth is timed to coincide with India’s independence, describes his identity as “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.” An identity formed around “everything done-to-me” places people in opposition to others. The division of people into distinct identities is the beginning of conflict—with people viewing themselves to be different and to have competing interests. A key element of radicalisation towards the kind of violence described by Sen is the removal of complex thinking—to see oneself and the other in simple terms. Simple thinking encourages a three-step process of deindividuation, demonisation, and dehumanisation. Firstly, an individual of another people is viewed as part of a collective, rather than a distinct person. Deindividuation is often followed by demonisation, with the collective viewed as immoral and unworthy of ethical treatment. This provides the ground for dehumanisation and the removal of the social restraints that would otherwise prohibit mistreatment of individual humans—the perception that “it’s ok to harm her, because she is less than human, because of what her group did to us.”9 When a people’s identity is solidified by historical traumas, such events can become as Volkan intoned “the horrors of the past that cast shadows onto the future.”10 How we describe such horrors in stories about the past in part determines how a conflict will develop.

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Research into the psychology of violent extremism suggests that it is useful to encourage “integrative complexity” when individuals are at risk of radicalisation.11 People that demonstrate low levels of integrative ­complexity “can be drawn to easy, black-and-white answers that seem to offer simplicity, clarity, and certainty,” as they “offer a sense of community and belonging and helps people make sense of the world.”12 Individuals exhibiting low integrative complexity are more easily swayed by extremist narratives and are more likely to be prompted to condone violence. Psychological interventions with those vulnerable to extremism are a slow process of exposing people to different and more complex stories—in the manner described in the criteria of Transcending the Collective and Exiting Circular Narratives. A Responsibility to Lead a Revolution Conflicts create leaders, and leaders create conflict. While such a summary is a simplification, it underscores why the Ethics of Political Comme­ moration addresses the use and misuse of memory by those in leadership positions. Political leaders have a responsibility to approach commemoration in the same way (it would be hoped) as they approach war—carefully, with an appreciation of its destructive potential and with the aim of building a ­better peace. Leaders in conflict are humans, exposed to the same emotional ­resonance as others. Ethical leaders recognise the need to grow and learn in their role. This learning process is especially visible among those steering political transitions, such as in Libya following the overthrow of Qaddafi’s government. The years 2012–2014 saw an explosion of activity among Libya’s new ruling class as they attempted to define a coherent vision and values for the reborn country. In one gathering in Misrata, in 2013, the city’s leaders reflected on figures from history and compared them with the values they would want to see in Libya.13 Misrata’s leaders, as we have seen in Chap. 3, honed their skills during the violence of the revolution, rallying people to defend their city, reinforcing their community’s resilience, and eventually prosecuting a successful military campaign to defeat Qaddafi’s armed forces. For many, these actions were driven by a strong sense of purpose to build a better Libya, unencumbered by Qaddafi’s authoritarianism. Their experience during the uprising, however, contributed to a preference for “strong” figures with an ability to control and coerce the population. For example,

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they positively assessed the former Italian leader Benito Mussolini, who oversaw a period of the Italian occupation of Libya. The gathered Misratans argued that they had the duty and right to set the path for the new Libya because of their role in the revolution, even if it meant coercing those on the losing side. The discussion included South Africa’s Ambassador to Libya, Mohamed Dangor. Ambassador Dangor was part of the African National Congress liberation struggle in his home country, was held prisoner by the Apartheid Regime, and was part of the wider leadership group that had to work out how to reforge relationships between the country’s divided peoples. His response was to argue that “Winning has no purpose if you create a future you are not proud of. How you lead matters.” His intervention was ­followed by a younger military commander who had overseen Misratan forces deployed to the oil production areas in the South of Libya. He argued for a change in Misrata’s collective approach, as he thought it was fracturing social relations in the country: “You need to understand. I have looked into their eyes, and they hate us.”14 He was not well educated and spoke in strong terms but was intent on modelling the values he desired for his country. He also understood, to come back to Lederach, that Misrata exists in a web with other Libyan peoples and that without them the web would break. “Transformational leaders” model good values, inspiring a sense of purpose in society, and the individual responsibility of each person not to let evil begin to nest within themselves.15 The purpose of a transformational leader is to change society for the better, not just manage its day-to-­ day functioning. Misrata’s leaders had a good intent to make a better future for their community and the whole country. They had a just cause, to overcome the authoritarianism of the Qaddafi period. They had some aspects of legitimate authority, as leading representatives of their community and the revolutionary cause. But their authority was shared with the leaders of those on the losing side, and history has since proved that they did not have a reasonable chance of success. The responsibility to model transformational leadership extends to commemoration. The Ethics of Political Commemoration can help peacemakers facilitate visioning processes that bring diverse leaders together.16 Such visioning should include a discussion of how the past is remembered and communicated, to engender wide political and social support.

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Multi-Temporal Focus: Justice for the Past and Peace in the Future Conflict transformation helps people accommodate competing instincts for justice and peace. It also accommodates diverging justice and commemoration demands.

Conflict is transformed when people are collectively able to address the past in a manner that helps forge more constructive relationships in the present and more peaceful societies in the future. This entails, as argued by Lederach, a moral imagination rooted in the challenges of the real world, and the pain and trauma of recent and remembered violence, yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist.17 Making peace is a creative endeavour, something akin to “sculpting with time,” by organising the individual pieces of the past, including its vivid suffering, into a new more hopeful shape that resonates with all the people that look at it.18 The Ethics of Political Commemoration provides a model for sculpting with time. It accommodates the impulses for justice for the past and peace in the future. It also absorbs the contrasting justice and commemoration demands of people in conflict. Integrating Peace and Justice in Syria Rajaa Altalli’s father, a pro-democracy activist, was detained in 1992 by the security forces of Syria’s al-Assad Government and held for nine years. During the first year of his detention, Rajaa had no contact with her father, and the family did not know if he was alive. This pattern of oppression affected many families following the Ba’ath Party’s coup in 1963, with detentions mostly conducted under the State Emergency Law. Although the Law was revoked in 2011, the Syrian Civil War continued the established pattern of oppression, as Syrian civilians are subjected to killings, torture, detentions, bombing, armed sieges, and the erasure of a range of civil rights. Her commitment to Syria’s better future creates an internal conflict for Rajaa Altalli and civil society leaders like her. How is it possible to gain justice for histories of atrocities, while still negotiating a cessation of the violence and a democratic transition with the very people responsible for them? Rajaa Altalli told the authors, “I’ve tried to find personal peace and

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personal justice. During my work, I came across many similar personal stories from other Syrians. It helps to know what other injustices are happening, to fight the bigger fight. It’s not enough to have peace. We need both peace and justice on a personal and national level.”19 Many in the opposition movement have predicated their involvement in the peace process on the condition that officials in the Al-Assad Government are barred from the negotiations, are not able to play a role in the country’s future governments, and face legal justice. The Al-Assad Government does not engage constructively in negotiations on these conditions, with the result that the peace process is all but dead. This conditionality extends to international aid, with sanctions designed to neuter the al-Assad Government also impacting the country’s population, as critical services such as the water supply deteriorate. To rebuild Syria would be to condone past injustices, the argument goes. In the meantime, the war and suffering drag on. Many who work in conflict settings have a narrow focus on either justice, driven by concern for the merit of a cause, or peace, motivated instead by restraint. For Rajaa Altalli, the two need to be integrated. We should not think of a “peace process,” or a “justice process,” but rather an “integrated peace and justice framework.” It also means a willingness to engage with those responsible for the detention of her father and the many atrocities that have afflicted Syrians during the civil war. This willingness to engage with one’s enemies demonstrates the transformational leadership required to build a better future for Syria. For commemoration, this means the integration of peace and justice in the planning of remembrance. It means understanding people’s historical memories and the potential for these memories to drive division and violence dependent on how they are addressed. This integration is the cornerstone of ethical political commemoration and the purpose of the Ius as Memoriam and Ius in Memoria criteria. It looks to sculpt time so that justice and peace are complementary to each other. Competing Justice Demands in Yemen’s Political Negotiations Addressing past grievances is rarely a simple task. While landmark cases of one-sided large-scale abuse often draw attention, most conflicts see abuse from many sides. As discussed in the exploration of the criterion Exiting Circular Narratives, those in conflict can prioritise different events as more

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important and to have a greater requirement for justice. Conflicting j­ ustice demands are not about facts only, they are also about focus and interpretation. This is the challenge facing Yemen, where memory is controlled by militant leaders who push their own foci and interpretations of justice to the detriment of peace. In June 2022, Stockholm hosted the first “Yemen International Forum,” the largest gathering of Yemenis since the National Dialogue Conference of 2013 and 2014.20 The Forum, as described by one of its Yemeni organisers, Farea Al-Muslimi, had the ambitious goal “to reimagine how peace is forged in Yemen, to bring politics back to Yemen, and to reignite the country’s vibrant civic life.”21 It was an attempt to re-assert the role of Yemeni civilians in defining what should be remembered and what deserves justice. To this end, the Forum brought those with different memories and justice demands into contact with each other. At the heart of this endeavour was a relatively unprecedented meeting between political leaders and their victims, as a way for them to assert their own justice needs. The Forum’s approach corresponds to the Ethics of Political Commemoration’s criteria, as its organisers tried to sculpt competing justice demands into a more constructive dialogue. In a preparation session for the Forum, in 2021, Yemeni civil society explored the politics of memory and the opportunities available for integrating justice into the peace process. It was clear that direct discussion in UN-mediated negotiations was near impossible, as it would become another intractable issue, with each side promoting its cause. The internationally recognised government would push a focus on the abuses of Ansar Allah in the period since 2014, when it took over the instruments of government in Sana’a, as part of its narrative that Ansar Allah is a “terrorist organisation.” Ansar Allah would try to direct the discussion towards the abuses of the Ali Abdullah Saleh Government from  1962 when the Republic was formed until 2014 as a way of defending the position that its armed revolt has a just cause. Southern leaders would focus on the neglect and marginalisation of the South since the outbreak of civil war in 1994, as a way of promoting the cause of southern independence. While the justice issues are politicised, they all individually have some merit. The peace process ignores such merit through a sense of restraint— that to open the topic of justice would not help political negotiations because of how the political parties will mobilise justice issues. The

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political parties also avoid accountability for the past, as it could mean their punishment. Yet without a justice process to provide some deterrent, Yemenis continue to suffer multiple abuses, and peace remains distant. The Ethics of Political Commemoration provides a potential entry point to explore justice issues outside a peace process, or when politics means that formal justice mechanisms will take time to agree. It looks to find a way of sculpting with time so that different injustices are considered, without negating any particular cause. The Yemen International Forum provides an example of how this can be done. Peacemakers can explore the potential for dialogue between civilian representatives that have influence over those that make decisions—in the jargon “Track II” representatives, as opposed to the “Track I” participants of political negotiations—on what deserves commemoration (Ius ad Memoriam) and how best to do so (Ius in Memoria). The Forum provided just such an opportunity for “Track II” dialogue between a range of Yemeni leaders. In its open sessions, and many side meetings, conflicting memories and justice needs were raised and discussed as a tentative step towards an integrated approach to justice and peace. The Forum also explored the role of art in reimagining Yemen. Yemeni artists discussed how their work can make people more aware of each other’s experiences of conflict, raise emotional awareness of how people have suffered, with the potential to mobilise political and public support for a formal justice process. Such art is an example of remembrance that exhibits contained unfathomability. Commemoration for the past should be introduced, when possible, into political negotiations between conflict parties. It is not enough to agree to a ceasefire, or a future governance arrangement, if people do not have a way of describing why the fighting started or why the old way of governing was not good enough. When this cannot be done directly in negotiations, Track II formats, such as the Yemen International Forum, provide another opportunity for dialogue on memory and justice. Art can be mobilised in support of dialogue, preparing people to engage constructively with others’ memories and justice needs. A second Forum, in the Hague in June 2023, included Hadi Jumaan, who has worked across Yemen’s frontlines to bury those killed in the fighting—a statement that all deserve commemoration. In 2022, the Aurora Initiative recognised the work of Hadi. His recognition was celebrated across Yemen’s conflict divides, providing a rare moment of unity that demonstrates the impact that positive recognition can have.22

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Conflicts of Commemoration in Libya The uses and abuses of memory intertwine with competing justice demands. When justice demands are in contradiction, politicised commemoration becomes a marketing tool. Internally, justice demands are used to maintain a people’s coherence and cause. Externally, they are used to gather the support of third parties, by attempting to demonstrate the legitimacy of one’s cause—that one is the victim fighting for rights and that the other is in the wrong, or even immoral. In the immediate aftermath of the Libyan uprising, “Libya is One” (Libia Wahida) became a rallying call in national and international gatherings to plan for the country’s future. The country’s new leaders, in invoking a united Libya, persuaded both themselves and their international partners that the revolution’s cause of establishing a new post-Qaddafi society was universally shared. Only immoral supporters of Qaddafi’s authoritarianism would think otherwise. This belief in a united purpose inspired commemoration that was exclusive to the revolution and its leaders’ ambitions for Libya’s transition. February 17 was established as a national holiday, to mark the “Day of Revolt” or “Day of Rage,” when the uprising began. Monuments and buildings affiliated with the Qaddafi period were damaged or destroyed. Qaddafi’s green flag reverted to the pre-Qaddafi red, black, and green. The depiction of Qaddafi on the One Dinar note, sitting with a smile in traditional robes, was replaced by ebullient young revolutionaries holding guns in the air and wearing baseball caps. An assertion about past wrongs also seeped into legislation, with the 2013 Political Isolation Law banning Qaddafi officials from participating in politics.23 Yet, in Bani Walid, a short drive inland from the capital, contrasting remembrance was visible. Walking through the city, it would be possible to see Qaddafi’s green flag displayed as an act of defiance. In a dialogue session in the city in early 2012, a Bani Walidi leader told one of the authors “That flag is almost the Libyan flag, but it needs more green,” an assertion of attachment to the symbols of the Qaddafi period, rather than those of the new Libya. Some in the city would remember dates other than February 17, when the city had defended itself, or when its young men had been killed. Pro-Qaddafi radio could still be heard on the street, although now broadcast from outside the country. Bani Walid was the last city to surrender to revolutionary forces and, even then, was viewed to be

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outside of Tripoli’s control. In October 2012, over a year after the ­uprising’s end, armed groups entered the city, authorised by the new authorities to re-assert Tripoli’s control. While Bani Walid could be viewed as a “pro-Qaddafi” outlier, this sentiment washed through society. Exclusive commemoration, and the use of force to maintain authority, led to many Libyans rejecting the new Libya, the creation of a parallel government in the East of the country, and widespread armed violence as communities looked to protect themselves, having lost faith in the government to do so. For some, it was a question of values. They were attached to the Qaddafi state and its socialist social contract, viewing the revolution as a disruptive force that made their lives insecure. The image of the young revolutionaries on the One Dinar note represented the cause of their insecurity—a commemorative symbol they rejected. If a people feels that its memories and justice needs are not accommodated, or that it is unfairly targeted, new grievances emerge that can fuel conflict. A core task of conflict transformation is to enable those in conflict to understand each other’s justice demands and to find commemorative outcomes that accommodate them. It is to develop “better formed narratives” that are shared and are subversive of militant understandings of the past. This entails sculpting diverging stories into a shared vision for the future that encompasses former enemies. The criteria of the Ethics of Political Commemoration help us navigate competing remembrance demands. Just Cause inhibits exclusive demands on commemoration, allowing for different causes to be viewed as worthy of commemoration, without diminishing the unique claims of each. In parallel, Transcend the Collective and Exit Circular Narratives help people share and integrate diverging stories about the past, building a path to some form of accommodation. At the time of writing, there is an opportunity for Libya’s leaders to learn from the failure of past commemorative efforts. A new national reconciliation process has been established for the country. It would be opportune for this effort to include memory as a starting point of dialogue, to imagine ways of remembering that fit the ambitions of both revolutionary groups and those with some attachment to the Qaddafi period.

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A Wider Understanding of Peace Conflict transformation goes beyond resolving specific grievances. It also means stronger relationships, inclusive institutions, and an accommodation of worldviews.

Conflict is transformed when people have a wider understanding of “peace” beyond the resolution of a particular issue. This wider perspective strengthens relationships with enemies of the past. The strength of relationships between people is in part dependent on the institutions that govern them, and hence peace initiatives also encourage inclusive institutions. How institutions function is in turn dependent on the worldview of the people using them. Peace initiatives should consequently also explore ways of accommodating worldview divides. The Ethics of Political Commemoration provides entry points for strengthening relations and institutions, and accommodating worldviews, through the processes that plan remembrance. Relations as well as Resolution after Taif In Lebanon, there is something akin to a politically enforced collective amnesia about the past. While the 1989 Taif Agreement ended Lebanon’s long civil war, it did not rebuild relations between its divided peoples. There has been no process of legal justice for abuses, there is no collective celebration of the end of the war, and its ending is absent from the country’s school curriculum. This is partly because it is of benefit to the country’s confessional leaders to maintain the silence and, with it, Lebanon’s social divisions. A collective process of reflection and learning could help to strengthen understanding across Lebanon’s peoples, reducing reliance on militant confessional leaders. The need to learn from history to reduce the i­ nfluence of militant leaders is well made by the Lebanese history instructor, Charles Al-Hayek, in the Story of Hope podcast series: “The aim of studying history is to break free from it, or else it will become a tool of tyranny.”24 Without collective remembrance, confessional leaders encourage divisive narratives within their constituencies—narratives that it is difficult to challenge in the absence of external perspectives. In neglecting the collective past, Lebanon’s leaders fail the basic test of legitimate authority, in that they are

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more concerned with their status than with the stronger cross-confession relations needed for peace. Conflict transformation practice tends towards the understanding that peace is not the resolution of an issue alone, as divisive issues will occur regularly between people with different identities. Rather, peace requires an established pattern of resolving individual issues without recourse to violence or other forms of coercion. This is not just a moral analysis, but also one of efficacy. When a people does not care about the strength of its relationship with another, it will likely use force to achieve its goals. Attempts to win a conflict through force result in unsustainable solutions, as, in a vicious cycle, they further strain relationships and create anticipation that future conflicts will be addressed in the same manner.25 Peace efforts need to build relationships—to strengthen the web that holds people together and upon which all depend. The Taif Agreement “resolved” a war but did not build a peace. Peace in Lebanon requires all affected peoples to develop a greater understanding of each other’s stories about the past. Such a process would encourage each people to develop more complex stories about itself and others. In lieu of political leadership, a cross-section of Lebanese civil society has taken on the burden of documenting the country’s history, educating its people, and doing so collectively across divides. As one example, the Forum for Memory and Future brings together a range of civil society groups “to promote ways of coming to terms with the past … with a view to dealing with these conflicts and memories in light of their impact on the present and future.”26 A review of the participating groups’ websites and manifestos demonstrates two constant themes—the link between knowledge of the past and future peaceful relations and that remembrance is a collective endeavour across divides. One of the Forum’s organisers, Assad Chaftari, who during the civil war was an intelligence officer in the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, described the catalyst for the Forum: “we became aware of the need to cooperate together, first as a group, and secondly the whole country … due to the intrinsic link between the past, from which we, unfortunately, did not learn, the present and the future.”27 Assad Chaftari’s organisation, Fighters for Peace, brings together fighters of different backgrounds, a powerful act of relationship-building between former enemies. The Ethics of Political Commemoration’s criteria encourages remembrance that strengthens relations with the aim of building future peace.

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The criterion of Right Intention encourages a focus on constructive relations between peoples by ensuring that the intent of commemoration is not to harm the other. Right Intention is reinforced by Legitimate Authority, which envisages commemoration that encompasses different perspectives, and active engagement between peoples that might have competing commemoration demands. Exit Circular Narratives looks to disrupt hard-liners’ narratives about the past. As described in Chap. 3, this entails a broadening of the boundaries of acceptable discourse on history—itself an active challenge to the militant political leaders who may look to control such discourse for their own ends. Institutions that Bind in Northern Ireland During The Troubles, some Catholics in Northern Ireland viewed the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) as a tool to promote the interests of Protestant Unionists and the British Government. This led to a loss of the police’s legitimacy, with the police viewed as one of the conflict parties.28 There was wide recognition that peace in Northern Ireland would not be possible without a change in the police and better relations between it and Catholic residents. To this end, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) established an Independent Com­ mission on Policing in Northern Ireland. A year later, the Commission proposed 175 recommendations on police reform in A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland, popularly referred to as the “Patten Report.” The resulting reforms reorganised the RUC into the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), a symbolic change of name, accompanied by a recruitment drive among Catholics, to better represent all the peoples of Northern Ireland.29 The Patten Report also ushered in a more participatory approach to policing using a “community policing” model. District Policing Partnership Boards (DPPB) were established to forge “a constant dialogue at local levels between the police and the community.”30 Each DPPB, composed of elected councillors and independent appointees, would work with the police to agree on Local Policing Plans, which would be further tested through widespread public consultation. The process of consultation had to tackle how people saw the past. In this regard, it was a test of the peace process and the viability of the PSNI as a police force for all communities. The political party Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”) only fully endorsed the new policing arrangement in 2009,

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finally taking their seats on the DPPBs, as well as on its national-level counterpart. In the same year, a reorganisation of policing districts merged North and West Belfast, areas mostly populated by Catholics. Sinn Féin was the dominant political party in the newly formed district. This meant that, perhaps for the first time, police officers working directly with Sinn Féin and engaging with Sinn Féin’s constituency. Emotions ran strong on all sides. Sinn Féin representatives, and Catholic residents, used the process to vent anger and frustration with past mistreatments, not to achieve legal justice (which was handled elsewhere), but simply to be heard. Those attending consultation sessions would ask what had happened to a deceased family member or why they had been arrested and detained. For their part, the PSNI officers involved knew they were meeting with those responsible for the deaths of colleagues and the prospect strained morale. There was, however, an intent to build a better peace, even if it meant working with former enemies. As one former senior officer involved in the process told the authors: “Our purpose there was to be silent and to listen. It wasn’t to justify what we did before. We bit our lips because it was the best thing to do.”31 This attitude demonstrates transformational leadership when it is most difficult and most in need. The peace process is still a work in progress, and some in the PSNI feel that they gave up too much and have yet to reap the benefits of peace.32 Nevertheless, police engagement with Sinn Féin and the community created working relations that before might have seemed impossible.33 One insight of peace literature is the importance of “structures” or “systems” in helping to guide how relationships are managed.34 This leads to peace practitioners trying to mitigate the underlying causes of conflict, or “structural conflict drivers,” rather than its superficial manifestations. Whether institutions are perceived to treat all peoples fairly is one of the most salient structural drivers of conflict, though other factors such as inequalities between peoples in the same state, or development indicators, such as GDP per capita, can also play a major role.35 It is not enough to work individually with those in conflict to increase their resilience to violence. It is also important to address the factors that make individuals vulnerable to low complexity thinking. When institutions, such as the police and judiciary, are thought to favour one people to the detriment of another’s rights, the “marginalised” or “oppressed” people can lose faith in them, and relationships between those perceived to be favoured and disfavoured are likely to become

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strained. In these cases, peace initiatives often include an attempt to reorganise institutions, so they are more inclusive. The focus on inclusive institutions is most usually described as helping to strengthen “vertical relations” between peoples and institutions and “horizontal relations” between peoples, with both essential for social cohesion. The community policing model adopted by the newly created PSNI had the purpose of increasing social cohesion. By engaging directly with society, the PSNI looked to strengthen the relations between Northern Ireland’s various peoples and the institution. “Dialogue for dialogue’s sake” does not build social cohesion. Being in a room with people from across a divide can reinforce rather than bridge differences. People come together with institutions when there is a clear purpose and need. By working together towards a shared goal, opportunities are created to forge relationships that endure over time. This is why social cohesion initiatives are often focused on practical issues such as safety and policing, local municipal works, or (in the case of Iraq) the return of the families of Islamic State fighters. However, social cohesion initiatives, while providing a practical focus, need to also allow for emotional engagement. Social cohesion activities focused on commemoration and remembrance get to the emotional heart of conflict. As for policing in Northern Ireland, participatory planning of commemoration entails that institutions engage with all affected peoples, even when it is uncomfortable. Such work does not need to deal with big national issues but can start locally. For example, how to deal with a monument to a divisive figure or what to do with a building that was used by an authoritarian regime to imprison dissidents. Worldviews and Women’s Rights On 25 June 2014, the day of Libya’s national elections, four armed men broke into the Benghazi home of Salwa Bugaighis and brutally assassinated her. Salwa Bugaighis was trained as a lawyer, defended political prisoners held by the Qaddafi regime, and was a strong voice in the protests that sparked the revolution. Her revolutionary credentials were as strong as it gets. After the revolution, she advocated for democracy, human rights, and equality for women. In the days leading up to her assassination, she had appeared in the national media to campaign for women to vote. She was a revolutionary, but one that represented a vision for her country not shared by all.

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The 2011 uprising was an opportunity for those who dreamed of a moderate democratic Libya to advance their ideals. Conservative Islamic groups, long suppressed by the Qaddafi regime, also saw the uprising as an opportunity to advance their cause. At the heart of the revolution was a divergence in “worldview,” meaning a “shared understanding of reality which orientates social and political life.”36 Worldview conflicts go beyond a difference in values and culture. Rather they point to differences in the guiding rules that determine what is good or ethical action and a set of sacred “red lines” that it is felt cannot be negotiated. Human rights principles and religious texts can be viewed as different sets of guiding rules. A divergence in guiding rules is one of the contributing factors that has made it difficult for Libya’s institutions to govern all its people. Salwa Bugaighis was aware of the divergent worldviews in the revolutionary movement. She was part of a coalition formed to protect her vision for Libya. She also saw that some form of bridge-building or accommodation was needed. In an interview in 2012, she stated: “We were not against Islamists or Muslim Brotherhood, because we are partners in Libya. But we want … all the Libyans there [in the national parliament], all the ideologies there … And we want the Sharia [as a source among others].”37 Most conservative Muslim leaders in Libya abhorred the killing of Salwa Bugaighis and do not condone the use of violence for their cause, but the worldview that drove it persists. In October 2021, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs of the Libyan Government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with UN Women to promote women’s rights. The signature of the Memorandum was followed by protest from the Grand Mufti of Libya, the Dar Al-Ifta, the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi leaders, arguing that it commits Libya to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and that the Convention is against Islam.38 The pressure from conservative Muslims led to the Government cancelling the Memorandum in February 2022,39 side-lining the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and distancing itself from UN Women. What can an Ethics of Political Commemoration offer in a context in which activists are gunned down at home? Raw violence is a reminder that real battles need to be won. Those responsible for such acts should face punishment. Salwa Bugaighis and the other victims of extremist violence in Libya, especially its women, deserve commemoration. Till now, such commemoration has been private, led by women and civil society in street

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protests, but without political leadership. There is a need to encourage such leadership across worldview divides. The path for addressing worldview differences is not well signposted in peace practice. It can be argued that one should not attempt to negotiate worldviews, as the sacred should remain just that. Indeed, attempts to question or dilute the sacred can result in a passionate outcry and violence. Engagement is still needed, however, to sensitively explore the accommodation of worldviews, as, without it, societies such as Libya will face a long period of turmoil. Salwa Bugaighis was involved in an attempt at such accommodation, in her role as Deputy Chair of the Libyan Prime Minister’s National Dialogue Commission, up until her death. As a stark example of the strength of the worldview divide, conservative Muslim groups established a parallel national dialogue group, resulting in the need for dialogue between those organising dialogue. It was during this process that one of the authors met and worked with Salwa Bugaighis. The dialogue ultimately ended with the failed 2014 election and the subsequent division of the country in two. Before its dissolution, the process was starting to explore how leaders across the worldview divide could collectively commemorate Libya’s past and through commemoration establish a shared vision for its future. It is essential that this discussion is resumed within the new Libyan national dialogue initiative. The Ethics of Political Commemoration can provide an entry point. The framework helps identify appropriate conduct in the absence of a shared legal or ethical perspective, by providing a multidirectional set of considerations to guide discussion. Its application provides an opportunity to engage across worldview divides in a way that does not challenge the sacred. This may seem hypothetical, but there are precedents. One example is provided by Karen Armstrong’s initiative to create the Charter for Compassion.40 Armstrong’s writing on religion argues that no matter how different religions and secular movements can appear, they are founded on social struggles and are linked by the “golden rule” of treating others as one would want to be treated.41 Armstrong interprets this rule as the requirement to be compassionate. While Armstrong does not use the language “worldview,” her argument is that joint action can be forged between different worldviews by emphasising and working through ideals such as compassion. The Charter for Compassion was agreed upon by a multi-faith, multi-­ national “Council of Conscience,” based on written suggestions from

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across the globe. The process of developing the Charter for Compassion can be viewed as a “mediation space” that “acknowledge[s] worldviews while avoiding their discussion head-on.”42 Libya’s new national dialogue should look to model this approach and identify shared ideals that can form the basis for practical decisions on commemoration. One would hope that compassion—and the memory of Salwa Bugaighis—would inspire Libya’s leaders to commemorate the diverse victims of the country’s violent transition. This book is dedicated to Salwa Bugaighis.

The Commemoration Gap Ethical Political Commemoration fills a gap in existing tools used in conflict settings, through its human engagement, multi-temporal approach and wider approach to peace.

There is a significant gap in how commemoration is deployed in the tools used in conflict settings to address the past and build peace. Existing tools tend to apply commemoration as a form of redress for past injustices, closely associated with legal processes. This technical approach does not allow for the role of commemoration in engaging the emotions of those in conflict, in taking a multi-temporal approach that addresses both the past and the future, or in its role in reinforcing the infrastructure required to manage conflict. The Ethics of Political Commemoration provides a framework to fill this gap and a set of criteria for scrutinising a range of actions that in some way address the past. Absent Commemoration Commemoration is often not directly planned for and is certainly not centred within policy frameworks or other guidance used in conflict settings. When it is included, commemoration tends to be viewed as an aspect of reparations, and hence justice for the past, rather than having wider significance for building future peaceful societies. The EU’s Policy Framework on Support to Transitional Justice references some aspects of commemoration under a section on reparations (III.3): “They [reparations] can include… official public apologies, building museums and memorials, and establishing days of commemoration.”43

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The Guidance Note of the Secretary-General: United Nations Approach to Transitional Justice includes two references. The same language is used in the section “Delivering reparations” (B.3), with an additional reference in footnote 17, when explaining “satisfaction” as a form of redress: “E.g., official declaration or a judicial decision restoring the dignity, the reputation and the rights of the victim; public apology, including acknowledgement of the facts and acceptance of responsibility; and commemorations and tributes to the victims.”44 Limited attention to commemoration may make sense in policy documents on “transitional justice,” as it is mostly framed in terms of the legal obligations of a state towards its citizens. However, a similar gap is also found in guiding documents for “dealing with the past,” which looks beyond individual accountability and redress, towards the strengthening of social norms that enforce the rule of law and prevent future abuses. Generally, dealing with the past is articulated through four broad rights— the right to know, the right to justice, the right to reparation, and the guarantee of non-recurrence. Swisspeace’s Conceptual Framework for Dealing with the Past, which was supported by the Swiss Government, references commemoration twice. The first reference is under the section on “The Right to Know,” but through an example of the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons, which “contributes to the development of appropriate expressions of commemoration and tribute to the missing.” The second reference recognises that commemoration can contribute to improved relations: “New relationships can be forged through symbolic acts such as official apologies, commemorations or through institutional reform.”45 Commemoration is more present in guidance on “reconciliation,” although such guidance is rarely officially endorsed. For example, the International Institute for Democratic and Electoral Assistance’s Reconciliation After Violent Conflict: A Handbook recognises that commemoration, among other issues, can drive “victim competition,” as “victims frequently compete with each other for … symbolic goods such as monuments, medals, memorial days and other types of commemoration.” Further references to commemoration repeat its role in reparations, as outlined in EU and UN guidance. The Handbook also recognises the role of rituals and ceremonies as “symbolic forms of healing.” The Handbook finally includes a section on “The role of memory,” both as a driver of conflict and as a “powerful instrument for achieving reconciliation.” However, the Handbook and other similar efforts do not provide a

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framework to guide processes for agreeing on commemoration, and how such processes can contribute to peace.46 This chapter demonstrates that commemoration is an essential part of conflict dynamics and that the Ethics of Political Commemoration is a tool that can redirect remembrance, so it is better able to contribute to peace. It can enable an emotional engagement with memory that helps people resist calls to violence. It helps commemoration that looks to the future, as well as to the past, absorbing competing justice and remembrance demands. It also strengthens the infrastructure that aids the non-violent management of conflict, by providing an entry point to enhance relationships and institutions, and to accommodate diverging worldviews. This potential should be better reflected in policies and guidelines for how to address the past in conflict.

A Wide Scope of Application Commemoration in conflict is not just restricted to the building of monuments and museums. It can also infuse a wider range of political actions that address the past. Hence, the Ethics of Political Commemoration has a wide application in conflict settings. Table 5.1 provides some considerations on the framework’s application that may be of use to peace practitioners. The intention is not to create a rigid typology of commemoration in conflict, but rather to spur a more creative approach to addressing the past when planning for peace. Political commemoration in conflict settings can be most readily understood as a collective or state-endorsed act that signifies the importance of past events for a people. This includes actions “to own” a past event, such as establishing memorials or remembrance days. It also encompasses actions “to disown” a past event, such as apologies or the removal of statues. Political commemoration also encompasses acts that contextually affect the present, by helping to create norms around how the past is described. This can mean “memory laws,” cultural commissions that review depiction of the past in public materials, and media codes established by state bodies. The framework is mostly likely to be usefully applied directly in all such cases. Political commemoration is also linked to actions that materially affect the present. For example, lustration processes that bar specific groups from public office or reparation schemes. These acts are political in that they are

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Table 5.1  Application of the framework in conflict Type

Manifestation (examples)

Signifies importance

Actions to own  • Symbols  • Memorials  • Heritage sites  • Rituals  • Remembrance days  • Anniversaries  • Awards

Application of framework

Actions to disown Direct application  • Apologies  • Penance rituals  • Statue removal  • Memorial alternations  • Changing place names  • Changing names of public celebrations. Contextually  • Memory laws Direct application affect the  • Historical commissions present  • Media codes (state endorsed) Materially affect  • Lustration Can be applied with the present  • Compensation and reparation caution  • Positive discrimination Private acts Interpretive Depictive Only applied if politically  • Legacy/social  • Film and music sponsored, or if looks to media  • Poetry and coerce public conformity  • Academic prose enquiry  • Painting and  • Civil society sculpture activism Personal acts  • Individual grief Should not be applied, as  • Family grief personal acts should be  • Communal ceremonies unconstrained.

negotiated by political leaders and endorsed by a community or state. They also, in some way, commemorate the past, though less directly. The framework is relevant to private acts of commemoration, such as film or sculpture, if they have political reach. Finally, personal acts of commemoration are not well suited for this framework. Humans should be able to commemorate the aspects of the past that connect to them privately. As Sophocles’ Antigone showcased, family members should be able to grieve their loved ones whom the political community rejects as perpetrators.

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Notes 1. Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling (Random House, 1993). 2. Authors notes from interview, February 2023. 3. ‘Writer Brian Keenan Says Imagination Is Key in Northern Irish Politics | IrishCentral.Com’ https://www.irishcentral.com/news/writer-­brian-­ keenan-­s ays-­i magination-­i s-­k ey-­i n-­n orthern-­i rish-­p olitics-­4 824897 2-­237647251 [accessed 27 February 2023]. 4. Authors notes, August 2020. 5. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Penguin Books India, 2007). 6. Ibid. 7. Zheng Wang, ‘Collective Memory and National Identity’, Memory Politics, Identity and Conflict (Springer, 2018), pp. 11–25. 8. Johan Galtung, ‘The Construction of National Identities for Cosmic Drama: Chosenness-Myths-Trauma (CMT) Syndromes and Cultural Pathologies’, Handcuffed to History, 2001, 61–81. 9. Jeffrey Z.  Rubin, Dean G.  Pruitt, and Sung Hee Kim, Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1994). 10. Vamik D. Volkan, ‘The next Chapter: Consequences of Societal Trauma’, Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness: Perspectives of the Unfinished Journeys of the Past, 2009, 1–26. 11. Integrative complexity is a concept developed over 30  years by Peter Suedfeld. More recently Sara Savage at Cambridge University and others have used the concept in an applied manner with groups at risk from extremism. For example, among Muslim communities in Britain and Kenya. For an introduction to integrative complexity, see  Békés V., Suedfeld P.,  ‘Integrative Complexity’,  Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, eds. Zeigler-Hill V., Shackelford T. K. 1st Edition, 2280–3 (Cham: Springer, 2020). 12. Christina Nemr and Sara Savage, Integrative Complexity Interventions to Prevent and Counter Violent Extremism (Global Center on Cooperative Security, 2019).  https://www.globalcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/ GCCS-PB-IC-Interventions-Prevent-Counter-Violent-Extremism-2019. pdf [accessed 24 February 2023]. 13. The gathering was organised with funding from the European Union and Swiss Government, as part of ongoing support to the political transition. 14. Authors’ notes from the exchange, as reported to the donors. 15. Transformational leadership is a concept developed by James MacGregor Burns. It looks at the role of leader in setting purpose, and values, and inspiring her/his team, as opposed to the “transactional leadership” that works within existing norms with a focus on management tasks. James

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MacGregor Burns, Leadership, Cass Canfield Book, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) https://bac-­lac.on.worldcat.org/oclc/299967151. 16. For a good introduction to visioning processes, see Conciliation Resources What does ‘future thinking’ mean for peacebuilding? ‘What Does “Futures Thinking” Mean for Peacebuilding? | Conciliation Resources’ https:// www.c-­r.org/news-­a nd-­i nsight/what-­d oes-­% E2%80%98futures-­ thinking%E2%80%99-­mean-­peacebuilding [accessed 24 February 2023]. 17. John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005). 18. The idea of sculpting with time borrows from the artistic method of the Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky, as conveyed in Sculpting in Time (Zapechatlonnoye vrem). Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (University of Texas Press, 1985). 19. Authors’ notes from interview, February 2022. 20. The Forum was organised by the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, with funding from Norway, Sweden, the European Union,  the Netherlands, and the Open Society Foundation. One of the authors played a role in planning and facilitating the Forum. For more information on the forum: https://sanaacenter.org/yif/ 21. Authors notes from interviews, February 2022. 22. This included congratulations from Ansar Allah, which is usually suspicious of external organisations. See https://www.saba.ye/ar/news3208337. htm [accessed 26 July 2023]. 23. Mark Kersten, ‘Libya’s Political Isolation Law: Politics and Justice or the Politics of Justice?’, Middle East Institute, 5 (2014). 24. ‘Story of Hope—A Podcast Series Aiming to Shed Light on the Issue of the Disappeared in Lebanon to Encourage Reconciliation and Work towards More Sustainable Peace in Lebanon.’ https://storyofhope105. com/ [accessed 27 February 2023]. 25. William L.  Ury, Jeanne M.  Brett, and Stephen B.  Goldberg, Three Approaches to Resolving Disputes: Interests, Rights and Power, (New York, NY: Jossey-Bass), 1988, 3–19. 26. ‘Forum for Memory and Future’ https://memoryfuturelb.org/en [accessed 27 February 2023]. 27. Dealing with the Past and Promoting Ways of Coming to Terms with It, dir. by UNDP Lebanon, 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_ CDtvouo_0 [accessed 27 February 2023]. 28. Aogán Mulcahy, Policing Northern Ireland (Willan, 2013). 29. Jane Gordon, ‘Post-Conflict Transformation: The Process of Institutional Legitimation of the Police in Northern Ireland’, Ethnopolitics, 7.1 (2008), 137–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449050701858555.

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30. Chris Patten, A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland: The Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland (Norwich, Eng.: H.M.S.O., 1999). Para. 6.25. 31. Authors notes from interview, February 2022. 32. As this manuscript was being submitted, an off-duty police officer, Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, was the victim of an attempted assassination while watching a football match. 33. For a deeper assessment of community policing’s transformational potential in Northern Ireland, see Barry J.  Ryan, ‘Northern Ireland’s District Policing Partnerships and the Participatory Ideals’, Irish Political Studies, 23.3 (2008), 341–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/07907180802246677. 34. Maire Dugan, ‘A Nested Theory of Conflict’, Women in Leadership, 1.1 (1996), 9–20. 35. For example, Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, ‘Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison’, American Political Science Review, 105.3 (2011), 478–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055411000207; Stephen M.  Saideman and others, ‘Democratization, Political Institutions, and Ethnic Conflict: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis, 1985–1998’, Comparative Political Studies, 35.1 (2002), 103–29; James E. Anderson, Jeffrey Moyer, and George Chichirau, Public Policymaking (Cengage Learning, 2022). 36. This definition was developed in the learning process, Mediating Conflicts between Groups with Different Worldviews: Approaches and Methods. Conducted jointly by CSS ETH Zurich, the University of British Columbia, and the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University. 37. Warren Hoge, ‘Interview with Salwa Bugaighis, Libyan Human Rights Lawyer’, IPI Global Observatory, 2012 https://theglobalobservatory. org/2012/03/interview-­with-­salwa-­bugaighis-­prominent-­libyan-­human-­ rights-­lawyer/ [accessed 27 February 2023]. 38. ‘Memorandum Of Understanding Signed With UN On Promoting Women’s Rights Sparks Opposition In Libya’, MEMRI https://www. memri.org/reports/memorandum-­understanding-­signed-­un-­promoting-­ womens-­rights-­sparks-­opposition-­libya [accessed 27 February 2023]. 39. ‘Libya Withdraws from UN MoU on Women and Peace | The Libya Observer’ https://libyaobserver.ly/news/libya-­withdraws-­un-­mou-­ women-­and-­peace [accessed 27 February 2023]. 40. ‘Charter For Compassion (@TheCharter) / Twitter’, Twitter, 2023 https://twitter.com/TheCharter [accessed 27 February 2023]. 41. Karen Armstrong, A History of God: From Abraham to the Present: The 4000-Year Quest for God (Random House, 1999).

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42. Jean-Nicolas Bitter and others, ‘Mediation Space: Addressing Obstacles Stemming from Worldview Differences to Regain Negotiation Flexibility’, 2022, 52 p. https://doi.org/10.3929/ETHZ-­B-­000557346 43. ‘The EU’s Policy Framework on Support to Transitional Justice’ (European Union, 2019) https://eeas.europa.eu/archives/docs/top_stories/pdf/ the_eus_policy_framework_on_support_to_transitional_justice.pdf 44. U. N. Secretary-General, ‘Guidance Note of the Secretary-General: United Nations Approach to Transitional Justice’, New York: United Nations, 2010. 45. Swisspeace, ‘A Conceptual Framework for Dealing with the Past’ (Swisspeace, 2016). 46. Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: A Handbook, ed. by David Bloomfield and others, Handbook Series (Stockholm: International IDEA, 2003).

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Roadmap for a New Paradigm

Abstract  The Ethics of Political Commemoration is designed for use by the public, politicians, and scholars. The concluding chapter highlights that the framework can engage citizens on questions of commemoration, as a way of helping establish legitimate authority and to rediscover the past that is all around them. Leaders of various kinds can use the Ethics of Political Commemoration to design respectful processes for making decisions on commemoration. Scholars can use the framework to inform their work, as it offers a robust paradigm for assessment. In addition to highlighting the framework’s practical applications, the chapter outlines questions deserving of further research, including what empirical evidence can help test the framework; the use of technology in commemoration; how to apply these concepts in the classroom; and how best to tell the story of Ethical Political Commemoration in a compelling way that can engage the public, politicians, and scholars alike. Overall, a sensible ethical framework is an essential contribution to genuine citizenship, so that remembrance contributes to a vibrant democracy. Getting commemoration right remains an essential task, as the past will remain with us in the future. Keywords  Scholarship • Peacebuilding • Citizenship • Research agenda

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Gutbrod, D. Wood, Ethics of Political Commemoration, Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7_6

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The Ethics of Political Commemoration is designed for wide use by the public, politicians, and scholars. It is intended as an invitation.

“Aurora” is the name of the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology and Latin poetry. Next to the memory of Aurora Mardiganian, this association was another reason to choose the name for the prize, as its purpose is “to awaken humanity to the heroic acts of those who stand up in the face of adversity.” The Ethics of Political Commemoration also seeks to offer a beginning or at least to add illumination. With this paradigm, the contours of the debate on ethical commemoration should become more properly visible. The authors believe that the framework can be useful for the public, ­scholars, politicians, local leaders, and those planning for peace. Citizens can use the Ethics of Political Commemoration to engage, participate, and argue. Active engagement is a critical part of establishing legitimate authority. The criteria can help citizens to challenge authorities and to propose constructive alternatives to politicised or misconceived remembrance. The framework can also contribute to a process of rediscovery by the public of what is around them. Instances of commemoration that become unseen due to how accustomed we are to what we walk past every day can be viewed in a fresh way. Examining existing commemoration according to the various dimensions of the framework can recreate a sense of wonder. Such active reflection is also part of asserting one’s moral autonomy and active citizenship. Scholars can use the framework to inform their work in various contexts. For example, they can employ it when considering what to do with cultural monuments damaged by war. The framework may be particularly attractive for scholars who want to explore ethical aspects of commemoration but do not come from disciplines which provide a paradigm to operate from. Like the Just War Theory, the framework can be adapted and modified for context. Moreover, the Ethics of Political Commemoration may interest scholars at the beginning of their careers who seek an approach that allows them to contribute to debates that are stuck. They can thereby also contribute to developing the framework and an understanding of how it needs to evolve. Shorter articles may be an excellent first focus, to generate a layer of work that others can draw on and engage with, and to help establish the framework. Politicians and leaders of institutions can use this framework to s­ tructure discussions on remembrance, especially when they do not have an

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apparatus or commissions to work out how to approach commemoration. As highlighted in Chap. 2, a respectful process can lead to striking and compelling commemoration. It can also catalyse remembrance that is “much safer and lasting,” to use Dink’s words. It is not often that those organising commemoration have the financial and intellectual resources of the Aurora Prize at their disposal. Hence, a guiding framework could be of use. People at a more local level matter as much as those focused on the big issues that draw national attention. For example, the framework may be helpful for public health managers who deal with the legacies of “problematic medical experiments, abuses of authority, systematic patterns of neglect or discrimination, or funders with questionable sources of wealth” which can undermine trust in medical institutions.1 If local municipalities and local institutions approach the challenge carefully and honestly, with due emphasis on legitimate authority, they can emerge from such a reckoning with strengthened trust. National debates usually draw most attention, but in many contexts a greater chance of success for change is at the local level, as the knotted poles in Tübingen show. The framework is also designed to fill a gap in the wider set of tools available for peace practitioners, activists, and scholars. It demonstrates the importance of well-thought-through political commemoration for sustainable peace that is presently absent in the toolkit available to address the past in conflicts. This approach could be of particular use to those working internationally in places that are going through political transitions or where there is a history of violence that is as yet unaddressed.

Questions to Answer As we wrote in the beginning of this book, we believe that the Ethics of Political Commemoration is a cogent framework. By connecting to an established tradition of reflection on just war and to best practice in the field of conflict transformation, the framework’s claims draw on the thinking of others and are an invitation to take this work further. However, it is possible that we have overlooked a component or not sufficiently worked through all the aspects of the framework. Moreover, there are issues that we want to focus on more in upcoming research. Can we demonstrate the impact of such a framework empirically? Is this an approach that can help engage people to transform their own conflicts? And does the paradigm travel across different contexts, including those

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with less familiarity with Just War Theory? A range of work appears possible in this regard, including simulations on whether one can use the Ethics of Political Commemoration to gain agreement on how to deal with thorny legacies. Consistency of language could also be developed further. Can commemoration “succeed”? Can it be “good”? Might some of the wordings be refined? Should we transform the collective or transcend it? Should we distinguish commemoration and remembrance? What exactly should be described as political, what as private, and what as personal? Attempts to find more precise language on these matters may also help to illuminate issues and nuances that at this point remain hard to determine. What is the role of new technology in ethical commemoration? Rūta Kazlauskaitė is one scholar who has shown how much there is to explore when considering the potential role of technology in remembrance.2 Are commercial platforms such as Instagram suitable for commemoration, or does its stylized presentation undermine any attempt to switch to a more solemn register? How do these debates look from the vantage point of the framework, with regard to having a reasonable chance of success and can social media offer an exit from a narrative, or does it trap its users in another circular and wholly owned platform?3 How can we better teach political commemoration in the classroom? Is it possible, for example, to leverage Wikipedia as a realm of micro-­ contributions to scholarship? Students, after all, could become active ­contributors and part of a wider conversation. Would this also allow them to assert a degree of moral and authorial autonomy beyond undertaking coursework and undergoing examinations? First attempts to integrate into the classroom appear promising. More work is required to expand and assess this comprehensively. In an earlier chapter we said that we should apply the Ethics of Political Commemoration to remembrance as often as we use Just War Theory when reflecting on war. In practice this means that the framework will not be applied much. When reflecting on wars, too, most people react to what is most vivid and salient to them personally, rather than deploying a full set of ethical criteria. There is work to do, to demonstrate the relevance and usefulness of applying frameworks for a more comprehensive assessment. If the Ethics of Political Commemoration is like an ethical grammar, how can we tell its story in appealing ways? Grammar is necessary if we want to speak intelligibly with words that we are unfamiliar with and allows to absorb what is genuinely novel in language. While one needs to

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put such grammars together (as we have done here), most readers prefer compelling stories. The reasonable chance of success of the Ethics of Political Commemoration as an approach in part will depend on how it tells stories, in ways similar to how Michael Walzer made the Just War tradition come alive again through his poignant historical illustrations, rather than through deploying a comprehensive analytic apparatus only.4 These and additional questions are an invitation for others to challenge us and to contribute to a better understanding of how to conduct remembrance.

Commemoration for Genuine Citizenship One grassroots activist in Yerevan rolled her eyes when the Aurora Prize was mentioned in conversation. “It’s a huge and expensive effort, and I am not sure it’s for people like you and me,” she said over a glass of wine at the city’s Cascade park in spring 2022. She added that the Aurora Prize initiative had just hired one of the employees from a friend’s social enterprise at a salary they could not hope to match. There may be few alternatives to a well-funded endeavour to have a significant impact. Still, the criticism illustrates that people can have reservations about an effort that we described in favourable terms. Whether, in the end, the Aurora Prize will help people in Armenia and beyond to “thrive” and “give back” can only be judged in retrospect. Assessing the eventual impact of the Aurora Prize is an empirical task. The exact impact will be harder to gauge as Armenians have gone through turbulent years in which they were repeatedly attacked by Azerbaijan. In the seven weeks of the Karabakh war of 2020, Armenia on a per capita lost more soldiers than the United States in ten years of its engagement in Vietnam. For many Armenians, the repeated attacks by Azerbaijan made the genocide of more than 100 years ago a present event, as they again had to fear aggression, displacement, and murder. When the Aurora Prize launched in 2016, it appeared that the region might have an extended future of frozen conflicts—grim but stable standoffs. Even if icy and partially brittle, that stability might have made moods more amenable to change. The Armenian political context also altered. In 2018, a reformist government came to power, leaving more space for political change and engagement. One of the co-founders of the Aurora Prize, Ruben Vardanyan, has become involved in politics in Karabakh. This main

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geopolitical flashpoint at the time of writing is under an extended blockade. Vartan Gregorian, another co-founder, passed away in April 2021. These changes illustrate that commemoration connects to shifting political and personal contexts and constellations. (The other co-founder, Noubar Afeyan, is based in the United States.) More than anything, however, the grassroots criticism of the Aurora Prize brings us back to the Ethics of Political Commemoration. We can interpret the critique as an exhortation. Better commemoration should not be left to elites but instead should be a task of genuine citizenship that allows people to participate in forming better stories on the past and in articulating shared visions for the future. A sensible ethical framework is an essential contribution for this remembrance to be constructive. This book sought to provide such a paradigm. We need to get the past right since it will be with us. The Great Gatsby reminds us of this presence of history in the future, with its very last line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Notes 1. Hans Gutbrod, ‘Addressing Institutional Trauma in Health Care: The Case for a Structured Ethical Framework’, STAT, 9 August 2022. https://www. statnews.com/2022/08/09/addressing-­institutional-­trauma-­health-­care-­ structured-­ethical-­framework/ [accessed 26 February 2023]. 2. Rūta Kazlauskaitė, ‘KNOWING IS SEEING: Distance and Proximity in Affective Virtual Reality History’, Rethinking History, 26.1 (2022), 51–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2022.2031803. 3. Noam Tirosh, ‘Understanding @eva.Stories: Holocaust Memory in the Instagram Era’, Jewish Film & New Media: An International Journal, 8.2 (2020), 217–25. https://doi.org/10.1353/jfn.2020.0024. 4. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 5th Edition (London: Basic Books, 2015).

Institutions, Works, Monuments Index

A The Act of Killing, documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, 85 Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity (“Aurora Prize”), ix, 6, 20, 21, 24, 25, 34, 35, 43, 59, 60, 68, 76, 77, 86, 87, 107, 130, 151, 153, 154 B Bolnisi Museum, Georgia, 110 C Cable Street Mural, London, 18 Carnegie Endowment of International Peace, 40 Cascade Memorial, Yerevan, 107–109 Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, Istanbul, 38 Charter for Compassion, 139, 140

D Documenta15, 84–86 E Elman Peace Center, Mogadishu, 60 Empty Library, Berlin, 83 European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), 7, 54, 61, 102, 103 F Fighters for Peace, Lebanon, 134 Forum for Memory and Future, Lebanon, 134 Freedom Trail, Boston, 16, 79 G German Ministry of Finance, Berlin, 29, 110 The Gesture, Beirut, 32, 33

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 H. Gutbrod, D. Wood, Ethics of Political Commemoration, Twenty-first Century Perspectives on War, Peace, and Human Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31594-7

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INSTITUTIONS, WORKS, MONUMENTS INDEX

H Historians without Borders, 7, 111 Holocaust Memorial, Berlin, 9 Hope for Peace, Beirut, 78 Human Rights Watch, 23, 71 I The Iliad, 75, 76, 96, 99 International Committee of Memorial Museums, esp its charter, 7, 103, 107 International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, 52, 98 L Langemark Cemetery, Flanders, 55 M Memorial for the Victims of NS-Euthanasia, Berlin, 83, 84 Memorial, Russian historical research and commemoration activists, 55 Misrata War Museum, Misrata, 64, 65, 71 Monument Against Fascism, in Hamburg-Harburg, 83 More in Common, 40 Museum of Soviet Occupation, Tbilisi, 108 Museum of the History of Jews of Georgia, Tbilisi, 56

N National Struggle Museum, Nicosia, 63, 64 P Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), 135–137 President of Ireland’s Ethics Initiative, 7, 15, 16, 105 S Stalin Museum and Statue, Gori, 28, 31, 108 Stolpersteine, 79, 86 T Tito, Josip Broz and museum, 27, 109–110 V Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington DC, 55 W Wall of Remembrance for the Korean War, Washington DC, 55 Y Yemen International Forum, 129, 130

Locations Index1

A Afghanistan, 17, 28, 37, 77, 97 Armenia, 6, 19, 21, 22, 31, 34, 38, 41, 43, 54, 60, 66, 72, 86, 108, 109, 153 Azerbaijan, 23, 66, 153

Brijuni, 109, 110 Bristol, esp museum, 76

B Baku, 22, 72, 73 Bani Walid, 131, 132 Beirut, 17, 18, 32–33, 55, 121 Bekaa, 18 Belfast, 121, 122, 135–136 Benghazi, 137 Berlin, esp monuments, 9, 29, 73, 75, 83 Bosnia, 24 Boston, memorials, 16, 79 Brazil, 27

D Democratic Republic of Congo, 77 Dresden, memorials, 81, 82 Dublin, 16, 37

C Cyprus, 63, 64

G Georgia, 22, 28, 31, 40, 41, 80, 107, 108, 110 Germany, 6, 29, 30, 42, 55, 56, 58, 59, 79, 84, 110, 112 Gori, 28, 108

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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LOCATIONS INDEX

I India, 123 Indonesia, 85 Iraq, 17, 97, 137 Ireland, 6, 7, 16, 22, 28, 30, 36–37, 79, 105, 106, 112, 122, 123, 135–137, 146n33 K Kutaisi, 28 L Latvia, 22 Lebanon, 17, 18, 32, 78, 121–123, 133, 134 Libya, 28, 31, 38, 62, 64, 65, 71, 123, 125, 126, 131, 132, 137–140 Lithuania, 22, 60 London, 18 M Misrata, 64–65, 71, 125, 126 N Nakhichevan, 72, 79 Northern Ireland, 36, 37, 61, 122, 135, 137 North Korea, 16, 27 Nuba, Sudan, 68, 69 P Poland, 39, 60

R Russia, 55, 63 S Somalia, 24, 59, 60 Spain, 112 Srebrenica, 24 Syria, viii, 18, 27–29, 127, 128 T Tawergha, 71 Tbilisi, 22, 56, 108 Troy, 75 Tübingen, street signs, 41, 42, 58 Turkey, 31, 33, 38, 39, 41, 56, 66, 72 U Ukraine, 17, 55, 60, 80, 97 United States, 6, 18, 24, 31, 40, 67, 153, 154 V Vietnam, 67, 153 W Washington DC, 55 Y Yemen, 75, 129 Yugoslavia, 27, 57, 110

People Index1

A Acquinas, Thomas, 113 Adan, Fartuun, 59 Adorno, Theodor, 58 Afeyan, Noubar, 20, 154 Akçam, Taner, 23 Altalli, Rajaa, 127–128 Arendt, Hannah, 58 Aristotle, 98, 107 Aylisli, Akram, 71, 72, 74, 79 B Berlin, Isaiah, 24 Bloom, Harold, 57, 67 Bugaighis, Salwa, 137–140 Burke, Edmund, 3 C Camus, Albert, 81

1

Casey, Edward, 70 Cataldo, Vanessa, 42 Catena, Tom, 68, 69 Chaftari, Assad, 134 Charents, Yeghishe, 31, 72, 109 Chemaly, Tarek, 33 Churchill, Winston, 112 Cicero, 30, 98, 100 Clooney, George, 35, 43 Cobb, Sarah, 8, 54, 102 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 58 Curie-Skłodowska, Maria, 16, 17 D Dangor, Mohamed, 126 de Vitoria, Francisco, 114 Didion, Joan, 22 Dink, Hrant, 34, 41, 64, 151 Dixon, Jennifer, 23 Dugan, Máire, 8

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E Elman, Ilwad, 59 Etkin, Alexander, 63 F Feynman, Richard, 60, 66 G Galtung, Johan, 8 Gauck, Joachim, 30 Gerz, Jochen, 29, 83, 84 Geybulla, Arzu, 68 Gladstone, William, 112 Goldstein, Piotr, 39 H Hallin, Daniel, 67 Haratischwili, Nino, 108 Al-Hayek, Charles, 133 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 42, 62, 110–111 Heuss, Alfred, 24 Higgins, Michael, 30, 105, 106 Holmes, Stephen, 5 I Ihrig, Stefan, 6 J Jumaan, Hadi, 130 K Kaminer, Wladimir, 84 Kant, Immanuel, 70, 73, 74, 81 Karam, Nadim, 32 Kazlauskaitė, Rūta, 152

Kearney, Richard, 106 Keenan, Brian, 121, 122 Krastev, Ivan, 5 Krawatzek, Félix, 39 Kuhn, Thomas, 94, 114 L Laqueur, Walter, 80 Lederach, John Paul, 3, 8, 15, 126–128 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7 Libaridian, Gerard, 66, 68, 73 Lusenge, Julienne, 77 M MacIntyre, Alisdair, 21, 98, 114 MacMillan, Margaret, 5, 14, 26 Mallinder, Louise, 7, 15, 16, 27, 28, 38, 61, 105, 106 Malraux, André, 58 Mardiganian, Aurora, 24, 25, 59, 150 Mill, John Stuart, 70 Minogue, Kenneth, 36 Miyamoto, Yuki, 7 Munawar, Nour, 29 Al-Muslimi, Farea, 129 N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 95 North, Andrew, 111 O O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 36, 37, 70, 79 O’Callaghan, Margaret, 7, 15, 16, 27, 28, 38, 61, 105, 106 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 85–86 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 56 Özdemir, Cem, 56

  PEOPLE INDEX 

P Pisani, Patricia, 83 Plutarch, 98, 99 Popper, Karl, 26 Power, Samantha, 60 Pruitt, Dean G., 61, 62 Q Qaddafi, Muammar, 63–65, 125, 131 R Rawls, John, 99–100 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 59 Ricoeur, Paul, 7, 68, 106 Rorty, Richard, 57 Rothberg, Michael, 7, 15, 17, 26, 38, 80, 101 Rubin, Jeffrey, 61, 62 Rudling, Per Anders, 60 Rushdie, Salman, 3, 81, 83, 124 S St. Augustine, 98, 100 Schiller, Friedrich, 85 Schliemann, Heinrich, 75, 76 Schwer, Milena, 42, 43 Sebald, W.G., 57, 58, 110, 112 Sen, Amartya, 123, 124

Snyder, Timothy, 24, 101, 102 Soderberg, Bill, 99 Sophocles, 143 Sperber, Manès, 57, 58, 74 Stevenson, Charles Leslie, 95 Suny, Ronald, 54, 60 Symonds, James, 29 T Tarkovsky, Andrei, 145n18 Taylor, A.J.P., 113, 114 Tito, Josip, 27, 107, 109, 110 Todorov, Tzvetan, 71 U Ullman, Micha, 83 V Vico, Giambattista, 24 Volkan, Vamik D., 124 Voltaire, 24 von Clausewitz, Carl, 95 Vonnegut, Kurt, 82, 83, 112, 113 W Walzer, Michael, 7, 96, 97, 153 Whitehead, Alfred North, 97 Winter, Jay, 15

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